Food engages all our senses and is a powerful ways to connect with those we've lost. Sometime, the people who are with you physically aren't the only ones at the table.
The way food smells connects us to emotions and memory, turning the space-time continuum on its head. When prepared and eaten with intention, food can be a gateway to our loved ones' stories.
The other night I invited several dead people to my home for dinner. I realize of course that this might sound preposterous or a tad delusional, but I assure you it’s neither. These weren’t just any people mind you, they were some of the people I love most in the world – the family members I’ve lost, including my parents, my sisters, and my teenage daughter.
The seeds for the dinner were planted in the soup aisle of the supermarket, when I stumbled on an onion soup mix that had a picture of apricot chicken on the box. I looked at the photo and could have sworn I actually smelled the sweet, tangy chicken I grew up calling “sloppy chicken. ” It was my mother’s specialty, and she made it at least once a week when I was a child.
I wanted to taste my mother’s chicken again, to fill my kitchen with that particular smell that felt like home. So I threw the mix in my cart, gathered the rest of the ingredients listed in the recipe, and went home to re-create my mother’s meal.
For many of us, food represents so much more than the sum of its parts, becoming one of the most powerful ways back to a specific person, time, or place – not simply through calling memories to mind, but through engaging our senses. Smell is particularly powerful because it’s one of our most primitive senses and has direct connections to the limbic system, a part of the brain involved in.
Which is also why anytime I smell Paco Rabanne cologne I feel like I’m back in the dorm with my first college boyfriend . Food is so embedded in our culture, the essence of our rituals and traditions. We use food to celebrate and console, to woo and wallow. Over time, foods become inextricably connected to specific people.
No matter who cooks it, for example, the apricot chicken will always be “my mother’s sloppy chicken. ”Food can feel like it’s turning the time-space continuum on its head. You smell your grandmother’s blueberry coffee cake or your sister’s pot roast and suddenly you're transported back to their kitchen, their table, their embrace.can be so profoundly isolating, authentic connection – however we can find it – is particularly important.
With that in mind, I decided to host a potluck meal where each guest would bring a dish that reminded them of someone they love and lost, which I called a Dinner with the Dead. I envisioned it as a time to grieve out loud – to share stories and taste memories together with other people who “get it. ” So what happened during the meal?
We said our people’s names and laughed at our memories and made fun of the fact that a can of sardines or a jar of olives counted as dinner. The evening felt like an intermission from real life, where talking about dead people so often makes others uncomfortable.
I felt my parents’, sisters’, and daughter’s energy in the room with me and knew if they were somewhere in another world eating dinner together, they were raising a glass to toast me andat the face I made when I tasted those sardines. The room felt full in the best possible way – crowded with those who were physically there and bursting with love for those who weren’t.writes about the mingling of joy and sorrow, mothering a child with a rare disease, and staying rooted when life tries to blow you down.
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