Summit Wellness: Gratitude - "A Small Ode to Bard & Ed"

By Matt Anthony - Summit FM Digital Media Specialist

 “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”

Voltaire 

We could hardly see. The snow piled up, and the roads were noticeably worse since we arrived for Mass an hour earlier. Leaving St. Peter’s, my father, though, would not be deterred.
 
He was going to check for that damned license plate number!
 
Early in our youth, my father adopted an additional Sunday morning ritual. Almost immediately after receiving Communion and waiting for the recessional hymn to end, we would practically sprint to the car so that, on the way home, my father could stop briefly at the Sohio station on 9th street. This filling station was never open on Sunday. 
 
However, it posted a printed poster with a series of license plate numbers on the glass window. Should our number be listed, we would win free gas. It was his ‘lottery day’, a chance to pull into the empty station, run over to the window, check to see if his future would be augmented in some way, and then return to the car, usually deflated, and head home, with high hopes for the next weekend.
 
On that snowy Sunday, my father, again, pulled into the Sohio. “I’ll be right back,” he announced before opening the door and releasing an Arctic blast of air into the car’s interior. Mark, my twin brother, was in the front seat, and I watched as my father sprinted to the front of the building and touched his gloved finger to the glass, moving up and down between the rows of numbers.
 
“We didn’t win,” he exclaimed on his return, turning up the heat and rolling our car back onto 9th street towards home, turning right and heading north on Shorb Avenue. 
 
Suddenly, through the blurry, wintry onslaught, a figure emerged. Plodding ever-so-slowly, this person shuffled along on the sidewalk, inching southbound on Shorb. Though draped in a parka and other winter accessories, my 8-year-old sensibilities could detect her ample, voluptuous curvature.
 
“I can’t believe she’s out walking in this weather,” I mumbled. My brother, Mark, in the front seat, turned his head back to the sidewalk, struggling to catch a glance. Shortly after, she walked up a set of steps and disappeared into the morning chill.
 
“How did you know it was a girl?” Mark asked.
 
I stole a glance at my father in the rear-view mirror, and we briefly made eye contact. My dad then looked back at the road. “Matt and I know it was a girl,” he said.
 
These tiny episodes have been invading my cerebral cortex over the past two months. I’ve been struggling to find a deeper meaning in them, while at the same time attempting to understand this phenomenon called ‘the grieving process’. But I admit to a foreign numbness, a kind of ‘grief PTSD’ that I can’t understand.
 
Losing both parents three weeks apart seems to have caused my gratitude antennae to lie dormant. But every once in a while, small episodes like the one above will materialize, like a July afternoon shower, and briefly drench me in an enormous tidal wave of thankfulness.
 
I was preparing eggs for Donna and me the other morning, and suddenly, I was transported. Mark and I had just finished our roles as altar boys for the morning’s 6:30 a.m. Mass. Long before the days of multi-car families, my mother would wake up extra early before even starting to get us ready for the day, and she would prepare breakfast, knowing that once we were driven (by her) to Mass, we would have to wait at the school for class to begin. We had one car, and my father needed it for work.
 
So that we would have breakfast, my mom would make our egg sandwiches, carefully dropping the scrambled eggs onto Wonder bread, cutting each of our sandwiches in half, and wrapping them in tin foil so that they would remain hot until we could eat them later in the morning.
 
I chuckled at this memory while making Donna our breakfast. Mark and I would trudge over to the darkened cafeteria connected to the school so that we could eat my mother’s concoction. Under one solitary row of lights sat the bus drivers, having coffee while their buses warmed up. “There’s those Sedmock boys!” they’d cackle. “Mom made ‘em those scrambled egg sandwiches again!”
 
We would stare at them and happily munch away. Didn’t everyone’s mother do this, I thought.
 
"Those whom we love and lose are
no longer where they were before.
They are now wherever we are."
- St. John Chrysostom

Yes, their gifts to us as parents are wide and plentiful. But as this grief-and-gratitude phenomenon introduces itself to my world, I feel like I’m most thankful for the seemingly insignificant acts that they bestowed on us. Like my mother splitting a grapefruit in half, taking a small knife, and separating each quadrant of fruit from its sheath so that we could easily extract the juicy fruit with our spoon, unimpeded. (not to mention the dash of sugar that she would spread across each half to temper the tartness!)
 
We’re sometimes told that we can fully experience gratitude when we finally conquer the loss. But this seems too large for my brain to handle, at least so far. I’m content with the microscopic things, being open to their memories, attempting to figure out how to share what they taught while still trying to move forward through the fog.