The Chair That Stayed Empty

Cedar Valley News — February 27, 2026
The Chair That Stayed Empty
By: Dan Larson
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

Rebecca set five places at the table Sunday night. We have done this for twenty-three years. Same table. Same time. No exceptions short of illness or travel.

Grace is in college now. She calls in on the phone we prop against the salt shaker. It is not the same as having her here. But she hears the prayer. She hears her mother ask her brother how practice went. She hears the forks and the pauses and the ordinary noise of people being a family in the same room at the same time. She stays on the line until we clear the plates.

I tell you this not because our family is special. I tell you because what we do at six o’clock on a Sunday is becoming rare, and the people letting it go do not realize what they are losing.

Only thirty percent of American families eat dinner together regularly. Harvard’s Family Dinner Project published the number. Eighty-four percent of parents say they wish they could eat together more often. The desire is there. The table is not.

The Survey Center on American Life found a generational collapse. Among Baby Boomers, regular family dinners were the norm regardless of income or education. Among Gen Z adults, only thirty-eight percent say their families ate together growing up. One generation. The table went from expected to exceptional.

The reasons are the same ones you already know. Both parents work. Schedules conflict. Kids have practice and lessons and clubs. Somebody grabs fast food on the way home. Somebody eats at the counter scrolling a phone. Somebody microwaves a plate and disappears into a bedroom. The family is in the same house. The family is not in the same room.

Children who eat dinner with their families three or more times a week show lower rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and eating disorders. Higher self-esteem. Higher resilience. Teenagers — the ones we assume want nothing to do with us — rank family dinner among their favorite parts of the day. Eighty percent say it is the time they are most likely to talk to a parent.

Eighty percent. We think they want to be left alone. They are waiting for us to sit down.

A family therapist at Harvard said she could almost close her practice if more families ate dinner together. Communication, trust, the simple habit of being heard — all of it happens when people sit across from each other with no screens between them and nowhere to go for thirty minutes.

I am a man of faith. I do not hide it and I will not apologize for it. But I will tell you where faith lives before it ever reaches a church. It lives at the table. A child does not learn gratitude from a sermon. A child learns gratitude from watching his father bow his head before a meal and mean it. A child does not learn to listen from a classroom. A child learns to listen from a mother who asks about his day and waits — waits — for the answer.

The table is where values pass from one generation to the next. Not in speeches. In the silence between the passing of the bread and the clearing of the plates.

This week Cedar Valley has asked you to notice what is disappearing. George asked why opinion columns lost their purpose. Lars asked why we stopped reading. Chloe asked why our children cannot read their grandmother’s handwriting. I am asking why the chair is empty.

The answer is the same every time. We did not decide to stop. We drifted. The schedule filled. The screens multiplied. The habit broke so quietly nobody heard it go. And now we wonder why the kids do not talk to us, why the teenager sits in his room, why the family feels like a group of people sharing an address instead of a life.

I am not here to shame anyone. Single parents work double shifts. Some weeks break you before Wednesday. But the table matters more than the schedule. A meal does not need to be elaborate. It does not need to last an hour. It needs to exist. It needs to be the one part of the day when everybody stops, sits, and sees each other.

Rebecca and I did not set the table every night because we had more time. We had the same chaos everyone has. We set the table because we decided the table was not negotiable. Everything else could flex. The table could not.

Grace still calls in on Sundays. Nobody makes a twenty-year-old call home for dinner. She calls because the table taught her something no lecture ever could. She belongs to these people. These people show up for her. And showing up is what love looks like when you take away the words.

Set the table tonight. Call everybody in. Put the phones in a drawer. Ask one question and wait for the answer. It does not need to be Sunday. It does not need to be perfect.

It just needs to be the chair where nobody sits alone.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Want to know the full story behind Cedar Valley? Teresa, Caleb, Dan, and the community you’ve come to know in these editorials first came together in Quiet Echo. Discover how a small town found its way from fear to fellowship—one quiet act of courage at a time. Available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3ME4nSs

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