Grateful

Thanksgiving was different this year. I spent the whole day cleaning. My mom made the food. I helped here and there. But if I am honest with myself, I was a woman on a mission. A mission to get my house clean. That was what I told myself. My house needed to be clean, we had family coming over that night. So I cleaned. Upstairs, downstairs, the basement, the bathrooms, the floors. Jeff and my dad watched football. The kids watched movies and played games and made more messes for me to clean. And I did. By the end of the day the house was spotless. Just in time for dinner. I probably would have kept cleaning right on through the big feast if I could have. But I didn't. Instead I sat down with my family. We all squeezed around our little black table, the 8 of us. Only 8. And I realized suddenly what that mission of mine had really been about that day. It wasn't about cleaning. It was about forgetting. Every Thanksgiving at my house has been with my brother. Every holiday my whole life has been with my brother. Every memory of every Thanksgiving and Christmas has my brother in it somewhere. And thinking of this first holiday without him here was too much. Too much to think of my parents and all the things I knew they had to be thinking and feeling too. To think of my nieces who weren't there. To think of my children and all the family they were going to miss knowing as they grew. The family they were too young to remember. So I avoided all of them all day, without even knowing that I was. I scrubbed and sprayed and cleaned and straightened it away. And then I sat down and it all washed over me in a flood of emotion. Not the kind that I had been pushing away all day. Another kind entirely. The only way to describe it was gratitude, this overwhelming feeling of gratitude. We went around the table and said what we were most grateful for this year. It was different for all of us. But that emotion I felt, that was mine. I was so grateful to be sitting around that table with my family. That after the year we have had we were all there, together. That we were still ok, we still loved each other. And my brother was part of that. I was grateful for Michael. Grateful that we got to have him for 33 years. Grateful that all my memories are full of him. Grateful that I loved him, that we all did. Just grateful.