Mandi Mooney
Editor-in-Chief

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. No doubt about it.

Starting the day off with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, followed by the arrival of many, many family members, Thanksgiving dinner with all the “fixin’s,” the required afternoon nap in between football games, etc, etc. It brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.

However, there is always going to be one Thanksgiving holiday that will always and forever be etched in the minds of the Mooney family as “The Year of the Invalids.”

The story begins two years ago, during my sophomore year in college. My parents had just moved from Indiana into a church parsonage in Ohio, only two weeks previous to Thanksgiving. Needless to say, most of our personal belongings were still packaged away and shoved into a corner of the basement.

With the arrival of aunts and uncles and grandparents, my bed - which happened to simply be a mattress on the floor - was moved to the basement.

It wasn’t that bad - at first. My parents had forgotten that the previous minister’s family had owned about half a dozen cats, and the cats had lived in the basement. They apparently also forgot that I am severely allergic to cats. After spending one night in the basement, I began sniffling and sneezing. I spent the remainder of the holiday break sniffling, sneezing and running into walls because my eyes were swollen shut from the allergic reaction.

But I wasn’t the only one in the family who was struggling.

My grandfather had been released from the hospital just days earlier after suffering from congestive heart failure. He spent half the day attached to a breathing machine and the other half struggling to catch a breath. To him, walking the few steps down the hall to the kitchen was like running in the Boston Marathon.

Next in line was my grandmother. Just months before, she had fallen and broken her hip which led to hip replacement surgery. As she was still recuperating, she constantly needed a wheelchair or a walker to make her way through the house. Occasionally, she forgot about her need for assistance and, to the horror of the rest of the family as we feared she would fall, would start walking around without her walker. But she never got very far as, like my grandfather, walking the few steps down the hall to the kitchen was like running in the Boston Marathon.

As far back as I can remember, my aunt has been paralyzed on the right side because of two strokes which were the result of chain smoking for too many years to count. She spends her days in a wheelchair, immobile and mute.

Last in the line of invalids was not what you would expect. It wasn’t my uncle. It wasn’t my dad. It wasn’t my cousin. It was my aunt and uncle’s German Shepherd. Yea, that’s right. A dog. But it was a dog who was basically a child, a member of the family. The dog suffered from degenerative nerves in her hind legs which made her unable to walk. She had to be lifted from room to room...when she wasn’t in her custom-made doggy wheelchair.

When the whole family headed into the dining room for dinner, we were like the blind leading the blind. Me, the one with eyes swollen shut, was directing my aunt’s wheelchair around the table. My grandparents walked arm in arm into the room, attempting to support each other although each barely had the strength the support themselves. The dog whined from the kitchen where she laid with no hope of joining us without assistance.

To the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Five invalids, four hearing aids, three wheelchairs, two swollen eyes and a dog that couldn't walk.”

It’s been two years since “The Year of the Invalids.” When we gather around the table for Thanksgiving dinner in a week, we will still be surrounded by wheelchairs and walkers and breathing machines. But that’s my family and I love them… wheelchairs and all.