Michigan Women

Here they are; three generations: Tina, Nikki, Emma. Mother, daughter and granddaughter. Flanked by helpers Ewa and Gina at Nathan’s Place. Their skill and capabilities are amazing. They create the Thanksgiving holiday for their adult foster care residents, an extended family come together in the frailty and desperation of old age. They produce a community out of American traditions. It is the Michigan women’s first Thanksgiving as an adult foster care home.

Wikipedia’s history of Thanksgiving shows how constructed this American holiday is, created out of relief at having survived, having had enough to eat or having escaped being killed, having found dry land, or being able to stop trudging and rest. For Anglos, the Virginia colony and Plymouth plantation; for Spaniards, St. Augustine, Florida, and San Elizario, Texas. They were all just glad to be here and be in one piece and not too hungry. All stories of desperation.

Of course, Thanksgiving isn’t the only holiday of deliverance, of being spared by the Almighty; Passover precedes it by millennia. But in addition to its etiology shared with ancient religions, Thanksgiving has had a special national utility. Witness the Wikipedia-cited proclamations from Washington and the Continental Congress, through Lincoln and the Civil War, FDR and the Depression, to Truman and the turkey pardon. No American president can omit Thanksgiving which enjoins even the most dysfunctional family or nation to practice an hour or so of mealtime civility.

And so here we are, my Mom and I, along with several other adult children and their spouses and elderly parents. We have been desperate too. Trying to find good care for a surviving parent. And now the Michigan women have put together a Thanksgiving meal that rivals most I had growing up or helped prepare myself. My mother (in her younger years critical and demanding) would have been impressed. Food is laid out artfully in the small kitchen, plates and silverware all to hand. Tina serves the residents who cannot fed themselves; a system for everything. One resident has snoozed off, another claps and sings, my Mom periodically calls out with the involuntary cries that result from stroke. Bonnie, the violinist, plays carols and Bach. The most alert resident smiles in enjoyment at the grandchildren who move so effortlessly among in this collection of humanity.

Several weeks later when I was packing Mom’s things after her death, I had to bid Tina a temporary farewell. Her words as I left were, “thank you for trusting us with your Mom.” I thought, thank you for the nicest Thanksgiving of my Mom’s life. My life too.