On Good Friday, Chelsea and Cynthia come out. Chelsea bursts into the big kitchen with paper grocery bags and pulls out fresh halibut, Swiss chard, cold ginger beer. She knows where the frying pan is and gets cooking. She is like the wind, breezing around the kitchen walls. I move more slowly but stay on task with her: we will make food, then she and Cynthia will talk to me about Corey.
Food is the thing we do while the rest of our body is preparing itself for the waters of grief. Fruit and root and green and meat, we touch and rinse and chop and heat and stir and fold them into our bodies, and their life force gives us renewed strength to sit with loss. There is an unwritten groundrule: because there is loss, we must have abundance. Because something precious has been taken away, our healing requires abundance of food, abundance of time, abundance of hugs, abundance of stories. We must have stories to heal.
We eat on a round table under the old Douglas Fir, and I don’t remember what we talk about. I enjoy the food, I want the food, and at the same time it is a necessary vehicle to get to the stories. We clear away the dishes and settling into chairs again I am struck with the bravery of these women, who—against all defense mechanisms—have bravely presented their bodies and souls before the video camera, willing to talk about my daughter, and knowing that tears will be a part of it. And that is when it hits me, how much courage it is taking for all of these young women to show up for this project.
They are coming because they loved my daughter and, with Corey gone now, her mom has shown up with this question: will you tell me Corey stories? They have come because they refuse to deny the presence of love, even when sadness and tears are its unwelcome companions.
I am fed by the stories—details of this day and that night, what Corey did and said and how they laughed together or moved through a difficult time together—and those stories become the bricks and mortar of my own memories. You cannot possibly know the precious gold that you give me when you give me your memories of my daughter. I know it isn’t easy. Together, showing up for the love and the stories and the tears, we are turning grief into gold.
Food is the thing we do while the rest of our body is preparing itself for the waters of grief. Fruit and root and green and meat, we touch and rinse and chop and heat and stir and fold them into our bodies, and their life force gives us renewed strength to sit with loss. There is an unwritten groundrule: because there is loss, we must have abundance. Because something precious has been taken away, our healing requires abundance of food, abundance of time, abundance of hugs, abundance of stories. We must have stories to heal.
We eat on a round table under the old Douglas Fir, and I don’t remember what we talk about. I enjoy the food, I want the food, and at the same time it is a necessary vehicle to get to the stories. We clear away the dishes and settling into chairs again I am struck with the bravery of these women, who—against all defense mechanisms—have bravely presented their bodies and souls before the video camera, willing to talk about my daughter, and knowing that tears will be a part of it. And that is when it hits me, how much courage it is taking for all of these young women to show up for this project.
They are coming because they loved my daughter and, with Corey gone now, her mom has shown up with this question: will you tell me Corey stories? They have come because they refuse to deny the presence of love, even when sadness and tears are its unwelcome companions.
I am fed by the stories—details of this day and that night, what Corey did and said and how they laughed together or moved through a difficult time together—and those stories become the bricks and mortar of my own memories. You cannot possibly know the precious gold that you give me when you give me your memories of my daughter. I know it isn’t easy. Together, showing up for the love and the stories and the tears, we are turning grief into gold.