Thanksgiving and the holidays can be a difficult time for many of us. This year, the Associated Press profiles several families coping with tragedy — but counting their blessings:

When American families gather together this week to give thanks for what they have, many also will reflect on what they have lost this year. Some of those tragedies have an added dimension, because they took place with the nation watching.

The dramas played out in places large and small: Southern California and Minneapolis, Blacksburg, Va., and Huntington, Utah. They were caused by nature or by man or by madness. One family was thrust into the limelight because of recognition for their son, a hero killed in the war in Afghanistan in 2005.

Those left to press on have found strength in friends and family, and have discovered strength of their own to share with others. They’re thankful for something else, too: loving memories of the people they mourn.

MOUNDS VIEW, Minn. — When Jennifer Holmes’ father died a few weeks before Thanksgiving last year, it was her husband, Patrick, who gave Holmes the strength she needed to get through the holiday.

This year, it’s Patrick who is gone — killed in the collapse of a Minneapolis bridge he had crossed countless times on his daily commute.

“It’s not just that he was my husband,” Jennifer Holmes said. “He’s been my best friend forever, who I talk to about everything. So it’s hard to not have that person to talk to.”

Jennifer, 35, met Patrick two months shy of her 15th birthday and married him about eight years later. “I don’t really remember a time before we were best friends,” Holmes said.

Short and athletic, Holmes was quick to laugh when recounting a happy memory, though her voice caught in her throat at times. Her kids, 6-year-old Gavin and 5-year-old Rena, played downstairs in the family’s neatly kept suburban split-level, where pictures of their father are spread throughout the house.

Thanksgiving week looks to be particularly tough, bringing not just a family holiday but what would have been Patrick’s 37th birthday. Thanksgiving will be celebrated, as usual, at the home of Jennifer’s sister.

“I can already tell you what I’m thankful for,” Holmes said. “I’m thankful for the kids. I’m thankful for the people around me who have supported me. And even though I think my time with him was cut way too short, I’m thankful I had the time I did have with him.”

RICHMOND, Va. — It was the Thanksgiving traditions more than the feast that Leslie Sherman treasured.

Her family always went to the movies while the turkey cooked; they loved the smell that greeted them when they returned home. The meal was always wolfed down in 10 minutes or less, so Leslie and her dad could rush to the living room to catch the game on TV. Her mother once suggested they simply go to a restaurant, but Leslie was adamant: Thanksgiving had to be a home-cooked meal, eaten together at home.

This year, however, the Springfield, Va., family’s traditions will be quietly set aside on their first Thanksgiving since Leslie, 20, was killed in the April 16 Virginia Tech shootings that left 33 dead.

Leslie’s parents and sister will go to a relative’s house for dinner. Her mother, Holly Sherman, will be polite and eat her meal. She will spend a little time with her family. After that, she may go visit Leslie’s grave.

Holly thinks of this and weeps.

She worries about balancing her grief with the celebratory nature of the holiday.

“We don’t want to be the symbol of sadness and bring sadness into somebody else’s home on an otherwise joyous occasion,” she says.

“We’ll be forging new territory.”

Last week, a co-worker handed her a card. Inside was a quote: “Be courageous. It’s one of the only places left uncrowded.”

FALLBROOK, Calif. — Lisa Horner lost almost everything when a wildfire torched her mobile home last month — antique tables and chests, clothing, sewing machines, old recipes. She had no homeowner’s insurance.

“I’m thankful to be alive,” Horner said one recent afternoon as she literally picked up the pieces, searching the ashes for her grandmother’s broken china.

She plans to turn the four boxes of shards she collected into a tabletop and wind chimes. She will make decorations out of knives and forks twisted in the conflagration by dipping them in silver.

Horner’s home was among more than 2,000 destroyed by the wildfires that hit Southern California last month, killing 10 people. No one was killed or injured in Valley Oaks Mobile Home Park, where Horner paid $650 a month to park her trailer, but half its 212 homes were wrecked.

Horner, 45, vows to return. She still treasures the towering oaks and redwoods that surround the park’s small, tightly packed lots. She cherishes the mountain views and quiet lifestyle in the heart of the nation’s avocado-growing country.

Many of those trees survived, as did the recreation center and swimming pool, a place where people gather daily to swap tales of their recovery.

For the fifth straight year, she’ll celebrate Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a friend, a woman she met 17 years ago at a bar. It’s a four-bedroom suburban house in Sun City, about 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

The only difference now is that she’s living there.

“Everybody’s safe, that’s something to be thankful for,” she said.

HUNTINGTON, Utah — For widows of Utah’s trapped miners, the pain is still raw.

“Nobody knows what’s deep in my heart,” said Bessie Allred, who can only gaze at the mountains that hold the body of her 58-year-old husband, Kerry Allred, a miner for nearly half his life.

It’s been more than three months since a thunderous collapse left the six coal miners entombed, possibly forever, 1,500 feet deep inside the Crandall Canyon mine. In a furious rescue effort, crews dug into a half-mile of rubble before three of the rescuers died in another collapse, 10 days after the first.

Federal regulators and mine executives say it’s too dangerous to start tunneling anew inside a mine where seismic activity remains active. They don’t know when or how they’ll be able to safely do it.

The pain remains especially sharp because the bodies may never be recovered, Huntington Mayor Hilary Gordon said.

“I have to believe that given the enormity of the cave-in, they had to have died instantly,” she said. “I don’t think they suffered, but the families were a long time realizing that.”

Gordon, a British transplant whose husband is a former miner, said the town’s 2,000 residents, living where the high desert meets the mountains, have pulled together.

“Everyone’s spirit came forward, and it was absolutely lovely,” Gordon said of the town’s support for the victims’ families. “If I had a wish for Thanksgiving, I’d wish that light could shine every day.”

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And give thanks.