Tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of my mother's death.

[NNadir]

It was on a Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, as it is in 2025. I think my father had a hamburger for Thanksgiving; I may have had a peanut and jelly sandwich. I spent the day before arranging the funeral.

For all 50 years, any time I want, and often when I don't want, I can be in that hospital room, watching her gasp for air, paralyzed, turning blue, hoping it would just end. Eventually it did. I didn't even have the strength to cry.

As I had spent months watching her die, pretty much full time; I was deformed for sometime thereafter by the whole thing.

That's what I'm thankful for, on Thanksgiving. I survived. My father survived.

No, it's better than that, far better.

It turns out that I didn't merely survive:

I was reformed almost exactly 10 years later, when I married my wife in a tacky chapel in Lake Tahoe during a blizzard with a drunk "preacher" (or whatever), my bride wearing a brace on her leg from a skiing accident, holding plastic flowers because there was no way for real flowers to get in, before a subdued Thanksgiving/wedding dinner, since many restaurants were closed for the storm.

Almost unexpectedly, there was this incredible joy, almost exactly ten years later: Entering that tacky wedding chapel with that very beautiful young woman with a great sense of humor, a fine mind, all that emotional generosity, all that kindness and tolerance, someone with whom I could and did grow old, sharing everything, the woman who'd be the mother of my sons, the real author of my real life, the life that matters.

I'm a lucky guy.