Giving Thanks for Tomorrow

Thanksgiving dinner was turkey and stuffing and cranberries and a vegan loaf. There were pies and wine and cousins, aunts, uncles, three generations. One of our family members has been diagnosed with cancer- a cancer known for its rapid urging toward death- so Thanksgiving was not as joyous as it can be, nor as boisterous, nor was the majority of the family together, with illness and weariness and grief now more interactive guests at our festive tables. Thanksgiving seemed a blip, a beat, a phrase in the slowly dictated paragraph of a family member's finite and proclaimed journey toward the threshold between earthly existence and that which lies beyond. There are different ideas about this "beyond." The research with which I occupy much of my otherwise unoccupied time tells of a continual journey from life to life with a persistent kernel of selfhood determined to grow and learn at any cost in future lives. My imaginations and ponderings often dwell in the space between death and a new birth where beings interact, where people choose the lessons they will learn and suffer the pains of those they have wronged. For so long have I worked with these ideas and experienced palpable confirmations of them that, in a time like this, the line between this world of the flesh and that of the spirit fold into one another filled with beauty, sound, color, weaving dynamic forces. I know how hard it is to lose someone you love- how difficult it is to find them across the threshold, the abandonment, anger perhaps. And I also know they are present, confronting their fears and longing for you to still know them and longing to help if only we ask. There is a comfort in that knowing. It doesn't cure the sadness- nor should it- but it provides an anchor and an imagination of possibility. Tomorrow will come and the sun will rise as the train blows its whistle, beckoning from a place far from lonely holding all you ever imagined.