When will I ever learn...?

My mother's last Thanksgiving was twenty-five years ago.

I can't say that was when I stopped celebrating this feast of gratitude and gluttony, but that one is a fixed point in time. I can go back, but I can't change a moment in my memory.

We'd always shared cooking tasks for Thanksgiving. And a shared kitchen is a sacred space. 1989 I was basting and baking and mashing with Mama on the sofa, watching and putting on a good face despite the pain and forced exile. Me? I was a mess...anticipated pain is always worse, future loss keen. I dealt with it characteristically. It all had to be perfect...and of course, it never could.

Table set in autumnal colors, cloth napkins, leaves from Daddy's Maple formed chargers beneath the pottery plates, candles...three places set. What a dreamer I am! The food...was as near perfection as my culinary skills have ever managed. Turkey moist, gravy free of lumps, potatoes with bits of well-scrubbed peels, Mama's famous cranberry 
relish jello salad...made by me for the first time. I ate...but I don't think I tasted a bite.

For all our plans and hopes, Mama couldn't manage sitting at the table...but thankful for an open floor plan...she had a much smaller plate at the sofa and we were a family at table...one last time. The "what are you thankful for's" were mercifully omitted in unspoken solidarity that we WOULD get through this holiday despite the clouds looming.

Mother praised the meal. She hadn't had an appetite in months and the lengths I'd gone to get her to eat during that time bordered on the desperate. When she asked, I gleefully spooned out tiny bits of her favorites for the obligatory second helping on this holiday of over-eating...victorious with the thrill of a moment of normal that only a house marked with looming death sentence can understand.

Later...leftovers packed away, dishes done, I went into her room and lay across the foot of her bed...another sacred space in those precious last days. The talks we had, the confidences, curses, promises, and silences that room...now my room...had kept sacrosanct. She critiqued each dish, one by one, pronouncing the feast a success. I choked back tears, the unspoken finality between us...thick with ache and love. 

Then she groaned, and I snapped into action...what was wrong? 
What hurt? What could I do? 
She chuckled and said, "I ate too much!" 
I relaxed and said I had as well. It was Thanksgiving...it's what you do. 
She said "I shouldn't have had seconds. When will I ever learn?" 

Silence. 
Tense with the enormity of the future racing towards us...and how absolutely familiar and common, that moment.

And then...the laughter came. Both of us...lying on the bed...laughing at the silliness of looking into the darkness of impending death and seeing the comedy. And we laughed until our sides hurt. We laughed as the two of us had giggled and snickered and howled together all my life. I reached for her hand and the laughter slowly dissolved into tears and a long, lovely, awful, terrible, precious silence. No more need for words.

She passed away within the week. And Thanksgiving was the last close to normal day she had ...fighting the pain. 

I have tried to keep Thanksgiving in the years since. Once Daddy and I decided we'd go out, but we had never been a family for spending that holiday, or any really, in a restaurant, no matter how elegant and vast the menu. It was lovely and thoughtful and there was no clean-up...and I sobbed silently all the way home. 

And so I've cooked every year since, inviting friends or accepting invitations out...even making a full course meal for another family once...who didn't eat turkey! Most years it's been eating alone after working my shift...but always cooking a bit of those shared recipes, even if they were eaten alone or as "left overs" ...and always remembering shared kitchen rituals and the secret ways of mothers and daughters for centuries before us. And how precious and painful and hilarious life is.

This year's been particularly difficult. The BIG NUMBER sense of twenty five years hit me months ago, but in the past weeks the world has made everything a struggle. Shootings and looting and politicking it to advantage. Too much death and sadness and injustice and madness...words simply fail. I find myself taking long, wrenching sighs...much too deep and way too often. And soldiering on. Like many who feel the world more than is entirely good for us. It isn't that we aren't grateful, but we're just so weary of the enormity of it all!

This year I worked, as I always do, even though I'd hoped to take time off, to make a place for people like me to come together and be a community. Those plans weren't to be. And there were invitations to join friends that simply didn't mesh with my work schedule, but gave me some sense of being welcomed. So as usual, I prepared to 'feast' alone. At the last minute, schedules were altered and I joined a friend at her table, and enjoyed the company of someone a long way from his family, and met some new friends who made it all much more bearable, in ways they will never know. I survived ...

I miss you, Mama...ever day... in a dull ache kind of way...too often in a deep silent sob...and sometimes...in ridiculous laughter only you would understand!