This is my family’s third Thanksgiving since my Dad died, our third without him in the kitchen, without his fingerprint on nearly every dish that we eat, without him speed-talking his go-to prayer that none of us could ever fully decipher. We are without him yet we do our best as a family to not turn our backs on the holidays all together.

Last year, my Mom and I mustered the holiday strength to share Christmas with my great-aunt who, mindful of our grief, extended a beautifully sensitive invitation to us and generously prepared a modern Victorian Christmas for our little gathering that required zero contribution on our part. Indeed, it was a lovely celebration except for the fact that when we returned to our separate cars that night, my mother and I both burst into tears, exhausted by the effort of tamping down our grief under the twinkle of Christmas lights.

To be honest then, the decision to give up a family Thanksgiving this year was not a difficult one for me. Weary from quarantine living and election anxiety, I had not approached Thanksgiving with much holiday cheer to begin with. The fact that this was a shared reality among so many of my friends and family was a reprieve to my tired heart as no one appeared to be mustering false cheer for anyone else either. Of course, I knew I would miss being with my mom and it absolutely pained me to know that she was going to spend the first Thanksgiving alone in her entire life. But when weighed against the risk of COVID, surging again at a harrowing rate, she chose to take the path of short-term sacrifice for the hope of something better long-term and my brother and I were in agreement with her in this. I would give up every holiday for the rest of my life if I could keep my family healthy and whole, if I could keep another family healthy and whole.

The plan for the day got stripped down. Instead of sharing a big meal with my brother and his husband in San Francisco, I made pumpkin cheesecake doughnuts that morning and delivered a few for a socially distanced breakfast visit. We FaceTimed my Mom and spent a lot of time laughing together on the call, a kind of laughter that we did not have in us this time last year.

I got home to Oakland in time to prepare my part of a low-key Thanksgiving meal with my next-door neighbor, Nina. Nina is one of my best friends in the world and gratefully she has been my pod-adjacent person for most of the pandemic. Living by myself has been made a world easier by having a friend I live next to. We have been coping by going on long walks together, making masked trips in the car to get frozen yogurt, and watching movies in the backyard with an outdoor movie projector. With her likewise observing quarantine wisdom for the holidays, we decided that we would mostly eat pie and the smoked meat that had been a gift from her parents with the addition of a few simple fixings. She played with the idea of bringing popcorn and jelly beans to the meal in homage to Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving. Instead, we opted to simply watch the cartoon while we ate.

After dinner, we went on a nearly five mile walk, ascending the hill to the Latter-day Saints Temple that overlooks nearly all of Oakland and the broader San Francisco Bay, and watched a fall-themed sunset across the horizon. When we returned home, we dug into the blueberry and apple pies we had bought the afternoon before when we made a two hour pilgrimage to a small Italian shop in the San Joaquin Valley to buy their marvelous pies. We had reserved them weeks ago when we believed we would still be with family for Thanksgiving and I was excited to share with them what I thought might be the best blueberry pie I had ever tasted. This meant we had a lot of pie leftover. Initially, at least. After our deep dive into our Thanksgiving pies, Nina and I walked another three miles through the streets of our neighborhood, getting glimpses through brightly lit, large picture windows of other people’s scaled down Thanksgiving dinners.

There was an ease to the day that surprised me. The next evening, during another long walk with Nina, I mentioned to her that it had been one of my favorite Thanksgivings in recent memory. There was no friction to it, all expectations gone. It was like a box of Thanksgiving decorations had been dropped from a high building, strewing broken bits and pieces of holiday traditions everywhere, so that the best we could do was to pick up whatever we could find and make a celebration out of the leftover fragments. Paradoxically then, my grief was not aggravated by the pressure to find joy. Rather, a quiet joy found space to show up on its own, like a wild animal that had the silence and safety to step into an open field.

In this year of collective grief, when over 260,000 families and extended communities are raw with mourning, it feels trivial to me to share about my own personal grief about my Dad, now approaching its third year. At the same time, I am aware that how hold our personal losses shapes how we can hold the grief of others. We are a country deep in grief. If there is anything we can give each other for the holidays this year, may it be the ability to hold space for the grief that is all around us, named and unnamed. May we relinquish manufactured cheer for the possibility of joy to quietly find its way into the clearing left behind by grief when it has found the space it needs to move. The joy may not come this year or next. It will come when it is ready.