Thanksgiving, 2011

Another Thanksgiving.  I realized this morning that it's been ten years since we actually celebrated Thanksgiving with Thomas.  He was a senior in high school in 2001 so he was home, he was in basic training at Ft.Benning in 2002 (where he told us the officers served the meal), in 2003 he was at Ft.Lewis and may have gone to my sister's for the day, and then he died exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2004.  I cannot remember our last Thanksgiving together.  What did we do?

Today started as kind of a melancholy day for me.  I just missed Thomas (who could eat massive amounts of food) and for whatever reason, the very sunny skies just made it worse.  He should have been here enjoying this beautiful day and holding us together.  Because that is the difficult part to explain to people:  it's not just that he is gone, but that the family we were is gone too.  The dynamic is different, the push and pull between siblings and parents feels distorted. We are adjusting but it has been very hard.  We've been clawing our way to that new normal I read about occasionally, but it is very hard work and progress is not always as steady as you think it should be.

But we are all here seven years later and I think we are going to be OK.

For some obscure reason, I put 2010 in the original title of this post.  The text offers no explanation so I'm guessing I was just being absent-minded that day.  Apologies to all who thought we might have dropped into a time-warp!  LA

Seventh Anniversary 11-11-11

Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of Thomas's death in Iraq.  It is unfortunate that questions arose in the press yesterday and today about the handling of remains at Dover AFB from 2003 to 2008.  I believe that Thomas's body was mostly intact but now there has to be a little question mark in my mind.  I am mostly upset for the families whose loved ones were most at risk for this mistreatment.

We will have a quiet day tomorrow:  Mass at 8:30, a visit to the cemetery, lunch with friends who are in town. Maybe pizza for dinner because Thomas was a pizza kind of guy. We could go to the Chinese restaurant that he and his friends frequented after their poker games, but our last experience there (Christmas of 2004) was not happy and it wasn't just the circumstances.  I am disinclined to give it a second chance.

Sadly, an online friend lost her daughter yesterday which I found out this morning.  Her daughter was in college, her cause of death unknown to me at this time, but it was sudden and unexpected.  Some days it just seems like there is more sorrow than the world can safely hold.