Incorporate the Three-Part Narrative

Grief Food

"What was your grief food?" my friend Cindy says, as I am handing her the black bean soup I have brought as my offering, in what I know must be her darkest hour. Condolence calls are awkward at best. Cindy tells me she has three more bean soups on the porch. I see they are lined up like planes on a runway waiting for takeoff. "But mine has coconut and lime," I whine. "And ginger," I add, "so I hope I get moved to the front of the pack." Actually, I don't care where my soup ends up. I just wanted to make her laugh.

After a brief visit, where I chattered about the lousy March weather and the ugly refrigerator we were just forced to buy, I found myself doing what the French call l'esprit de l'escalier, literally translated "the spirit of the staircase," meaning, thinking of the perfect reply too late. "What was your grief food?" my friend had asked me. Did I not answer because I didn't want to think of what food I ate when my son Dan died and have to face my own grief, or did I not want to face hers? Did she ask because she wanted to put me at ease because she knew we were now both members of the same club, a club no one wants to belong to? And why, oh why, did I want to make her laugh?

It's hard to drive while kicking yourself, but I managed to do both, at the same time thinking, Why didn't I say, 'I can't even remember what I ate, what people brought. I can't remember what nourished me. I can't remember anything'? It was twelve years ago. What I can remember is, one minute I was the mother of two sons, and the next minute I was the mother of … well, ya see, there's one of the interesting problems. When people say, "How many kids do you have?" should you say, "Past tense or present tense?" and really make them uncomfortable? Should you say, "I have two, but I lost one," as if he's wandering somewhere in aisle five at Cronigs? How easy it is to divert and avert pain with a snappy wisecrack.

I should have said, "The wedding cookies, the round balls with pecans and powdered sugar." But does that even qualify as my grief food? Maybe that's revisionist history. Maybe it was chopped liver on Ritz crackers. Who knows?

What I do know is that as a culture we are toddlers in terms of how we deal with other people's grief. And you would think since I went through it, I'd be better at it.

My standard note over the years has included "there are no words."

I recently read an article in The Atlantic that kind of made me wince.

The father writing the piece had lost two teenagers in a car wreck. He addressed most everything everyone has already written about: fear of saying the wrong thing in case it makes the bereaved break down and start crying uncontrollably, people not mentioning their own loss for fear of causing more pain, fear of the grief triggering their own unexpressed grief. He wrote, "Almost everyone we knew landed on the same unfortunate solution: ‘There are no words.' "

Oops. I gulped and kept reading as he proceeded to say that "there are no words" acts as a conversation killer just when what you want is a conversation.

I think back, and all the love and hugs and cards and food were comforting, but what comforted me most and still do are stories about Dan. When I bump into someone who says, "I was a nurse at the ER. I loved Dan. We all did."

I have been approached on Circuit Ave., in line at the Steamship Authority, walking on Lucy Vincent Beach, by folks who saw Dan do his stand-up at Wintertide in the seventies or worked with him at one of his many summer jobs or had a brief but passionate love affair with him.

Those kinds of encounters are the healing I forgot when I visited my friend yesterday.

At least I didn't say what Cindy and I both agreed were the worst attempts, like, "He's in a better place," or, "Time heals all wounds." The "better place" would be alive and with me. And I don't know what time heals, besides maybe a paper cut.

The thing is, everyone grieves differently. You have to come up with your own thoughtful, comfortable response because, as my friend Laura Lentz says, "It's easier to walk with grief than to bury it."

I may still say, "There are no words." I may still bring bean soup. But one thing I know for sure: I will not pretend I am there to talk about ugly refrigerators and the weather.