Grief, Grace Notes, and a Secret

Reclaiming myself, and giving back.

At a potluck, there’s always one knockout dish. Word gets around; within minutes, it’s gone. People clamor for the recipe. Some threaten to riot if it isn’t offered up immediately. You — because it is your dish — smile, collect names and emails, and send it off the next day. You keep the recipe handy in a folder on your desktop, among the others so often requested. The folder has a name that’s too clever for the cookbook you’re writing. But you’ll sort that out with the editors once it’s accepted by a top publisher.

The measurements and cooking times are precise. You’ve included the right brand of mustard and the website of the one importer that stocks it. The name of the book comes to you as you’re drifting off to sleep: Grace Notes. As in amazing, as in saying grace before a meal. You write it down in the journal you keep on your nightstand. In the morning, you brainstorm musical references and search for table prayers.

Someone brings your dish to the next party. People push it aside on their plates. You taste it surreptitiously. It’s barely edible. And the person who brought it comes to you crying. Did I mess up? Mistake sugar for salt? There must be something wrong with me. No, you start to say, it’s not you, it’s me —

You ask yourself, Am I that person? The one who shares a recipe, but leaves out the one ingredient that elevates it from mundane to magnificent?

You know you left it out. It was selfish and mean-spirited, but you wanted that recipe, like all of the others in that folder, to be yours alone. To cook is to give the best of yourself. You just gave your worst. The best of you has gone missing.

You go home and empty your recipe folder into the Trash, then delete it permanently. Folder after folder — not just recipes, but writing, art, photos, music files, all of who you are — disappear. You are the worst person in the world.

But this isn’t your story. It’s mine.

Reader, I am that person.

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Dinner on Memorial Day, I text my daughter and son. It’s an imperative, not a question. My husband, their dad, had died in April, thirteen months earlier. I wasn’t going to spend the weekend swapping out Sorels for sandals, bookended by my husband’s ashes and my 22-year-old cat.

My son sends a thumbs-up emoji. What time? My daughter: What can I bring? A heart. Four o’clock. Beer, I text back. They respond: thumb, heart. I sit down at the table and start a menu.

Pulled pork. Coleslaw. Potato salad.

It’s been ages since I cooked these things.

---

I drive to Costco. Bypassing roasts the size of concrete slabs and chicken breasts packaged in multiples of twelve, I find a pair of relatively small pork shoulders, each weighing five pounds, and a large, but not magnum-sized, bottle of barbecue sauce. I move on to fruits and vegetables, sparkling water and soda.

As I wait in line at the checkout, I see shelves filled with flower baskets. Sky-blue lobelia cascade from rings of vivid begonias. I hook two baskets on the handle of the cart and push it towards the cash register. Three hundred dollars lighter, loading my car, I feel something like happiness.

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May is a month of anniversaries. Most are happy: weddings and graduations. But some carry forward a deep loss. My mother died in May, 2001. It was the year of 9/11, and her death is tethered to that event. Some years, I wake up after dreaming of a plane crashing into a building.

Now I’m facing the worst. May 29th, 2022, was the day we learned my husband’s diagnosis. Lung cancer, stage 4.

I squeezed his hand, staring at the red image on the oncologist’s screen: a tumor devouring his lung. Later, numb and silent, we ate dinner. “In My Life,” came up on the speaker. We heard the raw sorrow in the voice of Johnny Cash. In my life, I’ve loved you more.

He switched to a different playlist. Prince: Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker. A happy, goofy song.

---

The next day, about to open the door to carry three iced teas to the front porch, I caught a bit of his conversation with our daughter. Cisplatin, carboplatin. Her tone was casual, as if comparing Advil and Tylenol instead of two brutal chemotherapy drugs.

I thought of how she’d gained her expertise. Radiation. Chemo. Seven surgeries. Immunotherapy, targeted therapy, vascular damage, lymphedema. The walnut-sized lump in her left breast was diagnosed as cancerous on September 20th, 2020. She had eighteen months’ worth of dark wisdom to share with her dad.

I went out the back door, grabbed a shovel and started digging out lilies of the valley, breathing in their intense fragrance as I tossed clumps aside. Each stab of the shovel was a blow to the heart. But those tiny white bells were toxic. They were invasive. Metastatic. They had to go.

---

“We offer thirteen months of grief counseling,” the social worker told me, a week before my husband died. She gave me a brochure, and a warm hug.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

I saw this program — unfairly, no doubt — as a series of AA-type meetings in which sobs and regrets were the currency of exchange, cliché affirmations the tokens of progress. I recycled the brochure.

That was thirteen months ago. If I want grief support now, where do I go?

As I sit at my desk through the night and into the morning, I’m slammed with a hurt so intense that I can only wait, eyes closed, immobile. I think of the words of Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on. When these recede, I summon the ones that follow.

I go on.

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Four a.m.

This is the time I’ve set my radio to begin playing the soothing classical music that sometimes helps me sleep. I curl up with my cat.

I stroke her collarbones and the bit of loose skin a mother cat grips with her mouth to carry her kittens to safety. My cat’s purr expands, fills her chest.

Glass, Schubert, Dvorak. The announcer introduces a Haydn piece.

“A symphony, but a very brief one. Only nine minutes and forty seconds.”

It hits me suddenly and hard.

With all my dread of the future and obsessing over the past, I’ve forgotten something. It’s May 25th. On this day four years ago, a Minneapolis police officer put his knee on the neck of a man and kept it there for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. If he’d left it there eleven seconds longer, he would have been able to listen to a full Haydn symphony as he murdered George Floyd.

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The night before Memorial Day, I make the potato salad and the coleslaw. I set them in the refrigerator, where the flavors will marry. I season one pork shoulder and swaddle it in plastic wrap, giving the spices a slow introduction to the meat.

When my family arrives — my son, his wife, my daughter, and her dog — I let them set the table as I pull apart the meat that’s been simmering all day. .

They argue over the music, decide on Prince. They debate IPAs: is this one better because of the hops or the brewery or the guy who dumps in the kitchen sink? It’s not the best day for a fire but my son builds one. He’s like his dad, tending and fussing, rearranging logs.

“Dig in,” I say. They do, and conversation stops. Everyone looks at me in a way that makes me want to sing Amazing Grace.

“Hey, Mom,” my son says. You never told us you could cook.”

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The secret ingredient, I tell my family, is zest. Dried, it looks like dust. But when you add it — just enough, you’ll learn how much — it blooms, opens, brightens. If you leave out the zest, it goes missing from your life.

If it goes missing, find it. Bring it back home. If it takes you a lifetime, find it. Bring it back home.

Add only the zest, not the thick layer beneath it. Don’t eat bitterness.

Let the fire burn tall. Let it grow to its true height.

Listen to Prince. Listen to Prince sing Dorothy Parker. Let your dog bark at the bongos. They are grace notes.

Remember your dad. Remember George Floyd.

Give everything. Everything you have is a gift.

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