Grateful: for our family's thriving self-image

Thank God the names are on these place cards. How else would we know who they belong to?

You won't find mine here. My hands were too greasy from wrestling my mother for the turkey wing. Rest assured, my turkey was totally descked out with a sparkly waddle, huge silver earrings and long lashes. My boy knows me. Too well.

My mom. Also fancy.

My brother. He's an engineer, so that's probably one of those wacky calculators with a hundred buttons those nerds use.

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Grateful: for a nephew who knows my name

How do we know that my nephew J belongs in our family? Because he thinks he is the funniest person in the room. And he is probably right.

He's not yet two and is all full belly and slim hips, a fire plug of a boy who looks startlingly like my brother. His hair has come in, fair and feathery curls, and he has decided Lil E's name is Seesee (or CeCe? J's not so hot at writing these things out) and that, my friends, is that. SeeSee is his name. Really, it's a pretty appropriate nickname, because everything my boy did, that littler boy noted and followed. Monkey SeeSee, other monkey do.

We couldn't get enough of this toddler and his definitive "NO!"s that family members are allowed to laugh at even if it totally ticks off the parents to hear. All Thanksgiving weekend, we mocked his adorable baby-steps gait when he ran at the park and around and around the kitchen island. We egged him on to say his favorite line.

"I'm cute."

No smile, no wince. Just a statement of fact.

It was heaven holding this boy. For the twenty-two seconds he stayed there. And it was even more divine to hear him call out insistently, "AUNT JESSIE!" I was at his beck and call.

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Fly away home

There were only a few of us at the burial. The Not Boyfriend's mother was laid to rest in southern Illinois, in a college town that's not easy to get to. And because of her faith, she was to be buried quickly. The circle of us included the rabbi, her stepsister and her husband, a financial planner she befriended but had never met in person, her brother, a local woman who knew her parents, and The Not Boyfriend and me.

Not everyone knew each other. I'd only met most of them that morning. But there we were, shoulder to shoulder around a simple pine box that seemed far too small.

The Not Boyfriend's mother journeyed into her death, and that was chronicled by the poems and prayers and songs she chose for her own funeral service. Hearing them, focusing in on each word, I felt like I got to know her better. It's strange and wonderful how that can happen after a life has ended, but I felt that way many times in the week after she passed.

I pressed my shoulder into my love's body, maybe hoping to steady him. He wasn't shaking, shed only a few tears. But he was crumbling and I wanted to catch just a few of the pieces. But falling apart is what you are supposed to do when your mother dies, and while the rabbi chanted about life being just a narrow bridge, I said my own prayer of thanks to be standing beside him.

It was a beautiful fall day. The sun was shining and the wind picked up momentum across the expanse of the cemetary. The vastness, the brown and dried grass, the landscape -- it all called up images of the southern Illinois cemetary where my own grandparents are buried, a few hours away from where we stood.  The grounds don't look anything alike, but the wind on that prairie land has its own way, both haunting and calming.

I took it in. And when I looked down, I noticed that a lady bug was making it's way, slowly and steadily, across the coffin.

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