Chicken Soup for Grief

All she could imagine cooking was chicken soup. She wasn’t even sure she could eat the soup but at least she could nourish someone else. She had made matzoh ball soup every winter for years, she used noodles to make a more traditional chicken soup, she taught herself to make mole from chicken stock adding the mole paste from the jar of Maria’s. (Why roast chilis and mash up sesame seeds when Maria’s was good enough? she reasoned.) These days she mostly ate pudding and cookies and yogurt, soft sweet foods, erasing years of determination to serve healthy choices: fresh sautéed vegetables and salads, lamb or fish, only olive oil, nothing with sugar. How he craved sugar! She remembered how he would add sugar to a raw beaten egg and pretend it was dessert. He loved her cooking, said he could tell she cooked with love. It was love: she put up with the cigarettes, the excursions to other states without notifying her first, the flat tires because he insisted in driving over the cactus-laded hillsides instead of the main road, the strangers brought home from the bar at 3 am, the frantic calls to her during work. (The questionnaire at the doctor’s office:  Are you able to take vacations without him? and how when she answered yes, the assistant was surprised, raised his eyebrows. As if she had done something wrong. Gave the wrong answer.  That was when she knew, that was the moment. It wasn’t just moods, it wasn’t just something to be cured with hot soup and salads or even acupuncture and therapy. It was terrible. Those lines of neurons laid down in childhood, those genetic misfirings, those attempts at self-medication, it was all part of a pattern no one seemed able to break.)   She had gone to retreat, recuperate, take a breath, because of his insane hours, because of his insistence that he didn’t want to live, because of the gun he had hidden from her, because of the suicide notes he read to her to ask her opinion, (how do you write the right thing when you are going to break someone’s heart into pieces and what right did he had to do that to us? she fumed) because their couple counseling broke down the day he drank too much and she was too angry to stay. That morning when his soul had left his body, there had been a black crow feather on the doorstep. She picked it up. She knew it was a sign but she didn’t—couldn’t—she was on her way to therapy, to the rest of her life, to her life savers of groups and activities. His body was already cold but she wouldn’t find out until that evening. And now she came to visit carrying a whole chicken, carrots, celery, an onion, a box of noodles. She would make soup. Nothing would stop her. Not the fact that the temperature was in the 90’s and soup was comfort for a winter’s day. Notice the way she carried all the ingredients in a bag she could hardly lift, more than enough to make two pots of soup. She brought her grief and her release, her freedom, her love unstitched from the place where she had been woven into a tapestry of despair and fear, of hopelessness. He told her I don’t want to be here and he meant it. But she wanted to. She wanted to soar, to sing, to commune, to praise, to bless, to be blessed, to love, to be connected, to be whole.