Thanksgiving without relatives a ‘gut punch’ for families

The Thanksgiving overeating — getting as stuffed as the turkey — followed by the post-feast stupor, and the requisite tongue-biting when conversations inevitably turn political: Aaron Thompson pines for it all.

It’s been an especially difficult 2020 for the Las Vegas native, who now lives in Pasadena, California. In June, his grandmother passed.

“She broke her hip, and they say COVID basically got her in the hospital,” Thompson explains.

About a week later, his step-grandmother died from a heart attack.

Thompson was eager to return to his hometown to celebrate Thanksgiving at his father’s house, with his dad’s wife and two sisters.

“I want to be with my family,” he says, “(to) kind of bring things back to normal.”

Then a few weeks ago, he got a call from his older sister, who is a nurse in Reno.

“She’s like, ‘(COVID) case numbers are really kind of going crazy up here,’ ” Thompson recalls. “ ‘I’m not coming to Vegas this year because I work almost exclusively at the COVID unit and I don’t want to even chance getting Dad sick.’ ”

Thompson’s dad is in his mid-70s and has had a stroke, so he’s at high risk for contracting COVID-19.

To protect him, Thompson and his girlfriend decided to stay home as well.

“This is the time that I wish, with all this tragedy and loss, that I could be with my family, to give my condolences to my dad’s mom, to give condolences to my stepmother’s mom — and I can’t do that,” he says. “I can’t celebrate with them. I can’t eat with them. It’s a gut punch, man.”

Thompson is hardly alone in facing this difficult decision as Thanksgiving approaches. One thing is certain in these uncertain times: The holiday won’t look the same for many families amid the pandemic.

According to a survey from Klaviyo, an online marketing platform that works with more than 40,000 e-commerce retailers worldwide, only 22 percent of respondents will spend Thanksgiving with immediate family members, while 66 percent of respondents don’t plan to travel for the holiday.

“We’re looking at a more solitary Thanksgiving,” says Stacy DeBroff, CEO of social media consulting firm Influence Central. “People don’t feel comfortable flying or having to stay in hotels. Already, 75 percent of consumers anticipate that there will be less people at their Thanksgiving meals. It’s really making people rethink how all these celebrations take place.”

Seeking normalcy in an abnormal year

She recites the litany of losses one by one.

“My son’s a senior this year,” Danielle Yvonne Wood begins. “There’s no yearbook, no dances, no sports teams, no band. They took prom last year.

“If you can give them a normal Christmas and a normal Thanksgiving,” she continues, “and try to at least make their home life normal, it doesn’t impact as badly.”

Wood is determined to maintain family Thanksgiving traditions this year. That means traveling to Reno, where one of her two daughters attends the University of Nevada, Reno, and spending time with a number of relatives who live in the city.

“My grandmother is there. My parents are there,” Wood says. “So we’ll go up there and have Thanksgiving with my elderly uncle and my aunt and uncle across the street. Basically, we’re keeping it the way we’ve always done it, because what would be the point not to? My grandmother has Alzheimer’s. We’re losing time with her.”

Wood certainly isn’t flippant about the risks: She’s an environmental consultant and her husband runs his own general contractor’s company, and both have seen COVID-19 show up at the job site. Moreover, one of her daughters contracted the virus and fell ill.

Nevertheless, in her eyes, gathering with loved ones doesn’t pose any more risk than some other routine activities.

“We’re not going to get it any more or less at this stage of the game than we would if we just stayed in our home and went to the grocery store,” she contends. “There are more germs in the grocery store than there are in your home, and yet we’re not worried about going to the grocery store, we’re worried about being around our own family? That makes zero sense.”

Plenty of fellow Las Vegans share Wood’s views on maintaining normalcy for the holidays.

“As for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it will be celebrated the same way that we have celebrated it forever: big family get-together,” Amy McKay says. “Nothing is changing in my household.”

Las Vegan Michelle Stratton wants to ensure that she spends as much time with her family as she can, so she plans to keep her Thanksgiving festivities intact.

“We have an 85-year-old great uncle on hospice,” Stratton says. “This might be his last one — if he makes it — so we are doing it all.”

Others are making tweaks in attendance.

“My parents are coming to visit — they haven’t seen my kids in a year,” Ruth Amaya Sanchez says. “(It’s) just them and us — no one else ’cause they are older and high risk.”

For Wood, it’s all about countering a new reality with old traditions.

“The coronavirus isn’t going anywhere,” she says. “So at some point, we’re going to just have to live with it. That’s kind of what we’re doing.

“Life goes on,” she continues. “It’s going to have to go on with COVID, too.”

A community hit hard

For senior citizens weathering the pandemic, life has been like living beneath a yellow traffic light for months now.

As such, Barbara Paulsen has been proceeding with caution.

“My husband and I, we’re both over 70, so we have been watching very carefully where we go,” explains the Las Vegan, who is a leader with community organization Nevadans for the Common Good. “We have still been seeing family, but if they were out somewhere where there were a fair number of people or if they know somebody who was close to somebody who tested positive, then we’ll go two or three weeks before we see even our own family members.”

Paulsen normally hosts Thanksgiving dinner at her house. This year, though, it will be closer to a game-time decision.

“I’m hoping that maybe we will still have Thanksgiving the way we always do,” she says, “but we may not make that decision until we’re a week out from Thanksgiving just in case things change.”

For Trudy Knowlden, 67, Thanksgiving has been upended.

“Normally I shop one day and I spend two or three days cooking and preparing, and all that is now gone away,” says Knowlden, a registered nurse, noting that she often invites about two dozen relatives to her home to celebrate the holiday. “It’s horrible. It’s affected all of the family, how often we see each other, what we do, what we don’t do.”

Of all the groups negatively affected by the pandemic, high-risk seniors remain chief among them. It’s a bitter paradox: After months of isolating at home for health concerns, those who arguably could benefit the most from family time are the same ones most likely to be excluded.

This means some painful choices.

“There are still elderly relatives who are at risk,” says Donna Wilburn, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Red Rock Counseling. “Of course we want them to be around, but we’re also afraid that they may get ill and we may lose them.”

“They’re lonely,” says Carol Chapman, president of the Foundation Assisting Seniors. “The people I talk with, they’re stuck at home. They need the socialization, and it’s really sad that they won’t be able to have Thanksgiving dinner the way they normally do.”

Marcia Blake, executive director of Helping Hands of Vegas Valley, a nonprofit that aids senior citizens, says that her organization already has seen a difference in the elderly community it serves.

“In speaking with my case managers, they are noticing that our clients are a little more sad,” she says. “They definitely feel more cut off from the world than ever before. We continue to reassure them that we’re still here and encourage them to reach out to their loved ones or friends, because we don’t want them to feel like they’re alone in the world.”

Making matters even more challenging for seniors of limited means, some charity programs that benefit them have faced cutbacks due to decreased contributions.

For instance, HopeLink of Southern Nevada’s annual “Thanksgiving for Seniors” program, which has provided 1,000 Thanksgiving dinners to senior citizens for the past two decades, will not proceed this year, mainly because of a lack of resources.

“Our whole agency does a lot of work with seniors, and it just breaks our heart to have this happen,” says Don Miller, communication manager for HopeLink of Southern Nevada. “There’s really nothing we can do about it. There will be a lot of seniors who go completely without.”

Still, there are measures being taken to attempt to assuage feelings of loneliness that might confront senior citizens this time of year.

“One thing we’ve done with our volunteers to combat that is ask them to do projects at home, where they could create greeting cards and things for homebound seniors so they get a little pick-me-up,” says Leslie Carmine, media and community relations director of Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada. “It helps to warm the heart and makes them feel cared about.”

Moving forward

“We won’t all have the connections this year that really help us to feel a part of a family,” Donna Wilburn says. “That grief that people really don’t want to acknowledge is going to be a part of the holidays, and if you try to just deny it, it grows and impacts you even more.

“You don’t have to cry all day, but just give yourself permission to feel kind of sad,” she advises. “I’d rather you feel it than try to distract yourself from feeling it. I think that’s going to be the most challenging aspect of the holidays.”

Aaron Thompson understands this well and believes that sometimes you have to make a small sacrifice in the name of the big picture.

For him, the key is looking forward.

“I’m a realist,” he says. “I understand that things are rough and bad, and it’s been a very difficult year, but I’m just trying to look at the positive, ‘Hey, maybe I can’t see my family this year, but by making these actions, I can see them next year or the year after.’

“What’s sacrificing one year if it means I can get 10 more with my dad?” he continues. “That makes me feel better about the decisions that I have to make. I can live with that.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter and @jbracelin76 on Instagram