The table with room for an endless number of chairs

“Buckle up for the toast of thankfulness,” I told my daughter Jenny as we started setting the table on Thanksgiving Day. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

She laughed, but she also gave a sad nod, because she remembered.

This year’s Thanksgiving was the first we have celebrated around my table since 2010, and as I pulled the wooden dining room table into the sun-room I felt my heart clutch a bit. And when I pulled Gail’s hand-made wooden table out of storage and joined it with the dining room table, my eyes welled with the first tears.

The dining room table could sit eight, but as our family grew, Gail knew it wouldn’t be enough. She wanted to find a matching table we could place at the end of it, but she wasn’t happy with anything that didn’t match in height, width, or construction style.

And so, Gail being Gail, she built one with her bare hands, with help from the Woodchucks Club.

We didn’t have room for it in the house from day to day, so we kept it in storage until Thanksgiving or Christmas rolled around, when we would set it up at the end of the dining room table. And then we had room for everyone.

Our last holiday celebration at those tables was eight years ago, on Thanksgiving, 2010. That was the year my mother died in late February. Less than four months later, Gail suffered a debilitating stroke in June, and by late November it was becoming clear that she would never again regain her ability to speak or walk.

And as I hoisted my glass on Thanksgiving that year and offered my traditional toast to all we still had to be thankful for, my voice caught in my throat, because our world had been shattered. The very thought of offering thanks seemed like a cruel joke. Tears streamed down my face, and the family waited, glasses raised, for the painful, awkward moment to pass.

That was our last family Thanksgiving celebration in Huntley. Every Thanksgiving since then, Gail and I enjoyed a quiet dinner by ourselves in Naples, Florida, in a climate much more accommodating to a wheelchair.

But when Gail died this February after a fatal stroke on Valentine’s Day, I decided that this year I would stay up north and spend Thanksgiving with what remained of my family, before subtraction could diminish it any further.

And so, as we set the table, Jenny and I shared a grim chuckle about how this year’s toast would go. And when the moment finally came and I raised my glass, all conversation stopped in an instant.

“To Gail,” I said as the tears welled in my eyes. “We should all be thankful to have had her in our lives. And nothing would make her happier than that we are all together again at these tables today.”

We all took a sip, which gave me a moment to compose myself. And then I raised my glass again with a smile on my face.

“And also a toast to Anastasia Rose, on her very first Thanksgiving,” I said, toasting our very first great-granddaughter, who was born only seven weeks earlier to our granddaughter, Johannah. “May she enjoy a hundred more.”

And so, as it turns out, we didn’t need to buckle up for my Thanksgiving toast after all. Because although there was plenty of sad subtraction to tally, there was also plenty of happy addition.

It was that way in 2010, too, because it occurred to me that during those sad subtractions we had suffered that year, there was also plenty of happy addition going on. On March 1 of that year — the day of my mother’s wake — our youngest granddaughter, Olivia, was born.

And so it goes. Tears of sadness. Tears of joy. Sometimes both at the same time.

By the time you get to be this age, you can’t help but be sad to think of all the loved ones in your life who are here no longer. And if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that subtraction wins in the end.

But it doesn’t.

If you’re doing the math right, addition wins, hands down.

Because even as old friends and family members are removed from us, our love for them continues, undimmed. Though they are gone from our sight, years later we feel our hearts swell every time we think of those who are no longer there at the Thanksgiving table with us. And we realize that they haven’t been lost at all. In our hearts they are still there, our love for them as strong as ever.

And in the meantime, others have entered our lives — new friends, new grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren newest of all. And we love them too, as much as we love those we thought we had lost.

Because your heart isn’t like a table with a limited number of seats around it. In your heart you can always push up another table, and pull up a few more chairs.

And thanks to addition, there’s always room for one more, isn’t there?

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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