Gratitude and Thanksgiving

For Victoria

Love After Love, Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Perhaps this week you’ll sit down to feast with family and friends on a meal, abundant. Perhaps you will reflect and give thanks for much of what you’re grateful for. Before you do so, perhaps you feast on a celebration of your own beautiful self.

I am trying to heed this invitation myself and am reflecting on the preciousness of life. This week, a beloved friend died after walking a 2 1/2 year journey with metastatic colon cancer. Her name was Victoria, and if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I believe everyone’s story deserves to be told. Vic worked her whole life for an organization called the Children’s Home Society and their Safe Haven Children’s Advocacy House. She placed foster children in loving homes, assisted with adoptions, and brought children from unsafe situations into a place where they could begin to get the care they so deserved. When she spoke of the situations from which she’d remove children—which wasn’t often—my own heart and mind couldn’t really comprehend the immense pain she held space for through the whole of her professional life. Yet, never, not once, did Vic not affirm the preciousness of life. She held above all else, the belief that every single child, every person, deserved to be held in the light of love.

And so, in honor of her legacy of love and of care, I am thinking about wholeness, of feasting on, celebrating, and caring for my own precious life.

Join me in this feast, my friend. Try this small practice to begin:

Take a look at your own hands and remember what they can do, what they have done already today. Start small. Today my hands have washed my face and cradled my sons cheeks; have touched my husband, held the coffee mug he handed me. My hands are typing this message and, in doing so, conveying my heart to yours. Earlier this week, my hands held onto Vic’s hand, stroked her face. Later today, they will hold the hands of others. I am grateful for these hands, so now I am pausing to hold them together, to hold my own hands, a reminder that today I am alive and I can feel their warmth, their softness, admire their lines and even their arthritic pains.

Which brings me to thankfulness. Did you know that thankfulness is the expression of the gratitude we feel in our hearts? One a feeling, the other an action. This week, whatever love or conflict you feel with this holdiday of Thanksgiving, could you perhaps cultivate a sense of preparedness for it by reflecting on gratitude for your precious self, in small ways maybe first, and then to allow that gratitude, that feast of thanksgiving for yourself to become one shared with others. What are the actions that might reflect this outwardly—again, small ones perhaps to start. Hold your own hands first, my friend.

I imagine Vic’s work as an expression of thanksgiving for her own precious life, for the immense care and love she’d received throughout it. I imagine she’d likely have traded her body for one without cancer, but I know she wouldn’t have traded her life. And so she gave of it, a feast of love that honored the preciousness of each being she could touch. With her hands, with her heart.

---

Victoria’s work with the Children’s Home Society and their Safe Haven Children’s Advocacy Center is reflected in the legacy they’re creating in renaming the Safe Haven to Victoria’s House. If you feel called to support this important place and their work, you can do so here: Children's Home Society of WV

If you wish to read more about Victoria, or to see the current efforts of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deparement in her honor, visit my Facebook page here: Christa on Facebook