River: First Thanksgiving without Colleen

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.