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.
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