thanks-grieving: gratitude for whom?
thanks-grieving: gratitude for whom?
this holiday has a lot of shit wrong with it, but here I am, expressing thanks for w h a t
i have a confession: i am simultaneously a person who loves thanksgiving (for the food) and loathes its existence (for a number of reasons, mainly colonialism, disgusting capitalist practices like Black Friday, and also the genocidal roots of the holiday.)
but i am also, secretly, a sucker for it for the component of loved ones gathering together over a delicious feast. weirdly enough, in my family, there have never been petty fights or awkward questions to dodge. my extended kin runs so vast and large that we often grouped ourselves based off interests, gender identity and relative age. when i go home for a holiday, particularly thanksgiving, i’m reminded that people consider my feelings. in my teens, i expressed a love for stuffing and desire for it to be featured in a future spread. sure enough, the next year, there was a pan of stove-top nestled right next to the roast turkey.
however, as i age and grow into creating my own chosen family, and start to roost further from my hometown nest— i have begun to mourn the loss of tradition. even in university, i made every excuse to fly back for most major holidays, and if i was unable (usually this was relegated to thanksgiving and easter,) there was always a family or a friend i could accompany. for the last few years, really forced by the pandemic, my partner and i have had to create space where others could gather. this year, for the first time since the panini began, we asked our friends and family in the area what their plans were and most of them told us that they seized the opportunity to go home, to visit their roots.
we decided we would do a restaurant thanksgiving this year instead.
one of my favourite comedians, youngmi mayer, recently posted a tweet about thanksgiving that is an admittedly soft (or even mid? I’m a geriatric millennial— I don’t understand slang anymore) opinion, but i also kind of understand why.
what’s going on is a lot of love for food and nourishment! i know, it’s (semi) possible to have a healthy immigrant family!
holidays with my extended family meant an abundance of food. until my grandparents passed, i made sure to come home for every holiday i could so i could spend time with them. for about the last decade of his life, my grandpa suffered from parkinson’s disease, with the three years preceding his death confined to a bed. in college, when i couldn’t go home (because i transferred universities… lol) i would always spend the holiday with a friend and their family. (shoutout to all the friends that hosted me at theirs. you’re the real ones.) up until then i went to university, my family stressed the importance of spending time together, because the rest of the extended clan was clumped together on the other side of the island. (other than three of my father’s eight siblings and their children living on the mainland, locally, we were the furthest.) at the time, we were the only ones who lived out east, a whole thirty minutes away by car.
i grieve tradition because i mourn the loss of the people with whom i can no longer make new memories.
over the pandemic, my grandma (technically, my step-grandmother, as my grandpa remarried after he was windowed) passed peacefully without incident. i remembered waking up the next morning, not having been told the news, but confided in my fiancé. “i think my grandma just died. or something happened. i feel like someone died.” my hunch was confirmed in a dramatic fashion, but needless to say: it was painful to not have the time and means to get my shit together to fly out for the funeral.
i sat, frustrated and angry, over a zoom call. i stared at a pixelated screen with a poor sound system blasting into the laptop speakers, blowing it out. i couldn’t feel my grief washing over me because it felt like it was part of me— and though i could accept the inevitability (she was far gone with her alzheimer’s) i could not accept the fact that i couldn’t be there with the majority of my extended family.
at 28, i reached the dead grandparents’ club*.
it’s weird shit.
*= i’m 30 now.
it’s weird that i started off talking about turkey day, but here i am, talking about the tidal waves of grief i have for my loved ones who passed. it’s challenging to not reminisce and feel resentful when i can’t have any of my grandparents around for future holidays, and this upcoming thanksgiving.
who am i to complain about loss when people have it so much worse than i do?
that’s the fucking thing about grief: it comes in all shapes and sizes. it does not discriminate. it’s universal, yet, we all seem to embody it in our own unique way. sometimes i feel shame over the ebbs and flows of sadness over what may be perceived to outsiders as a minuscule loss, but i’m content with holding that they aren’t living my life.
i admit that i’ve dealt with it terribly on my end at times. i’ve lashed out at others, yet couldn’t understand why they lashed back out at me, or why i took the brunt of their anger. (maybe it’s because i grew up in a family and culture that avoided uncomfortable topics.) but part of the beautiful thing about life is that we’re always in relation to someone or something else at any given time, right? that’s what makes things so complicated. how do we preserve enough grace for ourselves while also trying to hold space for our loved ones?
while i cannot tell you what to do, i do think there are better ways to express gratitude than this holiday itself. i also think you should just do what it takes for you to survive. given the fact that there’s been another senseless act of violence against the lgbtqia+ community again (and that, unsurprisingly, conservatives are using it as an excuse to only further villainise us) i mourn the idea that we were ever really moving forward.
i’m grateful to be in this vessel, and to celebrate my time on this earth amongst people i love. and i express that every single fucking day by choosing to live, by talking about shit that’s hard, and by making sure that i put effort into maintaining the relationships that nourish me.