Thanksgiving.

Jay Grelen's article for the Thanksgiving Day paper...It's worth reading.

She said this after my wreck and before we knew how her grandfather’s
surgery would turn out.
She said it, our 14-year-old, in early autumn, to her mother, in words
something like this: We’ve become one of those families these things happen to.
And Rebekah has earned the right to make the observation, since some of what
has happened to us happened to her.
It’s been one of those years where trouble has come not in threes but
seemingly in multiples of three, by which I mean few of the happenings have been
simple or resolved with a round of antibiotics.
Yet we’re still standing, our family, standing with that mystical
providential contentment that defies human comprehension. By which I mean that
in spite of all that has happened, and although we don’t yet know how some of
this will play out, we are inexplicably at peace.
Our year began with the news that the tiny chocolate-drip of a mole on my
left forearm was malignant melanoma.
After some minor carving and some high-tech scans of my lungs and brain
(they confirmed I have one), I’m fine.
In late April, Rebekah left for a doctor’s appointment on a Friday
afternoon, went straight from there to Children’s Hospital, and didn’t come home
until three weeks and six units of blood later. Crohn’s Disease. (She’s better
but it’s far from over.)
Then there was that day in September when a driver blew through a red-light
near downtown and knocked my Jeep off the street. I walked away from it.
That is the day Rebekah said what she said about our family.
A week later, her Papaw, part mule, sailed through abdominal surgery. Six
weeks later, though, he hasn’t returned to us. The medical assault shell shocked
him, and he’s not always sure where he is, and so the rest of us wonder where we
are.
If we were a mind to, we could count back several years and really make
Rebekah’s case: My mother’s breast cancer (she’s fine); my layoff; my wife’s
brother lying comatose 18 months after a wreck and dying at Thanksgiving; my
wife’s sister’s breast cancer and the hopeless prognosis (she’s fine).
So, yeah, we are one of those families. But which family isn’t? Crisis comes
at different rates but eventually, all families suffer a share of heartbreak.
Why should Providence spare our family. None of us, they say, gets out of this
world alive. Or, for that matter, unscathed.
We’re not of a mind to tally our hard times in order to cry unfair. We know
that many have suffered worse.
We recall events so that we can marvel at the mercy and grace that have
steered us through. We’ve cried – no, honestly, wept – over much of this,
walked in darkness beyond despair, but always mysteriously buoyed by an
undercurrent of hope.
On the day Rebekah left for her doctor’s appointment, the roses on her
miniature bush were blooming. When we brought her home at midnight three weeks
to the Friday later, the roses had faded and fallen.
But just a couple weeks ago, well into autumn and into our year of
happenings, and well after I’d expect this to happen, Rebekah’s roses petaled
out afresh, a splattering of bright pink on the brittle skittering landscape of
fall.