I remember my boyhood pastor saying once that Christmas always had a tinge of sadness since it was the time his father died. Little did I realize for that Donna and me, the same kind of memories would materialize.

It was Thanksgiving 1992, and we sat at the table with my in-laws in Birmingham.

My father-in-law, Robert Bell, always a good-humored man, joked that afternoon about his getting older. He’d been forgetting things and laughed that a few days before he’d missed his cup while trying to pour coffee.

A few weeks later the medical tests came back and revealed a brain tumor. He died that summer.

The next Thanksgiving my mother talked about her medical ailments. She’d not felt well for some time.

Still not feeling well at Christmas, she had to go lie down in the middle of our dinner.

My wife and sister-in-law insisted on taking her to the emergency room.

The doctor found a spot in her lungs and suggested she go to a larger hospital as soon as possible.

The doctors at St. Vincent’s in Birmingham found that her cancer had started in her right kidney, had traveled to her lungs and possibly to her brain. She died in only seven weeks.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that what our pastor shared when I was a boy is often true.

Maybe it’s just that Thanksgiving and Christmas are easily remembered benchmarks. I’m not sure, but I do know that for many of us there are feelings of loss tucked away in the pleasant holiday memories.

But, maybe these aren’t entirely unpleasant memories.

In spite of their premature deaths in our estimation, my family can look back with gratitude to the years we had with our parents. Mr. Bell was the gentlest and most generous man I’ve ever known.

He worked hard for what he had, but was always willing to give of himself to help others. And what can I say about my mother, other than she was a sweet and loving woman who was always my advocate no matter what?

The older I get, the more I see her as a role model of what a mother ought to be.

So this Thanksgiving, while we enjoy family and friends, many of us think about those who won’t be there.

But we’re grateful that God loaned us some special people along the way, and enriched our lives through them.

As Paul wrote to his Philippian friends according to Philippians 1:3 of the Message Bible, “Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God.”