René Magritte’s The Survivor has been lingering in my mind as Thanksgiving settles into afternoon. I keep returning to its unsettling quiet: a rifle leaning tidily against a floral wall, blood pooling at its base, yet no body is present. Violence has taken place, but its witness is only an object. The room appears orderly, civilized, intact, but something irrevocable has already happened. Magritte stages survival not as triumph, but as aftermath. He shows us an unsettling stillness where the visible world remains, yet something essential is missing.
This, strangely, feels like the truest metaphor for Thanksgiving.
We present the holiday as a tableau of harmony with families gathered, tables filled, gratitude spoken aloud. But beneath that familiar scene lies a deeper narrative: survival in the shadow of suffering. As Magritte’s rifle stands upright in a domestic room that hides its own story, so Thanksgiving has always borne the tension between myth and reality, celebration and loss, gratitude and grief.
The myth most Americans know is that of Pilgrims and Wampanoag sharing a peaceful harvest feast. A calm domestic scene, not unlike Magritte’s wallpapered room: ordered, comforting, deceptively complete. This myth operates as a national coping mechanism, turning a precarious encounter into a gentler memory. But the historical reality looks more like the emotional undercurrent in The Survivor: fear, vulnerability, hunger, strategic alliances, and the fragile hope of enduring long enough to see another season.
The settlers carried with them the 1549 Book of Common Prayer and the resonance of the 1611 King James Bible, texts that understood gratitude not as sentimental cheer but as the sober acknowledgment of deliverance. One prayer of thanksgiving from 1549 reads:
“We yield thee hearty thanks…for our deliverance from the noisome pestilence, and from all other perils and dangers of this life.”
It is language born of crisis, not comfort. It is a theology of survival.
In Plymouth, this liturgical worldview framed the settlers’ experience. Their gratitude echoed the psalmist’s cry:
“O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever” (Ps. 107:1).
Mercy, in this context, is the thin thread between life and death. It is the same emotional space Magritte paints into his quiet room. You know something has happened, even if the body is gone. Survival leaves marks.
Thanksgiving’s history is saturated with this tension. In 1637, after the Pequot massacre, colonial leaders declared a day of thanksgiving not for peace but for military victory. Survival became intertwined with conquest. Gratitude became the language of aftermath, echoing Magritte’s quiet violence where the room stands whole, but the cost is hidden just beyond the frame.
Later, Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday during the Civil War, another moment marked by unimaginable loss. His 1863 proclamation carries the cadence of prayer:
“to heal the wounds of the nation…to care for the widow, the orphan, the mourner, or the sufferer.”
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving was not a feast. It was an act of communal survival, a liturgy to hold together a fractured body politic. In this sense, his proclamation resembles Magritte’s painting, an acknowledgment of rupture disguised in the quiet of an ordinary room.
The same was true in both world wars, when Thanksgiving became a symbol of endurance, a ritual insisting that unity and identity could withstand global devastation.
Which brings me back to Magritte’s The Survivor and to this particular Thanksgiving.
The painting now feels like an emotional analog to our family’s experience of hospice. The room is familiar, domestic, and tenderly ordered: my grandmother’s bed near the window, blankets carefully tucked, the soft murmur of my mother’s voice as she sits beside her. But beneath that quiet lies an unspoken knowledge: we are in the presence of unfolding loss. Something sacred is shifting. Like Magritte’s rifle, there are traces of what has been endured, but the full weight is invisible, unspeakable.
In this space, the language of the Book of Common Prayer returns with new force.
“We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.”
Preservation. Not abundance or triumph. Preservation. A word that rests lightly, like a hand on a loved one’s shoulder. A word that names the daily mercies that sustain us.
Sitting with my grandmother, I find that gratitude has become a form of quiet vigilance. A discipline of noticing. A way of honoring the holiness of breath and presence. The psalms give voice to this fragile thanksgiving:
“He delivered them out of their distresses” (Ps. 107:6).
Deliverance here does not mean the avoidance of suffering; it means being held through it.
Our living room, lit softly by lamplight, has become a sanctuary. My mother tending to her mother-in-law. My brother preparing food in the kitchen. My father, watching the grill and the game checking on his mother every few minutes. Each act of care feels like a prayer, a soft echo of that ancient liturgy:
“In whom we live, and move, and have our being.”
We move gently. We breathe slowly. We hold one another. This is our thanksgiving.
Magritte’s painting reminds me that survival is not heroic. It is quiet, often painful, and carried in the small rituals of love. Thanksgiving, at its deepest level, is not about abundance but about the fragile grace of endurance. Thanksgiving is about naming what remains intact even as life alters around us.
This year, I am thankful that my grandmother is still here. I am thankful for the slow, sacred hours we share. I am thankful for the whispered memories, the clasped hands, the ways our family gathers around her like the ancient prayers that have carried generations before us. Gratitude feels less like celebration and more like reverence.
Perhaps this is the truest heart of Thanksgiving: not a mythic feast, but a room. A room that is quiet, fragile, filled with traces of what has been endured and what remains to be held. A room like Magritte’s, like ours, where survival and love share the same light.
And so, with the old words still echoing, I give thanks:
“The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him…He also will hear their cry, and will save them” (Ps. 145:18–19).
Not save us from endings, but save us through love, through presence, through the grace of another day together.
This is our Thanksgiving. A survivor’s thanksgiving. A sacred, quiet mercy.