Soldiering On

Thanksgiving, 2020

When I think about the spirit of this Thanksgiving that I encountered in stories I heard from friends and in my telemed office, and in my own experience, the words “soldiering on” come to mind. There were bright baubles of joy here and there but, by and large, the people I know endured this Thanksgiving with their shoulders squared, resolved to summon the courage and grit called for this holiday.

This is the Thanksgiving that will be remembered for its empty chairs, for all the people both living and dead not beside us at the table.  This is the Thanksgiving that will be remembered for the risks we weighed, agonizingly, when inviting anyone from outside our immediate household to sit at our table.  For many, it will be remembered as the first Thanksgiving spent alone. For many, ghosts are all they had with them at the table, and for some of us, already depleted by the isolation of covidlife, those ghosts were particularly painful guests.

Though there were many more this year, there are always ghosts at Thanksgiving.  There are the actual dead and there are the living ghosts:  people who for some reason can’t make it home or people estranged from families whose absence is not spoken, but whose presence vibrates in the walls, a small shaking of the foundation of things.  

The very first ghost in my life was my grandmother, Alice Gallagher, my father’s mother.  Though I couldn’t have told you at the time, she was with us for all the Thanksgivings when I was a child, rattling the walls, trying to be acknowledged, have her name spoken into the room. I never actually heard that name until I was in my late teens and was told the secret that Katherine, the person I thought was my grandmother, was not.  Even my father didn’t know this secret until he was well into his teens.  Alice died in April, 1919, two weeks after giving birth to my father.  In harmony with the tip-lipped way death was dealt with then, she went unmourned into history. 

I had a little bird and its name was Enza, I opened the window and in-flew-Enza *

Alice died after contracting the deadly Spanish Flu in the second wave of the last pandemic this country endured.  Because ungrieved deaths create powerful ghosts, it isn’t hard to summon the ghost of Alice when I weigh the risk of sitting next to Addie on the couch watching Octonauts.  Or invite Colin into the house for coffee.  Or assemble another fire pit the day after Thanksgiving with friends, most of whom spent Thanksgiving alone for the first time, maybe ever.  Weighing risks is exhausting, even with Alice at my side.  Worn out, listening to Alice, I cancel the Fire Pit. 

As I age, Thanksgivings become both sweeter and sadder.  Sweeter for the fact that there are fewer left to me at the end of the road and therefore I treasure each one more, and sadder for the fact that the number of dead assembled around the Thanksgiving table grows, inexorably, higher.  There is Aunt Rosalie with her matching black patent purse and shoes, her thin lips tightly pursed together and Nana with her gnarled hands and arthritic back and my mother with her determined smile and my father with his crinkly eyes, and Jerry, Bob’s brother, who could always be counted on for a good caper. And Mary Dunn, Bob’s mother, whose warmth and steadfastness still abide in Bob.  They are all gone now, passed over to the other side, but every Thanksgiving they creep into the room, pull up empty chairs, murmur, hum, wiggle, make themselves known.

Mostly, this year, my Thanksgiving was sweet but as the family gathered to give thanks at my daughter and son-in-law’s table laden with abundance, I was also acutely aware that just outside the thin curtain that separated us from the world outside—suffering and fear and loneliness and grief were all taking their place at other’s tables. And I was aware too that, though a vaccine, like a flock of warblers, is coming in spring, there is yet a long, dark, scary winter ahead of us. 

Now, instead of optimism and hopefulness, I see weariness and worry in the face of our Maine Coronavirus Guru, my hero, Dr. Shah. The Fall spike occurring everywhere now will be followed by the spike we will see ten days, two weeks, a month from now when the risks people weighed about sitting at the table with family and friends on Thanksgiving play out in real numbers of sick and dying. The number of people who flew on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving this year was down, but only by half. 1,070,967 passengers weighed the risks and decided it was safe to fly. 

I had a little bird and its name was Enza, I opened the window and in-flew-Enza.

The Pilgrims’ story of survival and of giving thanks in 1621 for the harvest that would ensure their survival that winter doesn’t offer me any inspiration for surviving the winter ahead.  Even as a child it didn’t inspire me.  Raised as the descendant of immigrant Irish Catholics, the early origin story of our country did not feel like my story.  And, of course, we’ve come to learn that these early stories were myths that overlooked the deadly price to the Native Americans of contact with white men and never questioned our rights to “own” this land taken from them.  This season, I thought maybe it was time to see if I could stir some new life into this tale, not only for me but for Addie, now nine.  I bought a book, “What Was the First Thanksgiving?” and eagerly showed her the cover: a Pilgrim holding a turkey, a Wampanoag man holding sheaths of corn. 

 “Let’s read this together,” I offered, keen to try to engage both of our imaginations.  “Oh, I know all that already,” she replied and went on to prove it by correctly pronouncing the words Wampanoag and Squanto.  “But we can learn some more about the Pilgrims and how they survived leaving their own countries and what kind of relationship they had with the Native Americans.” “Nah, she said, “let’s watch the Great British Baking Show instead.” 

But there is a story about Thanksgiving which does offer me sustenance for the difficult months ahead. It is an entirely new story to me.  I read it in a recent blog by my other 2020 hero, Heather Cox Richardson.  In “Letters of an American,” Heather tells us that the first official Thanksgiving in this country, the one we have on the third Thursday of November, was not in honor of those Pilgrims, but in honor of the great battle for freedom, the Civil War.  In October,1863, Lincoln established Thanksgiving to celebrate, Heather says, “the survival of our democratic institutions.” Always concerned about unity, Lincoln hoped this holiday would bring together north and south, old and young. Here is part of Lincoln’s message about Thanksgiving:

And I recommend (that we) commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

Now, in 2020, we are in two wars: a war for democracy and a war against the sticky headed beast known to science as Covid 19.  Like the country after Gettysburg in 1863, there are still many unknowns, still much division in the land to try to heal, but, with the arrival of the vaccine and the successful completion of the election, perhaps, just perhaps, we too can begin to see the way to our wars’ ends.  This winter, I’m with Lincoln, the tall poet, ready to soldier on in hopes of “peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

Meanwhile, when the wish for a maskless breath of air in the midst of a loud crowd overtakes me, which will be very soon as all this rectitude is, let’s face it, terribly boring, I will call the ghost of Alice to sit beside me, urge me to put aside that longing for a little while longer, reassure me that, soon, very soon, all this will change. 

*A playground rhyme from 1919.