A well-known fact about me is that I am an advocate that everyone should have access to safe food. A little-known fact about me is that I show my love for people by giving them delicious food. I think it started with my brother Eddy, his love of food was unmistakable. His eyes would get bigger, his smile deeper, you just knew when he found something especially good.
Another well-known fact is that Eddy and I didn’t have the best of childhoods, which often meant that the holidays sometimes felt a little heavy, especially when they were the years that people wanted to dig up bones. So, I would often opt out, but I never missed remembering to bring him the first package of tamales wrapped up. Some years if they were still warm, they wouldn’t even make it into the house, and I would relish how much joy it brought him.
He’s been dead for a year now, and this year the first wrap went to my little brother Matt.
Food has always been my language of love, and that didn’t stop with my brothers. For well over a decade, my home became an open door each Thanksgiving.
Aside from the last few years I would host each thanksgiving for my friends and family that had nowhere else to be, no dinner invitations, no family, just a day of solitude. I never asked for reasons, I just asked for their favorite entrée, appetizer or side, and dessert. I would start planning and cooking a week in advance and spend countless hours cooking.
Dinner was always late, but the company was always full of laughter and radiated love. I often would not make traditional foods, my table would be filled with sushi, meatloaf, tacos, and a never-ending supply of cookies. There was the obligatory playing of Alice’s Restaurant, sometime live music, and we would gather well into the night.
Some years my home was filled beyond seating capacity, others just a few would come. On one year, one of the fullest I had made an obligatory cookie writing table. Each guest was asked to take three cookies and write down five things they were thankful for. As the pile of cookies moved from one platter to the other it became a place of connection as each guest would always find one someone else had written that they had to say out loud. As the day continued it became a place where I would see people silently reading each new addition.
This was a year that is deeply ingrained in my memory, because this was the year that David learned I could make tamales, and each year after that was all he asked for and he would eagerly help roll each Thanksgiving afterwards. After David died, I didn’t roll a tamale for years the act of standing at my counter to roll without his eager smiling face standing across from me was too difficult. It wasn’t until I found a new kitchen and new friends to help me roll that I resurrected the tamale roll.
The cookie year was also the year I had a guest ask if they could bring a friend along, and as per tradition, I didn’t ask any questions, I just said what do they like to eat? He said she would be happy with whatever we had, then about an hour later in walked a very tall and very young girl. When she walked in I broke tradition, I asked one question, where is your family? When she told me they lived down the road I informed her I needed to meet her mother if I was going to have her in my home, because every parent should be given the comfort of knowing that where their child is is safe. This was the year that I met Carol. Seventeen Thanksgivings later, Carol passed.
Carol was fueled by coffee, nicotine, and the sharpest wit I had ever encountered. For such a small stature woman, she filled a room. She radiated love and always had a story she would share for any experience you could be facing. I could never guess the total hours that Carol and I would sit and talk about anything and everything, she became one of my closest friends, my confidant, my teacher, and always helped me find my grounding when I felt lost. In those seventeen years Carol had been with me through so many of my life’s twists and turns, always steadfast, ready to smoke and talk, or simply sit with me in my sorrows.
Carol was with me through the pregnancy of my daughter after her father left, always my cheerleader helping me find reasons to laugh, find joy, and keep going. Her and her family helped me care for her when I went back to work and each day, I picked her up I always knew that she was loved and doted on the entire time I was gone.
She cheered me on to find a new job, and with her encouragement I found a job that has brought me immense satisfaction and growth over the last 12 years. The transition to that job as a single mother with minimal income at one point had me facing my power being shut off, and without hesitation Carol paid the bill so that my children could be warm, no questions asked just love.
Carol was with me through the loss of my niece, I remember her driving her van over on the strawberry full moon with strawberry shortcake, a pack of cigarettes and her stoic grace ready to accompany through my grief. She cried with me, she laughed with me, and we sat outside in my yard together in one of my heaviest moments. Carol was always there through the hard times to sit with you no judgements, just love.
When I had one of the most traumatic experiences in my life it was Eddy and Carol who I turned to. I leaned on my brother’s logic dappled with sarcasm, and Carol’s tremendously astounding ability to know exactly what to say to help me work through it all. Without both of them and many others I don’t think I would have ever gotten off my porch to face the world again. Carol never questioned my grief; she simply sat with me in her stoic grace and felt my pain alongside me.
The irony of Carol passing on Thanksgiving might make one think that the holiday is forever stained in grief. I would be lying if I said that the pain of losing someone doesn’t often bubble back to the surface as special days or anniversaries approach, but Carol loved the holiday for the time spent with friends and family, so I steer my thoughts towards how incredibly grateful I am for having the fortune of knowing her.
I am thankful for all the late-night conversations, the hopes and dreams shared, the laughter and tears as we both braved what life threw at us. I am thankful that I was able to in turn sit with her through some of the hardest things she faced and show her the same love that she had always freely given me. And above anything else, I am thankful that she existed.
I may not know many of her friends and family, and I may not have always had the best relationship with those that I did, but I always knew that she loved them with the same fierceness that she loved me, because that’s just the heart that she had. I know she graced every one of them with her wisdom, her wit, and her adoration for simply being alive.
She is the reason I remember to “Take a picture! Take a picture!” She is often the voice that I hear when I feel like giving up. She has and always will be one of the best damn people that I have ever had the blessing of knowing. I know without a doubt that each and every person she encountered felt that they were genuinely seen without judgement in her presence. I also guarantee she has redirected many a soul with a candor that got to the point but was filled with grace few have the skill to accomplish.
I have spent most of my time in silence since learning of her passing. Most of that time has been spent in silent reflection and sudden bursts of extreme grief in knowing that she is gone. Yet I keep going back to what she would often quote after the passing of another equally amazing human being, her husband Bob. The quote is from Jamie Anderson: “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
I know I’m not the only one carrying this wild, unfinished love that still spills over for her. But I also know Carol would never want us to linger in sorrow too long. She would want us to laugh when the tears allow it, to hold a quiet, steady space for those who can’t yet find their way back to joy, and above all “take a picture!”
Because life slips by faster than we ever expect, and the moments we capture become proof of why connection is worth everything.
I am endlessly grateful to have known a soul as luminous as hers. And somehow, it feels achingly right that she left us on the very holiday that first brought us together. A Thanksgiving for misfits, where tamales and cookies and unexpected warmth stitched our stories into one another.
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