36 NOVEMBER 2019
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the reality of the person you’ve become since the
last gathering. But when the assembled are willing
to shift just an inch or two to make room for you, it
can feel like the very definition of gratitude.
Every Thanksgiving, I find myself thinking about
what can stay, be shed, or shift from the years before,
and what that might mean for the people at the table.
What might happen, I wondered, if we looked at the
holiday as an opportunity to mark who we’ve become—or who
we are becoming?
MY LONGTIME FRIEND Stephanie Burt, a poet, Harvard English
professor, and transgender writer, told me about the first
Thanksgiving after she transitioned. Each year, Stephanie’s
extended Ashkenazi Jewish family flocks together from around
the country for a massive, multigenerational feast around a table
laden with turkey, gravy, brisket, kasha, three kinds of cranberry
sauce, and an elaborate stuffing that her spouse, Jessie, has
learned to master over the two decades they’ve been together.
Stephanie, to her consternation, finds herself having to play
catch-up in the kitchen.
Though she’d been presenting as nonbinary in private and
in some social situations for some time, Stephanie publicly
announced in 2017 that she would be going through a medi-
cal and social transition. In 2018, for the first time, she was
welcomed into the kitchen to help make Thanksgiving dinner.
Her previous exclusion from the kitchen wasn’t personal by
any means, just baked in and handed down throughout the
years: The women do all the food preparation, save for cutting
the meat—a man’s task in their familial sphere.
“I was finally being treated as a woman by the women in my
family,” Stephanie says. “It felt great. It felt like I was where I was
supposed to be.” There was a hitch, though—she hadn’t been
taught to do many of the culinary tasks that many of the other
women took for granted, and she kept having to ask. It was a
mixed blessing of that acceptance chafing against the “learned
helplessness” ladled onto the men of her family, Stephanie says.
“But at least I’m on the correct side of the inherited, gendered,
invisible barriers. I felt like I belong in this space.”
It was a learning experience for her and her family, but families
by nature are in flux. People marry, divorce, are born, and die.
And sometimes, they are alive and loving but cruelly out of reach.
Writer Ashley C. Ford shared with me the first Thanksgiving she
spent with her father—when she was almost 30 years old.
Ashley’s father was incarcerated on a sexual assault charge
when she was about six months old, and for the next three
decades, his absence became an almost corporeal thing for her,
fueled by four in-person visits over the years, a hand-drawn
card he sent for every birthday, and phone calls when he’d
worked enough hours in the prison to be able to afford the
extraordinarily high per-minute charges, plus all of the fees
heaped on top. He was never able
to call on a holiday.
The year she turned 30, Ashley
got to share a Thanksgiving with
her father for the first time, at her
aunt Trina’s home. Due to con-
ditions of her father’s parole, he
wasn’t allowed to step indoors, but
Ashley knew what to do. While he reunited with family out in the
driveway, she ran to the kitchen and fixed her father a plate: ribs,
ham, turkey, dressing, the works. “I wanted to get him everything
that I knew was made the way Grandma would have made it. I
knew that no one would deviate from Grandma’s recipes.”
Her father instantly recognized it for the gift it was. Ashley’s
grandmother was his ex-wife’s mother, but she had always
treated him like her own flesh and blood. She’d died two years
before he was released from prison.
Ashley, who is writing a book about her relationship with her
father, knows that the two of them will never get those years
back. “When somebody is incarcerated, we don’t just protect
society from them, we strip society from them,” she says. “And
you really break down a family when one person is incarcerated.
What it does is at this point irreparable.”
This Thanksgiving plate, served in a lesser exile, tasted of a
past that could not be repeated but could be honored, and it was
also a reminder of how much open sky there was ahead. Ashley
and her dad can make plans. They call each other whenever
they want to, just because.
FOR THOSE WHO have suffered a more permanent loss, every
Thanksgiving can become a reminder of how things used to
be, leaving a small, invisible wound. But my former colleague,
Katie Hawkins-Gaar, shared how the first Thanksgiving without
her husband, Jamie, was also a moment of healing.
In February 2017, Jamie was running a half marathon when
he collapsed. He died at the age of 32 from a rare heart condition
that was undiagnosed at the time. The couple had been close
friends in college, married at 23, and had started the paper-
work to adopt their first child. They’d moved from Atlanta to
St. Petersburg, Florida, so Katie, a journalist, could work at the
Poynter Institute. They’d made a home, gotten a dog named
Henry, built a community, dreamed of a future together. A land
mine lurked in the months, weeks, minutes ahead.
“The first Monday in August without Jamie—you can turn
every little thing into a first,” says Katie. She told herself she
was doing OK, and to prove it, she decided to host Thanksgiving
for friends as she and Jamie had for the past few years. “I prob-
ably said ‘we,’ now that I think about it,” she says. “You just
get in that habit.”
Her friends knew better than to argue and agreed to be
there for whatever she needed, even though it was obvious to
Thanksgiving
nostalgia doesn’t
make room for who’s
at the table. But what
if we used the holiday
to mark who we’ve
become—or who
we’re becoming?
