Goosegiving

Thanksgiving With an Empty Seat

Brady was here for 17 years, 5 months and 8 days.

910 weeks.

6,370 sunrises.

And for every one of those sunrises, I will be forever thankful.

This Thanksgiving, I sat in the Smoky Mountains in a house I had chosen months ago to accommodate Brady and his extensive needs. I watched the sun rise over the ridgeline every morning. The sun would crest quickly, shining from behind the range, but then would take hours to climb fully above the mountains. Then the light would slowly pour into the house and across the large and inviting leather couch where Brady would have lounged next to me. The light took its time, stretching slowly across the room from left to right all day long. Sometimes it was blinding; too much. Sometimes it was a bit cloudy and muffled. It all felt right. Grief moves slowly too, meandering into nooks and crannies, ebbing and flowing with a mind of its own. Sometimes intense and sometimes muffled.

Lately I’ve been reading Suffering Is Never for Nothing by Elisabeth Elliot. Very early in my career, I worked on a project with the Elliot family and met her nephew, Steve. Their entire family was shaped by extraordinary loss and extraordinary faith. At that time, I was young, not yet a mother, and not very hands-on with clients thanks to my inexperience. But I knew I was in the presence of modern spiritual greats. Their family was incredible. Their story was incredible.

One afternoon, Steve and his wife, Ginny, walked up to me. Ginny asked for a hug and told me I reminded her of her daughter, Stephenie, who had died at age 20 of a sudden brain hemorrhage. She shared pieces of their story with such gentleness and sorrow; she was soft and kind. I remember nodding, listening, wanting to honor her grief; I also had no idea of the complex magnitude of her suffering as a mother. I understood and also could not possibly comprehend the weight she carried, the shape of that loss. I didn’t know what it meant to lose a child.

I know now.

Elisabeth Elliot’s missionary husband was killed in the same attack that killed her brother-in-law, Steve’s dad. They had barely started their lives together. They had a 10-month-old child. She writes about just doing the next thing in the days and weeks following his death, alone in the jungle with her baby, putting one foot in front of the other. Her in laws worried she was not grieving well, but that was not the case at all. She wanted to let the experience shape her instead of destroy her. She was devastated, but not afraid of her grief.

In her book, Elisabeth writes, “Let’s never forget that if we don’t ever want to suffer, we must be very careful never to love anything or anybody. The gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering. The two things are inseparable.”

Motherhood is one of the great gifts of my life; loving deeply has meant grieving deeply too. Even in that, I can be grateful. My extreme grief is a result of my extreme love. I can wrap my mind around that. I can find the thanks in that. Thankful for love that would run so deep it could cause grief this deep.

Thanksgiving was always Brady’s day. This makes sense if you knew him. Brady was a thankful kid, always, in all situations. Life kept taking things away from him, but we refused to let that be the end of our story and found special ways to celebrate. He was our ringleader.

But Thanksgiving is also where some of our hardest memories live. It was Thanksgiving weekend in 2015 when Brady’s earliest symptoms spiraled. We didn’t know it then, but that holiday marked a line we could never step back over. Life before. Life after. That weekend, the small glimmers of movement issues we had noticed got worse and worse. We ended up in the emergency room, where doctors exchanged quiet glances and whisked him off for test after test. Everyone was worried it was a brain tumor. After hours of waiting, they came back relieved, telling us what they didn’t see, or more specifically what they had expected to find but thankfully had not found. I remember the way the breath left my lungs in gratitude. We were so relieved! And so naive. We had no idea of the catastrophic nightmare that lay ahead for our family.

After that, the changes crept in quietly. Little by little, almost accidentally, we stopped celebrating Thanksgiving in a normal way. Traditions slipped away as our life narrowed around survival and medical crises after medical crises. By 2019, we decided to handle things differently. Brady loved Thanksgiving dinner. He proudly claimed a turkey leg every year. He loved mashed potatoes, stuffing, appetizers, all of it. But by now, he couldn’t swallow any of those foods. Turkey was too tricky. Mashed potatoes were the wrong texture. Stuffing was too fluffy. Everything he used to love became something his body simply could not manage and could result in hospitalization when he could not get the food down.

As a family, we could not sit at a table and eat all of the foods he adored while he watched. So we created a new Thanksgiving meal that year, one built around the specific textures he could safely swallow. A meal we could all eat together. He was hopeful. But within minutes, one of the foods, a carefully cooked lamb chop, which had worked 100 times before, got stuck in his esophagus. The next morning he was in the hospital under anesthesia while they once again cleared the stuck food. He was devastated. Michael still hates the dining room table that hosted this final and disastrous Thanksgiving meal.

Still smiling in the hospital, again, ready to clear an obstructed esophagus.

I didn’t fully realize how much had fallen through the cracks until this particular dinner when Eden came up to me before the lamb incident and asked, “Can we at least dress up? It’s Thanksgiving. We are supposed to dress up.” She had tears in her eyes as she asked this. The realization hit hard and fast: I was missing something important. Brady had been very, very sick, and that was real. But at the same time, I had not been keeping up well enough on Sloane and Eden’s need for normalcy and tradition. Everyone had been lounging in pajamas that morning; I had not even thought to decorate. Eden didn’t have a dress that fit. She borrowed one from Sloane’s closet, added one of my necklaces, and I did her hair carefully while she watched in the mirror. She was relieved to be celebrating properly. I quietly promised myself: next year, we will do better. And we did, despite the mounting obstacles with Brady’s health. The seeds of Goosegiving had been planted, but would take a few years to fully bloom.

A borrowed dress, mom’s necklace, and ready to celebrate.

By 2022, food was no longer part of Brady’s life at all. He could no longer move, speak, or swallow. Another loss. Another grief inside a day he once loved. So we rebuilt it completely.

We launched a full holiday reinvention and christened it Goosegiving.

We created an opening ceremony: lighting a candle, planting a Guardians of the Galaxy Groot Chia Pet, wearing tinsel Christmas tree hats and blasting one of Brady’s favorite songs. One year was Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler. One year was The Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin.

Brady chose matching shirts for the family, always pug-themed and always ridiculous: the first year, a pug tangled in Christmas lights. The next, a shirt that said Pugs Not Drugs. It made no sense. It was perfect. We each wore our shirt with new matching pajama pants.

We bought new sweaters for the dogs every Goosegiving. They were unimpressed but resplendent in their plaid Old Navy glory.

We invented The Praising of the Goose, our own backwards Festivus from Seinfeld, where instead of airing grievances we shouted rapid-fire compliments at Brady.

We made tiny clay snowmen and declared it an annual snowman building contest.

We catered a traditional meal for the girls. This avoided marathon cooking as well as the amazing scent of a Thanksgiving meal that Brady could not eat. There was no production to this, no sit down meal, and no open discussion about how it tasted. But this way, everyone still got their turkey and stuffing, and at the same time, the holiday was not remotely centered on food.

We watched the parade, football and a Christmas movie. We also put up the Christmas tree. But even that tradition had to bend when Brady lost movement. He wanted to help, but couldn’t. And decorating it in front of him felt wrong, like a reminder of something stolen. So we transitioned that tradition too. Instead of decorating it, we put up the tree with just the lights, the star, and the tree skirt. Simple. Gentle. Beautiful. A tree he wasn’t missing out on. And every single year, Max cashed in his one Bad Dog card. After nearly a decade of being a perfect service dog, his lone annual flaw remained unchanged: the second the tree went up, Max strutted over, head high, mission clear, and peed on it. Every. Single. Year. Not everyone appreciated this tradition.

Goose Giving became a small, stubborn circle of joy inside circumstances that were anything but joyful.

Last year was a very good Goosegiving. By now, everyone knew. People would ask what we were doing for Goosegiving instead of Thanksgiving and this made Brady laugh. He had picked out a funny Lord of the Pugs tee, featuring a pug Fellowship of the Ring remix. That one was his favorite; each character from the story, but in pug form. It was the shirt he was cremated in.

We made snowmen. The dogs wore their sweaters. We saw Moana 2 at the theater. Our Goosegiving agenda from 2024 is still on the sandwich board downstairs, waiting for me to chalk out the plans for the 2025 celebration that did not come.

Brady was such a wonderful person. That sounds oversimplified even as I write it, but it is the most accurate thing I can say about him. I always thought ahead to how beautiful our family would become someday. If all of my children married, I would end up with three sons and three daughters. I told Brady, even when he was little, that I just knew I would love whoever he married because if he loved her, she would be extraordinary. And I promised him I would spoil his children rotten. When he died, that future died too. The daughter-in-law I knew I would adore, the grandchildren I already loved in my heart, they evaporated in an instant. That is a hard reality to hold.

I don’t know how to do this.

Or maybe it’s more honest to say: I don’t know how to do this in a way that avoids ending up with a sad daughter asking to borrow a dress and do better on Thanksgiving because I let my own grief consume me, and forgot that joy and grief can coexist with a little creativity. I have to find the balance somewhere between to accommodate my devastation while still tending to my daughters, who I love just as much.

I am committed to intentionally choosing life around his absence; choosing joy, choosing memory, choosing love. I want my girls to feel the glow of the tree and see their stockings hanging next to Brady’s and know that we will figure this new life out together. That it is okay to be happy even as we grieve. That joy isn’t a betrayal; it is a continuation. It’s the way we carry him forward. He still exists, just not as we knew him. We will see him again.

None of this is simple. Every choice hurts and every choice seems heavy. Every choice feels like both devotion and betrayal. Doing things without him feels weird and wrong. But I know Brady was joy, and always fought so hard to keep going, to build new things, to let light in when things felt dark. So should we.

This year, I considered cancelling the trip to the Smoky Mountains, the trip we had booked for Brady, in the house chosen for his needs, along a route we planned around him. But we didn’t. We went without him, carrying the quiet and terrible truth of his absence along with us. I used the duffle bag we used to share, the same one I had packed for the hospital the morning he died. I stubbornly and impractically brought two of his three dogs. And I am glad we went. There were glimmers of goodness. Not instead of grief, but beside it.

Goosegiving was never about the pug shirts, or the contraband catered food, not the snowmen contests or the dogs in sweaters, or the movie or the opening and closing ceremony. It was our family’s fierce insistence on joy anyway. A belief that even in the hardest circumstances, something magical can still slip through. A determination to make something good out of whatever life hands us. It was about transformation, and choosing joy in impossible places.

I don’t have a tidy ending for any of this. We went on the trip we planned for Brady, slept in the room we picked for him, sat in a house that should have held one more person. And it hurt. And it was beautiful. It was both at the same time.

Reading Elisabeth Elliot this week reminded me that suffering and love are tangled together in ways I still don’t understand, but I do know I can consciously choose to accept both as part of God’s plan for Brady’s life and mine.

Goosegiving felt so heavy is because my son was so loved. Because my son IS so loved. And that is okay.

Thankful today for my 6,370 sunrises with Brady here on earth.

Bucky misses you too, Goose.