In two days, my wife and I will sit down for Thanksgiving Day dinner without her mother present, the first holiday when both her parents are no longer alive and available to make new memories with family.

If we live long enough, most of us will experience this same circumstance.

I can still see my mother in-law’s face — her jaws apart, her mouth wide open in the same stance when she gasped for one last breath (no, two) after her heart stopped — as her skin colour went from pinkish-white to yellow while the oxygen-processing cells in her body slowly died, her body turning cold on the hospital bed.

In the casket at the funeral home, my mother in-law’s face was fleshed out and powdered with makeup, leaving a blemish or two showing (possibly a hematoma?) to give her a natural look, albeit one from 20 or 30 years ago.

Reminds me of my friend Monica, now living in Singapore, who followed in her grandfather’s footsteps and became a mortician in Mississippi.  She embalmed her great-grandmother — as a mortician, who better do you trust to make a family member look her best at her own funeral?

Monica handled the usual variety of funeral cases — open caskets for badly-mangled automobile smashup victims (a mortician is one-part special effects artist and one-part magician), Christian services and Jewish burials — that you’d expect to find in a small southern U.S. town, and anywhere else professional funeral services are provided.

But she left the business a long time ago, at least two decades by now.

Modern technology has entered the funeral business.  Software development simplifies the memorial process for departed loved ones – posting funeral service announcements via online memorials, for instance, allowing those who cannot attend a service in person to post comments for family members and friends to read about their recently deceased, partially replacing the old method of mailing sympathy cards.

In two days, we’ll remember what we have to be thankful for:

• We have the Internet.
• We have a planet relatively free of galaxy-sized catastrophic interferences.
• We have one another.

What else do we need besides food, clothing, shelter, clean air, and protection from our worst behaviours/habits?

As a set of states of energy, “need” and “want” are terms readily understood in the here-and-now, in this moment, terms for which we can describe thankfulness and know generally what that means.

At that scale, this blog entry closes — let us put off, until later, readings of the Book of the Future which show timescales that make any language, and thus, words and sounds, indecipherable.

How would pepper spray have affected Geerat Vermeij if he had been sitting with protesters on the UC-Davis campus recently?

Supporting the right to protest and the right to preserve peace within a community is what makes any sociopolitical system flexible enough to survive turmoil and grow.  Conflict resolution is an inherent component of nature, including us.