I’m Spending This in Thanksgiving With My Close Relatives
Tags: Coronavirus, Health, Thanksgiving, Wellness

When my daughter was three, she found a mouse outside in the grass. Without hesitation, she grabbed it by the tail and picked it up for us all to see.

‘Look!’ she shrieked, ‘A partly-dead, partly-alive mouse!’

Although she’s now 9, this moment remains one of her earliest memories, and the phrase ‘partly-dead, partly-alive’ has made it into our family lexicon.

This year, more than ever, I’ve been thinking of the phrase in terms of my family. My family — and yours, and everyone else’s — is partly-dead, partly-alive.

I don’t mean it in the morbid sense like we’re all just a moment away from a cat-attack that leaves us seizing out in the yard.

What I mean is that part of my family is dead and part of my family is still alive. When life feels full of gray areas like it does right now, it’s almost comforting to have something so black and white to think about.

In the alive column are my kids, my husband, and my mom and dad. I have three siblings and assorted aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. They are spread out across the country, wrapped up their own 2020 narratives. And they’re all fine — as fine as any of us are right now.

But since I won’t be seeing any of them over the holidays this year, I have found myself thinking a lot about the other part of my family. This includes the people who are no longer alive but are nonetheless, part of my family. In this category are all four of my grandparents, as well as many great-aunts and great-uncles. Also on this side is my mother’s baby brother, who died of cancer at 50, which is an age that seemed old at the time, but now seems tragically young.

I can’t complain about this balance. Life is inevitably a moving equation of subtractions and additions, and I’m lucky to have special people in both the dead and alive column.

Most of the time though, it’s my living family members that demand attention. The texts, calls, photos, zoom meets, and gifts all go to them. In a typical year, the week before Thanksgiving would be a volley of recipes, eating times, seating arrangements, and guestlists. I’d be giving my kids a crash course on table manners and making sure we all had at least one decent outfit to take on the long drive to my parents’ house in upstate New York.

This year though, we are making no plans. We are mashing no potatoes and playing no after-dinner card games.

And so, like many of you, I’m faced with an emotional and logistical void.

What I’ve noticed though, is that the other part of my family — the dead part — keeps creeping in to fill the void. More than ever, I’ve been thinking about my grandmothers. One died while I was in high school and the other passed away only recently, but both were a force to be reckoned with in my early life.

When I was young and they were both alive, I thought of them only as old ladies who made casseroles for church suppers and drove big long sedans — always five to ten miles slower than the speed limit.

But lately, I’ve been wondering more about other parts of their lives. I’ve been wondering which decade was their happiest and what their biggest regrets were. Both lived through many elections, several wars, and the passing of Roe v. Wade. There are things that I look up on Wikipedia that I’m sure either of my grandmothers would know off the top of their heads.

I’ve been wondering if they wished they had more children or if they wished they never had children at all. Did they feel fat when they looked in the mirror and suffer from deep-seated anxiety that was layered over in cosmetics from the Avon lady and knitted vests?

Were they happy in their marriages, or after five or six decades, were concerns about happiness pushed aside by the contentment that comes from predictability?

This leads me to think about my grandfathers. One was short, the other was tall. Both were dairy farmers and both were staunch conservatives. I know from their testimonies in church that they were single-issue voters: abortion. But I also know that they would have hated Trump for a hundred other reasons. And I wonder what they would have done in the voting booth this year.

One grandfather, in protest of the government, always refused to wear a seatbelt. I now wonder — would he put on a mask for the sake of all of us, or would he travel the countryside bare-faced, untethered by safety restraints of any kind?

Then my thoughts wander to his sister, my great aunt. Though she died in the early 2000s in her mid-80s, I’ve often wished for the chance to revisit our last conversation. It happened on Thanksgiving as we were all squeezing in one more piece of pie.

“I think Hillary Clinton will be president one day,” she said, beaming.

I regret not demanding an explanation. In an era defined by 9/11 and a second Bush in office, what gave her the audacity to suggest such an outlandish idea? Furthermore, in a family of conservatives, how did she — my great Aunt with two white pigtails and purple leather mocassins — end up a liberal Democrat? But I was a dumb college student, probably itching to leave the table so I visit my boyfriend or talk to my college friends over AIM on my desktop computer, so I didn’t.

On one hand, it’s sad to think of how many opportunities I missed with my dead relatives. But I also know it’s unrealistic to think that I would have spent my teenage years and 20s focused on drawing wisdom out of elderly people in armchairs instead of traveling, studying, and aggressively following the belief that I already knew all I needed to know about life. So instead of wallowing in regret, I’ve just been spending time thinking about them with love and nostalgia.

For the first thirty-five years of my life, the sight of my grandmother spilling food onto her bosom and then dabbing at it with a wet napkin was as common as seeing a squirrel or a bluejay out my window. The difference is though, that I’ll see squirrels and bluejays for the rest of my life, but I’ll never again see my grandmother’s face feign surprise when an errant cranberry plops down on her snowy white blouse.

But that’s ok. Trust me, with a 4 and a 9-year-old, there’s still plenty of stained shirts in my life.

And most of the time, I spend a lot more time thinking about my kids than my grandmother. But this year, I’m changing it up. Of course, I’ll feed my kids — I’m not a monster. But my heart, my mind, and my thoughts — they’ll be with my dead relatives, dropping cranberries, predicting elections, and trying to find answers to the questions I never asked.

If you like this type of story about partly-alive-partly-dead animals, try this:

The Joy and Sadness of Loving a Good Dog

How our dead dog Cooper gave us one final happy memory in the woods.medium.com