Thanksgiving without Dad

The seat at the end of the long wooden dining table near my kitchen is a frequent reminder of many family Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It was where Dad always sat. It was his place because it was easier to wheel him there.

Last year, however, Dad wasn’t able to join us during the holidays. A few months before, our family made the difficult decision to move him to a nursing home.

Thanksgiving Day 2010 at Dad's nursing home.

Not seeing him in his usual spot at Thanksgiving last year felt strange and made me sad, but thankfully we’d seen him earlier that day.

My mom, husband and I joined him in the nursing home dining room as he ate his lunch. He had a healthy appetite and didn’t need much help using utensils. We joked with him and took photos to let him know he was still very much a part of the festivities.

This holiday season Dad’s absence is more profound. There was no visit to the nursing home. No checking in on him, no joking around, no “we’ll see you later.”

Dad died five months ago this week – in his sleep on a Thursday morning at the nursing home. When I woke that morning, I noticed numerous missed calls from my brother and an urgent message to call him. The moment I had dreaded for so long had arrived.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him. Yet I’ve struggled with what to say about his death.

Reminders of Dad are everywhere – on torn pieces of paper, in notebooks, in files on my laptop and on the back of receipts in my purse. There are notes to refill his prescriptions, sketches of my conversations with him, scenes from the nursing home, ideas for future blog posts and reminders to talk to the nursing home staff about the pressing issue of the day.

I catch myself telling friends or relatives something about my parents in the present tense and have to correct myself.

For weeks after Dad died, I would glance at the blue bag in the trunk of my car. Inside was the Mavericks Championship T-shirt I bought him that he wore on Father’s Day – the last time I saw him alive. The shirt was a little too tight on him, so my mom asked me to exchange it for a larger size. After he died, I couldn’t bring myself to take it out of the car. When I finally did, it brought a flurry of memories from that day, as well as tears.

For a while, I kept running into an elderly man at work, on the elevator and in the cafeteria. He walks slowly and doesn’t say much. He looks nothing like my dad, but something about him stuck with me. Maybe it’s a reminder of the fragility of life, the desire for independence.

Two months and three days after my dad’s death, my father-in-law died. I witnessed my husband experiencing the same emotions I went through. Sitting in a funeral home again listening to my husband and his family make arrangements brought back the still raw emotions that I hadn’t yet been able to process. But having each other there helped both of us.

Death has been on our minds a lot since then. At some inevitable point, we all will be the man at work or the nursing home patient waiting for a loved one to stop by. If we’re lucky.

Sometimes we are too obsessed with our own lives to notice the elderly. Only when you grow older do you cultivate a respect for longevity in this world, especially when confronted with parents who are nearing the end of their lives.

Thank you, Dad, for that lesson.

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