Rocky Ford
For three days she has cooked and baked and peeled 40 pounds of potatoes and let her mind wander back to a time when her heart didn’t ache.
Today, inside the parish hall of a small church nestled among the fields of harvested corn in this eastern Colorado prairie town, she’ll offer up a Thanksgiving meal for about 100 people. She’ll serve turkey and mashed potatoes and pie and the homemade stuffing that her son loved so much.
And Judy Padilla knows that the wave of grief she has felt every day for nearly 10 years will come again. So she’ll stay in the kitchen and keep busy and hope the people don’t see the tears that will most definitely gather in her eyes.
Because today was her son’s favorite day.
It was snowing the morning of March 6, 1996. Daniel Padilla, 21, was headed to Pueblo, some 50 miles to the west, where he worked as an air-conditioning repairman. They say his car hit a patch of ice. It collided head-on with another. And on a lonely stretch of road amid the fields and the silos, a young man died.
He left behind a young son, now in the fifth grade, whom he barely got a chance to know.
And he left behind a single mother who was a teenager when he was born. A mother who still feels her son’s soft lips pressed against her forehead every Thanksgiving.
“Daniel would give me a big hug, kiss my forehead and thank me for all the food,” Judy Padilla said. “And then he’d tell me that he loved me.”
After Daniel was buried in the town’s cemetery, his mother went to the grave every day.
As that first autumn approached, she began thinking about Thanksgiving. She was overwhelmed with the memories.
“I just couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without Daniel,” she said. “It was his day. The entire family would be at our house, and his friends would come over, too. He’d laugh and smile all day long. I couldn’t imagine sitting at that table, looking at Daniel’s empty chair.”
And so she put an announcement in the local newspaper. Thanksgiving dinner at her house. For anyone who wanted to come.
Nearly 50 people showed up. Many couldn’t afford to buy food for their own Thanksgiving. And Judy cooked turkeys and made that special stuffing that her son had loved, with the Italian sausage and the pork. It was on that day that she knew, finally, that he was gone.
“I felt so bad inside,” she said. “There was an emptiness without my son. I needed to do it to satisfy my heart.”
She’s done it every year since, with the festivities getting bigger each year. Judy Padilla’s Thanksgiving is now held in the parish hall at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, with Padilla, 46, working tirelessly inside the big parish kitchen.
“And she does it right,” said Judy’s friend, Connie Ayala, the church secretary and bookkeeper. “She peels all those potatoes. It takes her a couple of hours. I tell her to just use the potato flakes from the box, but she won’t. She says they might be lumpy.”
Among the guests again this year will be her grandson, Santino, who is 11. He is Daniel’s son.
“He’s with me a lot,” Padilla said. “Sometimes his mom lets him stay with me for three or four days at a time. Sometimes I look at him and I slip and I call him Daniel and it makes me sad, and he just says, ‘That’s OK, Grandma.’
“But when I look at him, I see Daniel when he was small. Santino looks like Daniel and has his ways, too. I have a room for him, Daniel’s old room, and now Santino has his trophies and pictures of himself right next to Daniel’s pictures and trophies.”
Santino asks his grandmother a lot of questions.
“In one picture, Daniel is with all of his friends, playing horseshoes, and he’s holding little Santino. Daniel has the biggest smile. He took that boy everywhere. When we look at that picture Santino always asks me, ‘Grandma, did my dad love me that much?’ And I tell him, ‘Yes, he did.’ ”
Once in a while the two of them sit together and watch a video of Daniel when he was in high school.
“Every time we watch that video, Santino will go up to his room and I can hear him cry,” Padilla said.
“On big days like Christmas and Valentine’s and his birthday, Santino gathers some money and makes me take him to buy flowers. Then we go to the cemetery, and he puts them on his father’s grave. He’s close to his dad in his heart.”
They say you never come all the way back when you lose a child. Today, in a busy kitchen filled with turkey and pie and very special stuffing, Judy Padilla will try to climb just a little closer.
