Deaths are hard. I’ve spent the last year with my fingers to the keyboard hoping to find a way to put it all into appropriate words. While I still haven’t thought up the most enlightening thing to write that makes loss any easier, I can say that I’ve finally found the positive in death, which is...the food.
I had not dealt with a close loss (at an age old enough to remember) until my great-grandmother passed away my freshman year of college, and my duties included holding down her house while neighbors and friends stopped by with food. “Write down who brought what so we can send them a thank you card.”
I didn’t realize that my great-grandmother had known enough people still alive to bring more food than you could even find on a Friday night buffet at the Golden Corral. Plate after plate of fried chicken and side dishes were brought in. I saw enough variations of pound cake to fill the dessert section of the First Baptist Church’s next community cookbook. That was the week I learned that the older she is, the better her pound cake is.
When my Papa passed last August, I didn’t want to think about life without him in our family. Papa and I saw each other every day while I was growing up and this loss was much harder for me. Regardless of how poorly I kept it together, I had to sit at the house and greet the food…errr, I mean, the people coming by to pay their respects while mom and Granny were out taking care of the arrangements.
It turned out to actually be refreshing. Sure the food was delicious, but I listened to the stories each family friend or church deacon had to tell about Papa. Sometimes they needed comforting just as much as we did, and that attested to the type of man my Papa was. People came and went, dropping off trays of food with the date that everything was made clearly marked, and cake carriers initialed in permanent marker so you knew who to return them to…and you had better return them eventually.
A foil pan of what we thought were from-scratch country ham biscuits was delivered and they were so darn good that we almost fought over them. Each morning that I was home I’d go out and have one with Granny so she wouldn’t have to eat breakfast alone (and partially because I didn’t want to share them). When we eventually found out that Polly Love “up the road” didn’t make them and that they were really from a restaurant in town called “Cousin Gary’s,” we had the best laugh together over how well those biscuits fooled us. I’m not sure whose cousin Gary is but he can be mine if he makes those ham biscuits every time someone dies.
Ya know, there’s something special to be said about comfort food. I always thought of comfort food as simply an excuse not to count calories because you were stressed for some reason or another. But maybe comfort food is more than just an excuse to put your arteries at risk because you’re having a bad day.
Maybe it’s the intention and community behind comfort food that makes it what it is. In the South, food is love and a death is essentially just a somber potluck that lasts several days. You eat home-cooked food, visit with friends and relatives you haven’t seen in a while and cherish that time with the people around you, despite the circumstances that brought you together. Maybe comfort food actually is a reminder of the feelings we get from love and home…and hence the name, the comfort of it all. Perhaps it really is food for the soul.
As we approached the one-year anniversary of losing Papa, Kendall received news that his grandfather had passed. He was in New Jersey for the funeral when he texted me that he was on the way to repast…reminding me of the one we had in the fellowship hall after Papa’s funeral. Maybe Northerners aren’t so backwards after all, I thought.
Upon returning back home in North Carolina, Kendall unloaded an entire cooler of Ziploc bags full of green beans, mac and cheese, pound cake and the some of the best cornbread I have ever had the pleasure of putting in my mouth. I noticed everything was marked with 8-17-16, the date which they were packaged, and it tickled me at how similar things were to my own experience this time last year.
Realizing that my previous enlightenment of the positive in the midst of a loss may not exclusively be just a Southern thing, I was grateful to have so much comfort food in the days to come that would undoubtedly be tough. Then I proceeded to unwrap some pound cake and went about determining the age of the lady who made it.
P.S. Don’t tell anyone back home that I complimented a Northerner’s cornbread that well.
