I did not know at the time that it was the last one.
That is the particular cruelty of it. You do not get a sign. There is no way to stand in the kitchen at a particular Thanksgiving and know that this is the one to hold on to, this is the one where everyone’s name is still in place, where the faces around the table are still landing correctly in the mind of the woman at the head of it, where she moves between them with the ease of someone who has the whole room mapped, who knows exactly who is sitting where and what they need and what they find funny and what subject not to raise at dinner because it will take forty minutes to resolve.
She knew us all that year. I know that now.
I have been going back through that Thanksgiving in my memory the way you go back through a document looking for something you should have noticed, running my attention over the details of it. She told a story about her own mother. She laughed at the right moments. She held the baby and looked at the baby with the face that knows exactly who it is holding. She looked around the table at the end of the meal with the look of a woman taking an inventory she loves, counting what she has, and the count was right, everyone present, everyone accounted for, the whole gathered thing intact.
I am glad I was paying attention.
Not because I knew. But because paying attention is something I have been practising, the sustained, present, unhurried attention to what is actually in front of me, and that year I was better at it than I had been in previous years, and so I have more of that Thanksgiving than I would have had if I had been somewhere else in my mind, which I often was, which I am trying to be less.
She is still here. The Thanksgivings are still here, different now but present.
I bring the same attention I was practising that year. I keep practising it. The attention is what I have left to give when other forms of giving are harder, and I give it as fully as I can, every time, because every time might be the one I will need to go back to.
