Five days later my mother suffered a massive stroke, then another and another. She was left brain-damaged, partially paralyzed and required round-the-clock nursing care for the rest of her life. She lived 12 more years. My father died four years before she did, unable to deal with the stress and the grief.

Each Thanksgiving since then, I have been overcome with a mixture of sadness and relief and remorse. It’s about saying grace. My father was a practicing Christian, an Episcopalian. He loved saying grace at the table. We would all hold hands and he would pray, “Lord make us truly thankful for these blessings which we are about to receive, in Christ’s name, Amen.”

When I was 13 and we were living in Athens, I announced to my father that I was an atheist and that I would never say grace again. I thought it was stupid, I told him. It nearly broke his heart. I wasn’t able to articulate clearly what I thought was stupid about it. It was only later when I read about St. Thomas Aquinas’s objections to petitionary prayer that I understood what was bothering me. And then Immanuel Kant’s take on Aquinas made total sense to me. “Praying,” he said, “thought of as an inner formal service of God and hence as a means of grace, is a superstitious illusion (a fetish-making), for it is no more than a stated wish directed to a Being who needs no such information regarding the inner disposition of the wisher: therefore, nothing is accomplished by it.”

I was very smug in my disdain for grace and for prayer. After that, whenever my father said grace at the table I would refuse to say the words, hold hands, bow my head or close my eyes. It made my father crazy and he soon stopped saying grace for every meal just because it was so unpleasant for everyone. Only on the holidays would he insist. I felt in the right. Why should somebody else’s religious beliefs be imposed on me?

When I got my own house and began having Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners here I would ask my father to respect my wishes and not say a prayer at the table, and for years we did nothing. So I have no explanation for why that Thanksgiving 13 years ago, I sat at the opposite end of the table and asked my father to say grace. There was stunned silence for a moment, and then without a word, we all held hands and my father began, “Lord, make us truly thankful......”

What was I feeling? Truly thankful. I had a wonderful loving family and many blessings. Why, I asked myself, had I been so against allowing my father to express those feelings in a way that was meaningful to him?

We never had Thanksgiving at home again. My mother was the real cook in the family and it just wasn’t the same without her cornbread dressing and mashed turnips. We went, instead, to the Brome-Howard Inn in Southern Maryland. It’s very warm and cozy and welcoming. If I couldn’t be at home, there’s no place else I’d rather be; but it was never the same after that. For one thing, in the restaurant the atmosphere didn’t lend itself to saying grace.

This year, though, I’m going to say grace. I haven’t become a believer, but I do feel overwhelmed with gratitude for all the wonders of my family and friends and the gifts I have been given. After all, what is grace anyway, what does it mean but gratitude?

Here’s what I’m going to say: “Let us be truly thankful for these blessings which we are about to receive. Amen.”

This one’s for you, Daddy.