Well, thanks

We did our first Thanksgiving in years on Friday (having a dinner of those dimensions on a Thursday that’s not a holiday here in Germany is impractical).

There’s some debate about when our last Thanksgiving dinner was. I feel it was in 2017, when we were invited to a friend’s. Christina says we must have done one since, but I can’t see how. In 2018, we would have been too distracted by Colin’s mounting health problems and, in 2019, I don’t think any of us were in much of a mood to give thanks, just two months after his death. And I’m pretty sure the logistics of trying to organize a Thanksgiving dinner during the pandemic were too daunting for us in 2020.

But this year, in 2021, we’re old hands at negotiating pandemics and lockdowns and the new variant of the day. So, with a lot of prompting by Ricardo, we went ahead and did it.

And it was good. I mean, I don’t know many better cooks than Christina, so there was never anything to worry about from that angle. And the company was great. It was a pleasant evening.

Now, we were never one of those families that set aside time during Thanksgiving to take a moment to say what we’re thankful for. Being German, my Mom went through a lot of these US holidays always a little unsure of what was expected of her. And my Dad was happy to just sit an eat. So, there wasn’t a lot of this looking back at the year and thinking about what we wanted to say thank you for.

And yet I know this is done and, even if I’m not going to make a room full of Germans participate in a tradition my family didn’t have, it’s there in the back of my head. And I want to be grateful. We’ve stayed healthy, the four of us. It looks like Noah is going to Gymnasium (the university-track education). I turned 50 without major incident and fulfilled a years-long dream of coming into possession of a lawn-mowing robot. You can accentuate the positive without forcing it.

But it was still (if I’m right) our first Thanksgiving dinner without Colin. And that stung a little bit. In the three or four Thanksgivings we had him, he managed to form some memories. I mean, in 2016, when we had our Thanksgiving and we were in spitting distance of our last major round of chemotherapy and getting the heart catheter removed, we were thankful beyond words. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t force everyone present to play the “I’m thankful” game, we were so euphoric and certain that we had gotten through the nightmare with nothing but a few scars and a reminder to be grateful for life. But there are quieter moments. I remember Thanksgiving 2015 wrapping up and, as we were all clearing up the table, finding Colin clinking sippy cups with another little boy his age, just a couple of German 1-year-olds getting ready for the day when they’d be doing the same thing with beer glasses. It’s one of the more adorable memories I have of him, moreso because that was all him and the other kids. No one set him up to create a memory so perfect. No one coaxed him into the corner and put the cup in his hand. They just did it, and I was thankful in that moment to have such a wonderful child.

So, then you jump ahead to another year where Germany seems to have gotten just about everything wrong with the virus and now we’ve got a new variant threatening to shred our lives and force us to lock away for the next couple of months, the “I’m grateful” game is hard. I can do it. I can tell you things for which I’m grateful. But everything I say is paired with – at least in my head – a “but it would be better if Colin were here.”

I say this looking ahead to Christmas, which will be our third without him. In 2019, I think we were all still shellshocked to really grasp what a holiday without Colin meant. Last year we were all disoriented by Covid-19. Now I look ahead to a month from now and it’s dawning on me that, even if there wasn’t a killer virus stalking us, none of these holidays are going to feel quite the same. They’ll be good and they’ll be fun and – at least this year – the contents of the stockings are going to be spectacular. But it’s never going to be the same.