My column: The Beacon, November 2009

Thanksgiving

This is my first Thanksgiving without my parents. I know that losing one’s parents as an old lady is not as hard as losing them as a young one. Nevertheless, I feel sort of orphaned.

My parents won’t be tasting my turkey this year. Thanksgiving has always been my family’s favorite holiday. We used to celebrate with another family: a couple my parents became friends with when they were wild and young and on their own in NYC. When the other couple died, their kids inherited the job of family elders but our Thanksgiving tradition did not survive the passing of their parents or the pressures of marriage in the age of divorce.

September 1998, my Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer and, expecting her to be a goner, I insisted on getting a day off on Thanksgiving Friday to travel to make what I thought would be the last turkey cooked under her supervision. (I checked the turkey through carry-on at the airport. I still like to imagine what they thought that child-sized critter in the suitcase was. The age of packing pureed squash in a tote bag is gone. You can’t get more than 2 servings in a quart size zip bag.) Although the past decade has been difficult, my brothers and I and our families have enjoyed many jolly Thanksgivings since then. Ten grandchildren will remember their grandparents: old, at home, eating solid food, driving.

So my Dad died in the spring of 2008 and my Mom made it to the new year of 2009. They outlived their parents by a lot. My parents were great advocates for civil rights and they would have been so thrilled to see the inauguration of a man of color. They were rabid Yankees fans and would have loved this year’s world series. But they became old folks and had they lived, they would now be prisoners of economic fear. They would also have been terrified of catching H1N1 from one of the grandchildren. They were spared that fear.

So what am I thankful for? I have never seen children so ill with flu as I have seen this year, now that I am working part time at Children’s again. Healthy 15 year olds come in with fever and cough and in 1 day, their lungs fill up with whatever it is that makes an xray white. The worst off wind up on a ventilator and the worst of those die.

In my school district, 50% of the kids were absent with “flu-like” illnesses. (The CDC reported one case of confirmed ordinary seasonal flu from April to November. Anyone with a “flu-like illness” in our neighborhood has the H1N1 flu.) None of our kids in my school district were hospitalized. None of them ended up with ruined lungs. None of them died.

When you consider that there might have been 50,000 kids with H1N1 in Western NY, I give thanks this year that so few became gravely ill. And I am so terribly sorry for the ones who did.

Be thankful for small joys.

Editor.

Copyright Western Region PTA