Thank you

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice." ~ Meister Eckhart

Being alive

Being through with chemotherapy

My mom

My husband

My stepson

My huskies

The feral kitties I care for

All of the people I love

All of the people who love me

A place to live

Sufficient food and water

A job

A fully (as far as I can tell) functioning brain and the medication that helps it function correctly

The trees outside my office window

The fabulous squirrels who defy gravity as they leap from branch to branch

The Good Boy, my favorite kitty

Books

Music

Art

The full use of all of my limbs

My upcoming reconstruction surgery

All of the natural world

My best friend, even though she's gone

The opportunity to give to others

The opportunity to learn, spiritually and intellectually

Not being like everyone I know in my Dad's family

My online friends

Hitting the genetic jackpot

There are many other things for which I'm grateful, but it's not possible to think of all of them right now. Suffice it to say that I'm grateful for everything--good and bad-- that's happened to me. My job is to figure out how to use my experiences for positive growth. I'm grateful for being up for that challenge.

Thanksgiving

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." ~ Wendell Berry

On Friday, my therapist and I were discussing how I keep avoiding the knowledge that Thanksgiving is imminent. I used to be Ms. Traditional Thanksgiving to make up for all the really horrific ones I had as a kid. I not only cooked a turkey, but baked fresh bread and made pies with homemade crust. I lit candles and looked fabulous while we ate. Most people who know me now find it hard to believe I was ever that way. That's just because it's more comfortable to reduce others to the lowest common denominator so we don't have to embrace complexity. I am always at both ends of the spectrum. I embody contradiction. That's a hard, hard thing for people to understand, so I just let them rest in whatever (limited) understanding they have of me. But I digress.

Miss G., the therapist, asked me when all of that changed. I actually had to think a moment before I remembered...it was the year my dad killed himself. That changed everything. The first Thanksgiving, which came only about a month after he shot himself, I decided the only way I could get through it was to do everything differently. We did Italian for Thanksgiving. We did Chinese for Christmas. My husband was out of town for both.

I gradually migrated back to a more traditional menu, but it's never been the same. This year, I'm just so exhausted that, even though I keep making noises about bread and pies, it's next to inconceivable that any of that will actually happen. My mom and I shopped for Thursday this past weekend and it was hard to even focus my mind on what we needed to get. I'm not sure that's related to my father, but I suppose it could be. I seem to be a bit stuck in cancer treatment mode. I was trying to remember where I was last year on Thanksgiving day and, as far as I can recall, I was getting infused with poison. Fun times.

All in all, the memories that currently go with Thanksgiving are difficult to face. The memories from being a child at Thanksgiving may be, in their own way, much worse. It's hard to quantify horrific.