Thanksgiving

Seems everyone is warning me about the holidays. The first ones I will be experiencing? celebrating? living through? without Robert.

To forewarn myself I have been trying to remember last Thanksgiving. Nothing comes to mind. I know all the things we didn't do. I didn't cook a mighty bird. We didn't do it at home. Nope to visiting friends. Ditto for going out to a restaurant. I have images of past years but last year is a blank. What on Earth did we do last Thanksgiving?

I will admit, right here and now that the mind can be wonderful at times. Amnesia is bliss. Amnesia protects. Amnesia insulates. Amnesia is absolutely my best friend. Until.

Until. Quite an interesting word until. I prefer to linger a bit before until hits. And hit it does. Like a sucker punch. No wonder my mind kept offering up amnesia.

Last year I had my Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, some sort of green vegetable and apple pie in the cafeteria of the big city hospital. Alone. While Rob was lying upstairs in a hospital bed recovering from surgery. The surgery that sealed our fate. Where the doctors leaned over the bed afterwards and said, "We can treat you, but we can't cure you this time."

To put this into context....Remember my post "Numbers, but no one is counting" a while back? The number 10? It stood for 10 months. The last 10 months we had together. The clock started ticking just before Thanksgiving. Turns out my post "A Broken Heart" was the one year anniversary of this surgery.

Seems while the conscious mind can offer up amnesia, the unconscious never forgets. I am awakening to time marching on. Understand now that I was stuck. In the abstract 10 can still be an important number, but now I am at 12 and apparently counting once again. Moving forward. I choose to take thanks in this.