Thanksgiving at the Edge of Loneliness

“All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?” — from “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles

Three of us sat at the dining room table for Thanksgiving dinner: Karin, Asher, and me. Our holiday meal was simple. We had chicken, a green bean casserole, zucchini fries, and a yogurt dessert that Karin had dreamed up. I think Asher, our nearly five-year-old grandson, actually ate mac and cheese, but at least he ate with us.

Karin and I have three children. None of them were able to be with us on Thanksgiving. Our tiny gathering in no way resembled the Norman Rockwell painting from The Saturday Evening Post in 1943. I suspect that almost no Thanksgiving dinners look like what Rockwell idealized.

Thanksgiving is a strange beast. It is officially a secular event with all the trappings of a religious holiday. It commemorates the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when Pilgrim colonists in Massachusetts shared a feast with members of the Wampanoag tribe. The original gathering has a symbolic and mythical status.

The current holiday is supposed to be an occasion for people to share food with others and express gratitude for what they have. It is also an opportunity to overeat, binge-watch TV, and then buy unnecessary consumer goods the following day. Thanksgiving is a day full of contradictions. As such, it is profoundly American.

Karin and I said a Christian prayer before we ate our meal with Asher. Then we recited a Japanese Buddhist verse that we learned from our friends, Senji and Gilberto, long ago. We chanted “Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo” three times, and then we joined hands with Asher and said, “Froelich heißt beim Abendessen: Guten Appetit!” (a German phrase that Karin learned as a child that roughly translates to “Happy means at dinner ‘have a good appetite.’”)

Years ago, before Asher entered our lives, I used to go with a small group of people from the American Legion to visit patients in the psych ward at the local VA hospital. We went there every Tuesday evening for a couple of hours to spend time with the vets. Around the holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, the ward was packed full of patients.

Holidays that emphasized being with family and friends were particularly painful for veterans who had no loved ones. The loneliness that these vets could somehow keep in check during most of the year overwhelmed them, and they wound up in a hospital ward loaded up with strangers who felt equally forgotten. I’m glad that I had the chance to spend a few hours with these men and women. We shared our common humanity for a little while, and I learned things from them.

Our culture and our technology encourage us to remain isolated. We need to be physically together at least once in a while. I give thanks for Asher and Karin for being in my life every day. I look forward to being with others too.

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Frank (Francis) Pauc is a graduate of West Point, Class of 1980. He completed the Military Intelligence Basic Course at Fort Huachuca and then went to Flight School at Fort Rucker. Frank was stationed with the 3rd Armor Division in West Germany at Fliegerhorst Airfield from December 1981 to January 1985. He flew Hueys and Black Hawks and was next assigned to the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord, CA. He got the hell out of the Army in August 1986.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.