I knew the look on her face all too well. She leaned against the doorway with slumped shoulders, staring off into a space with eyes opened wider than normal. Her eyelids were containing the tears but barely and the damn could rupture at any moment. Over anything. The normally vivacious voice was muted and cold. The fire had gone out in her heart.
She glanced up at me and I smiled. She smiled back and made her way to where I was sitting. She placed her hand on the table and I placed my hand on top of hers.
“I know exactly how you feel,” I said.
Her eyes filled with moister, her lip quivered and she nodded her head up and down. Normally words come easy for her but she had none. She couldn’t conjure then up if her life depended on it. There were only feelings of brokenness and hurt and loss.
Her thumb moved up over mine and there was the slightest of pressure. It was all that she had to give.
“So, remember last January and February and March?” I asked. “Well you are me then. I know your look. It was my look. I know exactly how you feel.”
She withdrew her hands, wiped her eyes, and told me that she’d be right back. Briskly she took herself outside and both hands covered her eyes and the sobs came. I watched her through the window and felt the moisture in my own eyes. I can still feel that way.
Eventually she returned and again placed her hand on the table. I placed my hand over hers again. She smiled but it was a vacant expression of gratitude. Her brain knew to say thanks but there was nothing anywhere else.
“Anyway,” I said, “remember when it was me? You took to given me big hugs every day. Every single day you would come up behind me and just hug. It was really the only touching that went on in my life during that time. You don’t know how much that meant to getting me through it.”
Her eyes again filled with moisture and just before the damn broke again I said, “And we’ll get you through too.”
Again she ran outside with her hands over her eyes, stifling sobs that desperately needed to be released.
When she returned people were standing around me asking me what I’m going to do for Thanksgiving. She stopped and stared at me intently and I knew that she had nothing to do for Thanksgiving. Hell there was little to be thankful for at this moment in her life.
“I dunno,” I answered. “I suppose that I’m doing a progressive one. My Mom wants me to drop by the family thing which is in the morning. Then my Breakfast Club family wants me to stop by. Then there is the Tybee celebration at Fannies-On-Beach where the Bored will collect.”
As I said these things, the damn burst again and I watched her run outside for the third time. “Let it out,” I whispered. “Let it out.”
She returned yet again and asked me what I did yesterday so I told her about sitting on the Beloved Back deck with a fire going and Pandora radio and Goddess lying on her mat staring at the first.
“I miss my dogs,” she sobbed never making it outside.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know someone else who does too.”
For thirty years I was in charge of Thanksgiving for hundreds of homeless people, orchestrating tremendous celebrations of food, music, presents, and merriment in the most depressing of contexts. The poor and the homeless hate the holidays more than anything. From Thanksgiving through New Year’s, but especially at Christmas, everything that they do not have is rammed down their throats.
Celebrations consist of outside of the ordinary food, different people serving it, plastic Turkeys, Pilgrims, Santa’s and birth announcements of Jesus are plastered everywhere. Other than that it is still a homeless shelter and the day after New Year’s it will be stripped of all of the “good times and cheer.”
I watched her and realized that it happens at the individual level too; outside of homeless shelters, hospitals or Hospices. This is the first Thanksgiving that I’ve only had to plan for me. This is the first that she’s only had to plan for her. She stares at me and the corners of her lips barely turn up below the wettest of eyes.
“We’ll be ok,” I tell her, “Happy Thanksgiving!”
Tears rolled down her face, but when she squeezed my hand, it was with force and there actually was the slightest bit of thankfulness in the air.
