Superfluous Man
Parlor Afternoon
In the States we are preparing for Thanksgiving, a feast day. We gather with our families (whether they’re born or chosen), we share a meal, and we are grateful for all that we have. We are grateful for each other.
Our experience of the feast is often bound to a sense of place that we’ve spent years cultivating. We never quite forget the furniture, the grain of the wood, the squeak of the chair beneath the warm weight of a loved one. We never forget the way the light streams into the room at a certain time of day, as Brian has captured so beautifully in the photo above.
I know so many people who have lost loved ones this year; there was a terrible loss in my own family as well. It doesn’t make emotional sense yet. We’ve never experienced a Thanksgiving without the sound of his voice, his humor, his love of our particular version of the feast. Something in me wonders how we’ll pull it off without him — as if Thanksgiving is simply broken forever, now that he’s gone. And in a way, for us, yes: it is broken.
But this is what we do: we do it again. We prepare the feast, we unpack the fine dishes, and we keep on, the best way we know how.
It’d be easy — and a little escapist — to tell each other to just focus on the blessings and the sweetness, but we all know it’s more complicated than that. We make space for the dotted outlines of the ones we’ve lost; we’re happy and angry and joyful and hollow, in varying measure. Year after year, over the finely laid table and the dishes we prepare the same way every time, we watch the children get bigger, and we watch each other’s hair go greyer. Our numbers grow smaller. We keep on.
The ritual is not so much about the details, in the big picture; it’s about the ideals. But really, the details are everything. Through our tactile memories we experience the intimacy of our fallen loves again, and we’re grateful. We’re shattered, and we’re bewildered, but there is still such dizzying abundance. Through the ritual we find in each other a busted sense of wholeness, even as we’re still falling apart.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Jenn Wilson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
