Thanksgiving looks different this year. Honestly, everything looks different this year.
Nearly a year has passed since Joshua went ahead of us, and I am learning, day by day, that grief is its own season, its own weather system. No one teaches you how to live inside a storm like this. No one prepares you for how lonely life becomes when the world keeps turning, but your heart remains somewhere between what was and what will never be again.
This year, grief has felt like winter settling in early.
Not the picturesque kind, the quiet, still beauty of snow dusting the fields, but the bare-tree winter, where branches stretch up like empty hands, and the landscape feels stripped and exposed. When the leaves fall, the world suddenly looks so open that it almost feels vulnerable. You start to see how much was hidden before. You see everything too clearly.
Grief does that too. It strips away things you thought would be steady.
It reveals who stays, and who quietly fades to the edges of your life because they don’t know what to say or how to navigate the cold with you. And that part hurts in a way I didn’t expect.
The Loneliness of Bare Branches
There’s a particular loneliness that has come in this first year after losing my child. It’s a hollowed-out kind of quiet. The kind where you can be surrounded by people yet feel like you’re standing alone in a field in late November, watching the last of the leaves blow away.
I’ve withdrawn at times…gone quiet, disappeared into myself, lost the ability to know what to ask for or when to reach out. And in those moments, some people stepped back. Not out of cruelty, but uncertainty. They don’t know how to handle my grief any better than I do. But that doesn’t make it less lonely.
But Some Trees Stay Green
And yet…even in winter, there are always evergreens.
Those faithful few. The ones who didn’t give up on me even when I went still and silent and have been the steady pines in this season. They’ve checked in, even when I didn’t respond right away. They’ve shown up without needing instructions. They’ve provided warmth without requiring me to first explain the cold.
They’ve been the ones who understand that grief isn’t linear. That it isn’t tidy. That it isn’t over just because the calendar flips forward. They’ve stood beside me even when the landscape of my life looked unfamiliar, stripped bare of the color it once had.
Today, on Thanksgiving, I am especially grateful for them.
Gratitude in a Season of Loss
I’m grateful for my children. All of them. The ones I get to hold today, and the ones who have gone ahead. I’m grateful for the privilege of being their mother, even when that role is now lived out in two worlds at once. And I’m grateful for the strength that comes, somehow, from showing up in the midst of a grief that still feels impossibly heavy.
But I won’t pretend today is easy. I am sad. I am tired. I am carrying a version of loneliness that only those who have walked this road understand.
Still, even in this winter season, there are evergreen branches. People who stay green when everything else has turned bare. And today, on a holiday built around gratitude, I hold tightly to that.
I am thankful for the ones who stayed and who continue to stay steady and rooted, no matter how cold the wind gets.
Winter Doesn’t Last Forever
I know seasons change. I know that even the most barren branches eventually feel the first hints of spring. I’m not there yet, and that’s okay. Winter has its purpose too. It slows you down. It forces you inward. It shows you what is essential. It reveals who is essential.
So this Thanksgiving, I’m honoring both truths: The ache of the season I’m in and the deep, quiet gratitude for the evergreens, the ones who stand tall beside me while I weather it.
And maybe that’s enough for today.
