Whenever my parents would ask us kids at the Thanksgiving dinner table to report on what we were grateful for, I'd roll my eyes so hard I practically fell over.

How cheesy.

But, as with licking your finger to wipe smudges from your kid's face or justifying things with "because I said so," often we find ourselves returning to the script our own parents wrote.

Therefore, this year, I'm making a Thanksgiving gratitude list, and near the top is a gift I got from a dead person: a knee ligament.

I had surgery recently — the repair of an old injury — and I'm still recovering. Everyone who sees me limping or who saw my brace asks how I did it.

I usually deliver a version of the truth, a "tore my ACL" or "fell down." The full story's too embarrassing; it makes me want to melt into the ground like a popsicle in July.

I hurt it breaking up a fight at a house party.

Whose house? No clue.

The combatants? Had never met them before, have never encountered them since.

Were they drunk? Stinking.

Why did I try to get between two strange, inebriated men? Your guess is as good as mine.

I mean, I've always been an interfering person, the kind who can't help but weigh in. Once, I heard a chiropractor tell his patient that if he thought he was having a heart attack, he should take cayenne pepper instead of calling 911.

"Take the cayenne pepper, if you want," I blurted out, "but call 911, too."

That cost me a half-hour of my life, which was spent arguing with the chiropractor and his wife, and ended only when I agreed to accept 20 pages printed out from Yahoo answers.

But back to the knee.

Ever since my ill-advised attempt at conflict resolution, my knee has given out sporadically, when I twisted it, slipped or just stepped wrong. It got particularly bad earlier this year, leaving me incapable of walking to the playground with my kids or achieving even my normally poor golf performance.

A surgeon told me he could graft a cadaver ligament onto my knee to replace the one I'd been living without for so many years. The surgery promised a long, slow recovery, with only the hope of increased stability.

In the months since, it's been steadily improving. I used to say I only ran when chased, but last week, I found myself jogging on the treadmill, something I hadn't dared since the advent of the smartphone.

And I've thought a lot about the donor whose ligament I now use. I don't know the person's age or gender, have no clue what their life was like or how they died.

But I wonder what my donated ligament did before it found its way into my knee.

Did it run for the train to avoid being late for an awesome first job? Did it swing on monkey bars and jump off into the waiting arms of a loving mom?

I'll never know, and perhaps that's for the best.

My knee has a past, but it also has new tasks, new hills, both literal and figurative, to climb.

It's helping me play trains with my kids and take long walks to the park. It's giving me gifts, every day, in a thousand small ways.

So, when I make my list this Thanksgiving, I'll make sure to mention that mysterious, wonderful gift, given in grief but received as a blessing, from another person's body into my own.

The gift not of life, in my case, but of a better one.

A gift worth the thanksgiving.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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