The Widower's Notebook by Jonathan Santlofer

Author:Jonathan Santlofer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

26

Thanksgiving

The end of summer and early days of fall seemed to drag on forever. Then suddenly it was Thanksgiving, Joy’s favorite holiday (once we’d disentangled it from family and adopted it as our own, which we had for the past decade or more). The new Thanksgiving consisted of our nuclear family, Joy’s sister, Kathy, and husband, Charlie, always Jane O’Keefe with some of her family and friends, along with good friends orphaned from their families. It became a great tradition and something we looked forward to every year.

Joy would cook up a storm, a rarity, but she did it well. She’d order Indian corn from a company out west (creamy and delicious), brine and braise the organic turkey, make my mother’s cranberry mold (the one and only carryover from my childhood Thanksgiving), bake her two best desserts, a plain orange pound cake just for me because I loved it, while everyone else devoured her rich and decadent Chocolate Bruno. People would bring vegetable dishes and apple pies and lots of wine and Jane would make the gravy and we’d argue every year that mine was better (though it wasn’t). I’d make stuffing and watch the same video every Thanksgiving about the best way to carve a turkey, and it was a great holiday, no religious overtones, no father turned away from the table to watch the football game, no childhood angst, no endless drive on the Long Island Expressway, no after-meal headache from anxiety. Joy’s Thanksgiving—and it was very much hers—was a glorious event, and anyone who came begged to come back.

Joy insisted on a sit-down meal, never a buffet, no matter how many people. I ended up building an extension for our table, as it grew from ten to twelve to sixteen to eighteen people.

So what do you do with a holiday when the person to whom it mattered most is no longer around?

You ignore it.

And that’s what Dorie and I did.

The idea of going to any other Thanksgiving, at anyone else’s home, was impossible. When Thanksgiving rolled around, just three months after Joy died, the two of us left town.

That first year we flew to Arizona, spent one night with my oldest childhood friend and his beautiful Lebanese wife, who cooked a delicious Middle Eastern meal for a dozen though we were only five.

The next day Dorie and I take off in our rented car, a Jeep, since we have planned some long-distance and heavy-duty driving, though we start out on the normal tourist route. First, Sedona, where we buy rocks and crystals (many related to grief, the smooth black Apache Tears, my favorite, one I continue to carry in my pocket). Then, to the Grand Canyon, which Dorie has never seen. We have reserved a cabin only yards from the canyon, too dark to see when we arrive, though we awaken to a startling view, then hike a few miles along the rim.

We both know it’s something Joy would never do, that she hated heights and would

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