Food for Thought

Yesterday, I bemoaned to Cathy the fact that it's been a month since I last wrote on this blog, being not without inspiration, but without the focus to turn words to page.  As is her wont, she came back immediately with her idea of a solution: "Just write one paragraph."  Right, I thought.  The paragraph and I travel the way of Faulkner's sentences:  I am certainly capable of it; I just don't feel the need to stop at the end of every rational point...everything in life is connected, after all.

Since my aunt died, though, late on November 4th, writing anything but the form-filling has been nil, save for her obituary. Such traumas close me up to all but practical thought; I go into mindless action, doing what tasks need to be done, organizing and re-organizing, making the changes necessary in a fast-changing life.  Wearing myself down to no words at all.

But Cathy can probably be credited for opening my word-door again.  Early this morning, a vision came to me of the family cookbook we produced twenty-some years ago, and suddenly I knew how to begin here.

With Thanksgiving coming fast on the heels of Aunt Vi's passing, the holiday season, with its tumble of family and feasts and frantic activity, ought to be an intrusion into sorrow; it's said that holidays are often hardest on those who have suffered loss.  In past years, closed tightly up into myself after two searingly close deaths, how fearful I was of attending to such social occasions...how I girded myself up against anything but the necessary.  But this time, having a table to fill with children, relatives, relatives of relatives, and friends and their relatives, silvery service on shiny linen, wine, and food cooking for days, each redolent of the history we have shared, seemed to me just a continuation of her memorial, another way to honor memory.  After all, our gatherings resemble in no small way how my aunt not that long ago filled her house, as did my mother and grandmother theirs. They were open to any guest; the tables expanded or multiplied, however small the space.  (My father once remarked, after inspecting our first house, "I like the way they spaced those roof joists, but that dining room is way too small.") 

My sister Ann, on such occasions, reminds us tongue in cheek that food is what our family is about, in sorrow as in joy, in celebration as in vanquishment.  Often one affection glides along with the other; someone lost brings back someone gained...we mourn a death, we look forward to a new life coming into the world, or a lost one returned.  We gather around the table to share one and both simultaneously.  We're not unusual in that.  In the short weeks between her passing and Thanksgiving, neighbors from houses nearby, bless them, brought daily offerings of sustenance to our door.  Food as nourishment and compassion is hardly a new thing in any culture (though my Scottish uncle, quite amazed and touched by their care, asked, "Is this a Southern practice?").  Food is the language we all have in common.

As in times before, the table held old dishes and new dishes, each remembered by its maker or its originator.  Our book of recipes...my mother's and grandmothers', my aunts' and sisters' and cousins', my sons' and husband's and friends'...might as well be instructions for a renewable feast that acknowledges both life and loss.

I don't mean to say that the holiday table is a panacea for grief.  Hardly.  You could make a case for temporary distraction, for the busy-ness taking one's mind off absence and heartache for a few hours.  But not a good case.  My uncle, the newness of whose days without my aunt brings complication unimaginable, generously let himself become part of the scene, teasing children, listening hard to and trying to attend the conversations around him.  My friend Johanna, also recently widowed, who had asked to join us for the Thanksgiving weekend, too entered willingly enough the crowd and noise of the table (the children running around and under it), seemingly relieved by the occasion on which she could feel loss and beyond-loss.  It's not always easy to rise to the surface from the cloudy underwater of mourning.  But it can feel like a breath of new air, an intimation that we can eventually come back to live with ourselves again.

This isn't what I set out to say, actually, when, between dreams early this morning, I imagined that photo, and by now I've forgotten just what it was I did intend.  (Perhaps I could have written that in a paragraph.)  

But sitting here, in the small interim between one feast and the next holiday racing (for better or worse) toward us, I find words not about what we have lost, but what continues, and what that continuation means to our solace.