Scott Greaney prepares to carve the family bird as his wife Tracey, left, and son Ben, 15, right, watch during Thanksgiving dinner at the family's home in Mercer.

Scott Greaney gets a hug from daughter Emily at the family dining room table before the Thanksgiving feast, the family’s first “real meal” in a week.

Emily Greaney, 17, right, spreads wood chips in the barn with the help of her brother Ben, 15, as they prepare to expand the turkey pen at the family farm in Mercer in September.

Turkey chicks huddle in a shipping box as they arrive at the Greaney farm in August.

Ben Greaney sits in the back of the U-Haul truck last week with some turkeys he has helped raise over the past four months. The turkeys will be transported across the farm for slaughter. The whole Greaney family, as well as some of their friends, take part in the slaughtering, de-feathering, packaging and shipping. It is a week’s worth of exhausting work.

Emily Greaney feeds turkey chicks before heading off to Skowhegan Area High School, where she is a senior, on Aug. 27, the first day of school.

Emily Greaney works on her Advanced Placement government homework in the barn.

Scott Greaney receives an injection of chemotherapy at the Harold Alfond Center for Cancer Care in Augusta last month. A year earlier, in the fall of 2013, a case of shingles sent a worn-out Greaney to the doctor, where blood tests led to an ominous diagnosis: Greaney was found to have mantle cell lymphoma, a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Emily Greaney, 17, heads out to the family barn for early morning chores before the first day of her senior year of high school.