Giving Thanks

It snowed here in North Carolina on Friday  It’s been an unusually cold few days.  I never mind the cold leading up to the holidays.  It seems appropriate to see your breath fog up the morning air on Thanksgiving morning.

 

We took a walk on Saturday morning.  The snow was long gone, it was only a dust of powdered sugar on the lawns of fallen leaves, on the mailboxes.  A few hours before we took our walk, we were eating a hot breakfast, and I ignored my cell phone ringing.  A few minutes after that, when I got the message "It’s your mother, honey. Call us as soon as you can," I knew someone had died.

 

Years ago when I was still in college, I got a similar call from my mother.  She was sobbing, and my heart sank when I heard her.  "What’s wrong, Mommy?"  I asked.  I always call her Mommy when she’s sad, I don’t know why.  "My brother died."  Since she has five brothers, I had to ask which one.  Her second-to-youngest brother Michael, the only one who never married, the carpenter who built her a beautiful and intricate doll house, had died of a massive heart attack.  He was around 42, if I remember right.  He died in the night, with the telephone in his hand.  A couple of years later, another tearful phone call, but this time it was a message on my machine.  "Your Pap is dying, honey.  He’s on life support, just until I can get there.  Call us."

 

This time, she was not crying.  "Your Uncle Steve died," she said, and I wondered why she said it that way, instead of "My brother Steve."

 

Steve’s birthday is on New Year’s Eve, or maybe it was New Year’s Day, I can’t remember.  In any case, in the years that our family lived in Virginia (seven of them total when I was growing up, scattered over a couple of decades) we would spend Christmas at our own house, and then make the long drive up to Pittsburgh to Steve’s birthday party.  A sort of yearly family reunion, which wasn’t too much of a reunion for the rest of them since they all still lived within an hour of where they grew up.  For us it was exciting, though – to see the 13 or so cousins that we rarely got to see, the 6 Aunts and 7 Uncles, my dad’s cousins who were like Aunts and Uncles to us.  I remember sparklers in Uncle Steve’s front lawn, and all of the kids sleeping on pallets throughout the house.  Card tables set up for dinner.  This was before Michael died, and Pap, before my 7 year old cousin Mary Beth died of leukemia, before we all grew up and went to college, before any of us were married, or thick-waisted, or old.

 

In the summer of 2007 my sister Caki graduated from a Pennsylvania college, and Patrick and I drove up there to see her graduate, and then went to her graduation party, and Uncle Steve and his family were there.  He looked good, seemed happy enough.  He was worried about his daughter, Holly, who didn’t go to college.  He was worried about his twin sons, Chris and Matt, who were in college but couldn’t decide on a major.  He was worried about his wife, who’d been laid off.  But these were all typical worries, good kind of worries, and he was pleasant and joking as usual then.  The last time I saw him, though I never would have suspected.  My mother has brothers who have suffered major health problems – Steve was the healthiest one.  The oldest of the 7 siblings, she is outliving too many people, she told me on the phone today.  They’re all over there now, she said sadly – My mom, my dad, my brothers, my niece.  All together.  This is awful.

 

He was an organ donor, but he died alone, face down on the floor in his house in the wee hours of the morning, while miles away I wrestled with my squalling baby, and my sister enjoyed her latest play’s cast party, and hundreds of people (including his early-to-bed wife) slept.  So they could only take his corneas and, oddly enough, a leg bone.  What kind of world is this, where people can walk around with other people’s eyes?  Other people’s bones?  Wonderful, and terrible.  The thought of him in a casket with a deflated leg makes me feel a little shaky.

 

I feel badly for my mother, and otherwise we’re ok.  Such is the way of it, when you lose people who you care about but who are not a part of your daily life.  He is in a better place my mother said, resignedly, and although I still sometimes wonder exactly how I feel about all of that, I prefer to think that this good man has been folded into a gentle and benevolent embrace, and that his goodness has been absorbed again into the world.

 

A few hours after my phone call with my mother, we strapped the baby into his stroller and tucked a thick blue blanket around his feet.  We put the collar on the dog and clipped on his leash.  We pulled on jackets, and coats, and hats, and walked for an hour through our wintry neighborhood, and talked of this and that, as we do nearly every weekend, and outwardly I was much the same but in my head was a continuous prayer of thank you, thank you, thank you, for this, and for all of it, and for everything.