What is necessary in grief is often the most basic, and the most difficult — consistency of presence. Joan is 81, about four years older than my mother. She lost her husband, Allen, just weeks after Orli was diagnosed with liver cancer in late 2019. One afternoon last spring she offered me a spoon to share her bowl of ice cream and told me a story: After her first two children, she lost twins. One was stillborn, the other lived outside the womb, but only briefly. Still, she continued to live, she had people to live for. “I mostly consider myself lucky,” she has told me. She went on to have one more child. She offered the story not as comparison, but as context.
I’ve come to see that, after loss, part of what fuels a person’s ability to keep living — and not just survive — is a continued engagement with curiosity.
In mourning, and in crisis, food is often an action, an act. It is typically how we meet the needs of those whose pain we cannot imagine, especially when we feel stymied by our limitations. It is often dropped off, for the family’s benefit, and for our own. It can be done without offering, or insisting upon, presence.
In the early weeks of Orli’s bewildering diagnosis, our home was inundated with food. We set up a cooler on our stoop for drop-offs, an online form filled up with well-meaning friends, acquaintances, synagogue members, others. It was a relief, in those early days, not to have to think or work, to just open a container and collapse.
But it was not sustainable. Hana and Orli wanted recipes they recognized. Plus, I missed the normalcy, the rhythm, of cooking. We thanked everyone and turned inward. When Orli died, last March, our table was swollen with sweets, babkas and rugelach and cookies, a spread we no longer had enough people to consume. Food felt overwhelming, irrelevant. Tasteless.