A friend asked last week about why I hadn’t written lately, and was hoping everything was okay. Everything is okay. I do a weekly video for my work, now, so all of my thoughts and creative energy have been funneled into that. I showed her the link on our Facebook page, in case she was interested.
This friend is also Native American and a caregiver for one of our patients. I asked if she celebrated Thanksgiving, as I asked our patient about their Thanksgiving traditions. She said she cooks the food, but doesn’t participate. For her, and her ancestors, our Thanksgiving is a day of mourning. There were no pilgrims and no Squanto. Just death and injustice.
I was not surprised that she didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have never had the opportunity to hear this perspective firsthand. Have you?
I’m pretty sure I wore a pilgrim hat made out of construction paper when I was in elementary school and I am also pretty sure I have pictures of my children wearing the same.
I wanted to say I’m sorry, but it seemed too little and too hollow.
It is a little disorienting to lay an idea held for a lifetime on a kitchen table, out of which are borne many, many wonderful gatherings and memories, next to another idea to which it is diametrically opposed and feels instinctively “truer” than the one you’ve been espousing.
I continued to think on this the rest of the day and brought it to my own dinner table that night for discussion. My husband replied without hesitation. “History is written by the victors.”
Ugh. I really am sorry.
It is mind boggling how these things co-exist. Or not. If you are a Native American, “Thanksgiving” is built on a lie. If you are like me, Thanksgiving just is, and you are grateful for it, just like the name implies, and it is not (or has not been until now) mixed with a tincture of sadness for another version of how it came to be.
And yet, things that don’t go together at all, occupy the same space at the same time, all of the time. Like singing a prayer of Thanksgiving to a host of friends missing their spouses, listening to old voice recordings of boys learning to speak while they tower over you and watch you cry at the memory of it, and hearing your husband’s deceased grandmother's voice, wish her daughter a Happy Thanksgiving “wherever you are”. And that was just yesterday.
But time just keeps moving forward, and mornings come and little boys lay on your lap and you want to freeze time, but you know you can’t. So, you just admire the complexity of veins running through his growing body and look at your new Christmas cactus blooming days before Thanksgiving, and realize that life is simple and complicated and time can be a friend if you make good use of it.
