Skipping Right Over Thanksgiving
Loren Hardin
The Ashland Beacon
Ronnie is forty-nine years old and enrolled in hospice services with end-stage cirrhosis of the liver. Ronnie spends most of his time in his “man cave” behind the main house. His man cave is a renovated shed with “The Bare Necessities” (The Jungle Book), which doesn’t include a bathroom. Ronnie stated, “People come in here and tell me they don’t see how I live like this, but I tell them, I have everything I need.”
I must admit that sometimes I’m confounded by Ronnie and Doris’ contentment. Their home is modestly constructed and furnished, they heat with wood, and they barely make ends meet. Doris has been shouldering heavy caregiving responsibilities for several years. She moved from Maryland to Waverly, Ohio to care for their mother about fifteen years ago. When her mother passed away Doris stayed on to care for her elderly developmentally handicapped brother and sister, Frank and Shirley. She humbly declared, “Somebody had to”; and now Doris is “looking after Ronnie”. Yet, in the months I’ve been visiting Ronnie and Doris, as Ronnie’s hospice Social Worker, I’ve never heard them murmur or utter one complaint. Instead, they claim, “We have everything we need and we’re thankful for what we’ve got”.
I visited Ronnie and Doris before Thanksgiving and Doris suggested, “People skip right over Thanksgiving anymore. They already have Christmas decorations up in all the stores and people are already looking forward to Black Friday so they can go shopping. We used to never think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving used to be as big a deal as Christmas. My mom always taught us to be thankful. We didn’t have much, but we were thankful for what we had. It’s sad how people skip right over Thanksgiving. You should write a column about it”.
I told Doris that her comments reminded me of what another patient, George, shared with me a few years earlier. It was a beautiful summer day and George, and I were sitting in his lawn swing when George exclaimed, “Do you know what frustrates me? People don’t appreciate things anymore. People are like hogs. An acorn can fall from a tree, hit it on the head, fall to the ground, and a hog will gobble it up without ever looking up to see where it came from.”
I asked Doris where and why she thought our culture started losing the spirit of Thanksgiving. Doris thought for a couple minutes and replied, “I think it started when they started moving Christmas ahead until it’s taken over Thanksgiving. And Christmas isn’t even about Jesus anymore. It’s all about money; about how much the stores can sell. It’s about what we can buy and what we might get. You might say that we’ve lost Thanksgiving to greed. And we might even lose the real Christmas one of these days.” We talked about how greed has stolen Thanksgiving just like “The Grinch that Stole Christmas”. Ronnie commented, “And do you know what can kill you faster than a bullet? Greed! It will kick you right in the butt!”
The Apostle Paul also warns of the lethal potential of greed, “Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from their faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows,” (I Timothy 6:6-10) or in Ronnie’s words, greed will, "kick you right in the butt...kill you faster than a bullet!”
Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our spirit of thanksgiving. But how do we recover it? I asked Doris for her thoughts, and she replied, “I’m only one person but mom always told us, ‘You need to sweep up around your own back door first, before you start sweeping up around someone else’s.’ When you do that, you usually find that you don’t have any time left to deal with anybody else’s anyway. And another thing mom always told us was, ‘If the shoe fits wear it.’”
Loren Hardin was a social worker with SOMC-Hospice for twenty-nine years. He can be reached at 740.357.6091 or at lorenhardin53@gmail.com. You can order Loren's book, "Straight Paths: Insights for living from those who have finished the course" at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Comments