November is the month we remind ourselves to be thankful. As the ground hardens in frost and the last remnants of leaves find their way down, I wonder if this season gives us clarity to see the blessings that sustain us. The excess of summer is stripped away, leaving us exposed to the simple truth that we are fragile, that for better or worse, we survive in the cradled embrace of Mother Nature. We are thankful for each breath because the oxygen in our lungs is provided to us, and our organs themselves created by a divine and mysterious process in the wombs of our mothers.
I visited my granddad in hospice care on Thanksgiving. He has extra oxygen given through tubes in his nose, and on the machine, the air flows through a humidifier that dribbles like a fountain of water. I see no clearer picture of the fragility of our condition than a man at the very end of his life dependent on the love of his children and neighbors to care for the entirety of his existence, a love he did not earn but has yet received in abundance.
My mom stands by his bedside in a bright red weaved sweater. She makes him comfortable and cares for him as his body slowly gives way to the irresistible movements of time. In the end, like him, we are utterly dependent on this love, which is always outside of our control, but always comes to our bedside, always sacrifices itself for us, always helps us. Winston Churchill would say that we carry on through the cancer, the death, and the grief. It’s in the rubble that love carves out a way.
I never met my grandparents on my mother’s side. When she was my age, she cared for her mom as she died of cancer. She got a call at the hospital that her brother came home from school with a high fever. She told her mom that she’d go home to take care of him. That was the last time she would see her.
That picture in my mind is the kind of love my mother taught me, a love that rolls up its sleeves and cares through the muck of life. “I wanted you to see what real courage is,” Atticus said, “instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” Like him, my mom would block the doors to death, pull up a chair, and sit before the mob, no plan in hand but always ready with a book. “Seems that only children weep,” Atticus said, perhaps because they see better than us the need to be loved and held and carried through suffering.
This November I’m thankful for my mom. I’m thankful for the love she taught me. She showed me that we are always dependent on it. And I will always be blessed to be called her son, hopefully to live in such a way to roll up my sleeves, like her, and carve out love through the rubble of life, to see it through no matter what: “You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
Regarding Life 