Thanksgiving at Mom’s and the Uncertainty of Life

We were going to see Mom and sister Ana today to share a cherry pie Sharron made. But Jim bought a turkey yesterday for Mom to cook. Even though she’s almost 90 years old, her back hurts and she’s thinner than a rail, she stoked up sufficient energy to cook the turkey yesterday for Thanksgiving Day today. And so we brought the cherry pie with us and gave thanks for our blessings, as few as these are, without Mom at the table. Just as we arrived she got a horrible pain at the pit of her stomach and felt dizzy. She gets this way often, she says. When it happens, she has to lie down until the pain relents. We had finished our Thanksgiving dinner when she finally returned to the table and ate a little something. Not much of anything, actually. That’s the way it is with her these days. Anemia, the doctor’s say. But she stubbornly holds out against going through more testing. She doesn’t like tests, or doctors, for that matter. And so our Thanksgiving was an uneventful, but not really. Our eyes told a different story.