Good Morning Folks and Happy Thanksgiving, or to my Canadian friends… Thanksgiving a month late. This is going to be a pretty text heavy post so as a result I am paying you off up front with a cat photo. There are a lot of things that I am thankful for this year, because it has been quite possibly the hardest year of my life. For those who do not follow this blog regularly, I lost my wife of just shy of 30 years in July when she passed away suddenly from what was effectively undiagnosed congestive heart failure. We had no clue anything was wrong until she suddenly effectively dropped dead one day after we both had a bout of Influenza B. What I am most thankful for is the support structure that I have had to make sure I am functional.
There are a lot of folks that I knew would have my back no matter what happened in my life because we are as they say “ride or die”. This includes my unofficial sibling Ace, the entire AggroChat crew, a bunch of folks from my work family, a handful of neighbors that we were really close to, and my family both my personal family and my wife’s family who keep checking in on me. What I did not expect was the plethora of other voices that have continued to show up in my life and make sure I am doing okay, and have been there to listen when I very much was not. Y’all have been amazing and I think you know who you are. I am not exceptionally good at accepting help in any form, because I am stubborn at doing things on my schedule and my way… but y’all have always been there in the background supporting me with a kind word when I needed it.
Another thing that I am deeply thankful for are my cats. Sure they love on me and snuggle me, and each of them does so in their own special way, but what they provide me that is more important than anything else is a routine. They expect to be fed at specific times, and expect me to go to bed at specific times. Gracie will scream at me until I pay attention and go to sleep when it is sleep time, and this is immensely beneficial. The indoor cats and the outdoor cats need me, and that more than anything is the thing that I feel like I am missing in my life… a sense of purpose. My purpose was taking care of my wife and doing whatever it was that she needed to make sure she could continue to be a rockstar teacher. I don’t have that anymore, and more than losing a partner, I lost my center of gravity and my purpose of being. The cats… while not exactly the same have allowed me to maintain some semblance of order in my life that got shook vigorously and carelessly dumped out onto the table. I am pretty sure a few pieces fell down the heating vent behind the couch.
What has been wild to me is how each of them has changed slightly, for better or worse. Mollie for example is way more demanding of my attention, and if I do not lay down fast enough she gets real mad at me because she demands to snuggle with me as soon as I hit the bed. Now this behavior is an adaptation of something that happened a lot where my wife would go to bed without me and read for awhile, while I was still winding down for the night and playing games. During this time Mollie got special time where it was just her, because the other two cats were almost always in my orbit. The death of my wife means that she had to get brave to continue getting that same special time, but she has done so and we snuggle more now than we have ever snuggled in the past. Similarly Gracie had behaviors that she had for me and my wife and they were totally different interactions… and now… I am sort of having to play both roles so she is always in my business. You see so much of her because she is always the cat that is within arms reach of me as I am doing anything in life. Josie sadly has gotten a bit more skittish, but she does not handle change very well so it is understandable.
Being the first Thanksgiving without my wife, I was way more concerned about her Mom than I was about me. I still have parents and we used to do the “divide and conquer” thing where I would go to my parents and she would go to her mom’s. There were many years where my wife was the only person there, and I wanted to make sure that she was not alone for Thanksgiving. So during the funeral process I made plans to eat Thanksgiving with her, and primed my folks that they would end up taking the backseat at least this year. We have a mutual friend that also said she was going to go with me to the meal, and thanks to timing it turns out my wife’s sister is also going to be available. She works odd hours and goes off to do these multi month long jobs where she cleans out nuclear power plants, so we never know exactly what her schedule is going to be like and if she is going to be available for holidays. We see her when we can see her basically, and I am also thankful that she has not made herself scarce in my life.
Early in our marriage we were having to attend five of six Thanksgiving proceedings. In my family there were always two happening which was my Mom’s side of the family and my Dad’s side of the family. Since my wife was from a split home there were two full families associated with her Dad and Step Mom, and with her Mom and Step Dad. Then we often had a separate meal with my wife’s eldest sister and her family, who often served as a bit of a surrogate mother because there was a twenty year difference between the two of them. So we would do this whirlwind trip through all of the houses, trying to carve the most opportune path and hit as many proceedings as we could so that no one felt snubbed, often ending up at her eldest sisters house that night, because we would get up at zero dark thirty to go shop the Black Friday sales, back when they were physical things and not just a month long sequence of lukewarm deals.
My wife would get so tired of eating the same meal over and over at every household, because while the individual components might vary… it was essentially a combination of turkey, ham, dressing, and the same basic sides over and over. Slowly over time the various houses disintegrated as they lost the connective glue that kept things together. When her step dad passed away, his kids stopped going to visit Mom-in-law in quite the same way… and started having their own family Thanksgiving meals. This led to some quiet gatherings, but my wife was always there. One year Mom-in-law asked my wife what she wanted to Thanksgiving meal, and not wanting her to have to cook a full meal with all of the trimmings, and also being tired of all of that… she said Spaghetti. Truth be told she makes really damned good Spaghetti, and then year by year that sort of became the tradition. The idea being it was something simple enough to make that it did not put her through an egregious amount of effort to make the meal, especially when it was often just the two of us and her eating said meal. The bonus would be that we also got sent home with a lot of excess Spaghetti, which reheats beautifully and keeps for a really long time in the fridge.
Traditions just sort of happen like that, and Thanksgiving Spaghetti was one of the good ones. Once upon a time I was starving and desperate for food… and ate a handful of honey roast peanuts at my Grandmother’s house… and those became something I got every single year because she thought I loved them. We do our best to do the little things for the ones we care about, and while honey roast peanuts are not a thing I actually enjoy… I did always appreciate the attempt at thoughtfulness. My Dad loves them so he always got them. I am thankful that we are keeping the tradition of this unorthodox meal alive even though my wife is no longer around. Thanksgiving without a big mess of spaghetti just would not be quite the same.
The only problem with a non-traditional meal is the fact that we ran out of traditional ones. As happens… the family bonds disintegrates over time as the glue that holds a household together passes away. We lost her sister and step father to cancer, and her dad started RVing full time which obliterated any semblance of a formal meal. Then both of my grandmothers passed away, each of them the anchor for that household, so eventually we were left in a scenario where we were out of homes to go to. My folks don’t really need to go to all of the effort of fixing the full meal, because my mom is no longer able to walk and my dad is overburdened with caring for her. So at some point we started partaking of Charlies Chicken, which makes ready to go meals that are pretty damned good. I went by and picked up a giant pan of chicken and dressing yesterday and then came home and split it out into another pan so I could take half of it to the little 85 year old neighbor guy that I check in on every Sunday. I wanted to make sure he also had a good Thanksgiving meal that he did not need to cook, and this also gives me plenty of leftovers in the fridge to eat on in the coming days.
I guess that is the challenge going forward, is that I am going to have to start building new traditions. There is so much of me that feels guilty that I am moving on with my life. I am trying to do things that bring me joy, and it feels somewhat wrong that I am doing so. The core of my being is still very much broken, and while I am shambling along and going through the motions… it feels like I still lack a unified sense of purpose in the way that I once did. I am going to have to find that purpose again, but that is a challenge for the future. I am just barely out of the crying every single day phase. I still have moments where I fall to pieces, and they almost always revolve around seeing something and desperately wanting to tell my wife about it, only to suddenly realize that I can’t. I am getting through it though and I am thankful to everyone who has helped me get to the point where it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did.
Anyways. I don’t normally do holiday posts but given that I have several hours to kill before I need to drive to my first destination, I thought I would sit down and bang one out because I am legitimately thankful for all of the help that I have been given this year. I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday, and if you don’t celebrate… then I hope you have a great tail end of the week and weekend. Does your family have any unorthodox family traditions? Drop me a line below because I would love to hear some of them.
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