Cassie
I already knew what Thanksgiving without your person felt like.
The year before, my first Thanksgiving without Cody, I sat at a table with my kids and tried to hold it together. The chair was empty. The prayers felt heavier. My boys were quiet in a way that boys shouldn’t have to be. My girls watched me for cues on whether it was okay to smile.
That Thanksgiving nearly broke me. The silence where his voice used to be was louder than anything in the room.
So when our second Thanksgiving without Cody rolled around, this time with Nick as my husband of two months, I didn’t know what to expect. Part of me was terrified it would feel wrong. Like I was replacing something sacred. Like sitting at a full table again somehow dishonored the one that used to be.
But God had already been working on my heart. He hadn’t asked me to forget Cody. He’d asked me to trust Him. And trusting Him led me to Nick.
We celebrated our first Thanksgiving at my family’s house. My two sisters and their husbands. My parents. The four cousins running around with our six kids. It was loud and full and chaotic in the best way. Nick was the new face in the room, but my family wrapped around him because they could see what God was doing. The table that had felt so empty the year before was overflowing.
For the first time in over a year, I looked around a holiday table and exhaled.
Nick
I was dreading it.
Thanksgiving was Anna’s holiday. She had the recipes. She had the traditions. She had the way she set the table and the way she made our girls feel like the whole world was right there in our kitchen.
This was my first Thanksgiving without her. I had been bracing for it, the moment when I’d have to walk through a major holiday carrying that weight, trying to make it feel normal for my daughters when nothing about it was normal.
Cassie’s family Thanksgiving was beautiful. Being welcomed into her family, watching our kids pile together with the cousins, seeing Cassie’s parents and sisters open their arms to me and my girls. That alone was more than I expected.
But then came the second Thanksgiving. At my house. The house where Anna and I had built our life together.
After Cassie and I got married, I moved out and my parents moved in. So when we pulled up to celebrate Thanksgiving with my side of the family, I was walking back into the house where Anna’s presence still lived in every room. The kitchen where she cooked. The hallway where the girls’ heights were marked on the wall. The table where our family of four used to sit.
And now I was walking through that front door with Cassie. With six kids. With a life that looked completely different from the one that used to fill those walls.
It hit me hard. Not in a bad way. In the way that only God can do, where grief and gratitude exist in the same breath. I felt Anna’s absence and God’s presence at the same time. The house was different now. The family around the table was different. But it was full. And it was whole.
Nick & Cassie
Before we ate at Nick’s family Thanksgiving, we gathered in a circle to pray. All of us. Six kids. Nick’s brother and his wife and their two kids, who were now cousins to our crew. Nick’s parents, who had watched their son bury his wife and were now living in the house where she once stood in the kitchen on this same holiday. Cassie standing where Anna used to stand. Hands held.
Two months married. Two families that had been shattered by cancer. And somewhere in the middle of that prayer, Nick broke down.
Not from sadness. From the weight of gratitude that God had carried us, both of us, separately, through the darkest seasons of our lives, and set us down here. Together. In a house that used to hold one family and now held another. Different, but whole.
That’s the word that keeps coming back to us. Whole.
Not replaced. Restored.
Cody is still part of this family. Anna is still part of this family. Our kids carry them. We carry them. Those two Thanksgivings didn’t erase the ones that came before. But they proved, in a way we could feel in the room, that God wasn’t finished writing our story.
To you
People expected our first holiday together to be the disaster. The blended family horror story. Six kids fighting over seating arrangements. Awkward silence from two families crammed together too soon.
That’s not what happened.
What happened was two Thanksgivings. One with Cassie’s family, where Nick was the new face at the table and was welcomed like he’d always been there. One at the house where Nick and Anna had built their life, where every room held a memory, and where God filled the space with something new without erasing what came before.
If you’re heading into a holiday season and you’re dreading it, the empty chair, the traditions that don’t work anymore, the quiet that settles over the house when everyone else has gone home, we need you to hear this:
God is not finished with your story.
We know that because we’re living it. Two months into a marriage that neither of us planned.
Six kids who lost a parent. A prayer circle in a house full of memories where a grown man couldn’t keep it together because the goodness of God was so heavy he couldn’t speak.
That’s what restoration looks like. Not perfect. Not painless. But whole.
Hold on.
Still standing.
Nick & Cassie
Next week: “The First Vacation.” A ski trip to Colorado with Cassie’s whole family right after Christmas. Nick’s two girls had never seen a ski slope. Cassie’s four had to teach them.
And somewhere between the bunny hill and the hot chocolate, we started to feel like a real family. Not a blended one. Just a family.