The Life Preserver

Mark’s favorite holiday was Thanksgiving – the bigger the table the better. For all of us, the last one he was alive was our most memorable. It would be the first one we would be celebrating without Mallory who had moved to California and had to work that day. At my sister’s house the night before in walked Mal who had bartered with someone to take her shifts after my younger sister arranged and paid for her to fly home. We jumped up and screamed when they came in the door, Mark’s eyes filled with tears. That was also the year my mom was not yet in the abyss of dementia and my brother and his wife flew in from Las Vegas. We were so happy that weekend, never knowing it would be drastically different the following year.

In these last few months there has been a young mom I’ve gotten to know whose story of loss is so similar to mine it catches my breath. I want to scoop her up and cradle her like the broken bird she is and I was five years ago. I want to promise her that one day things will get better, but if someone had said that to me in the early months following Mark’s death I never would have believed them. She will have to lead herself and her young daughters to light, the steps forward so incremental they can’t even be measured. On the day of the year designated for family and thankfulness that feels like an impossible task.

This year our table will look a bit different. I’m not sure what healed is and whether I will ever be completely there, but I am happy which for so long I wanted to believe was possible while never actually buying into it. One day I will write about how that came about, how the stars aligned in the most incredible way, and you will think I made the whole thing up. Like other times over these past few years, I keep asking myself, “Is this real?”

I think the most grateful people in life are the ones who have suffered tremendous loss. They are the ones at the Thanksgiving table who know there is no guarantee that the same people will be there next year. They act accordingly, taking in every detail and putting it in the bank, on-their-knees thankful for every life preserver that was thrown their way when the dinner in front of them on Thanksgiving Day looked like a heaping plate of loss.

When I talked to some writer friends about turning this into a book one day, one of them said, “It needs to have a happy ending.” There was some disagreement about that, about why things only feel complete when there’s a happy ending. I might have been the one pushing back the most on that idea. It has been hard to allow new things to come into my life when both of my hands were tightly clutching what used to be. But I never let go of hope and one day it said to me, “You can unclench your fingers and set those things down now. I am here. You are going to be okay,” and I grabbed the ring and allowed myself to drift towards something new.