[Coda]

My mom is the youngest of four sisters. It's been almost 20 years since her dad died to lung cancer -- he smoked heavily when he was in the Navy in his younger years but he quit when he realized the impact it would have on his children and didn't smoke for almost 40 years, but it caught up with him in the end anyway. One of her sisters passed away a few years ago, kind of unexpectedly, and her mom passed away a while after that. All of these are far enough in the past to just be a sad memory now, but... Another one of her sisters has been fighting cancer, and things took a turn for the worse recently, and her prognosis is grim: less than two weeks. My parents are understandably going to spend time with her in her last days.

On the other side of the family, my mother-in-law is a schoolteacher. The town she lives in has more than 1% of its population diagnosed with COVID-19. The school district is trying to decide if she's had enough exposure risk to quarantine her, but she and my father-in-law are quarantining for everything but work obligations anyway.

And so with both sets of parents unable to visit for Thanksgiving, the fact that we've all been quarantining in preparation for it is moot now. I know it's kind of shallow compared to what they've got to deal with, and I don't begrudge the fact that it's necessary to cancel those plans, but it still sucks.

I'll manage, but my wife was looking forward to this for a long time. She's really been chafing under the isolation, with her depression being worse this year than it has ever been in the 18 years I've known her, and she was counting on this as an opportunity to recharge with loved ones. It doesn't quite compare to people dying, but... again, it still sucks.