What You Bring When Words Are Not Enough

My friend Gil lost his mom in the spring. It was not sudden, she had been sick for a while, but that does not make it smaller. Sometimes it makes it larger because you have had months to see it coming and no amount of preparation actually prepares you.

I did not know what to say. This is the honest truth about grief. You do not know what to say and anything you reach for feels either too small or too large and so a lot of people say nothing, or they say I am so sorry and then trail off, and that is fine, it is human, but it also leaves the grieving person alone in the room with something enormous.

I thought about what Gil actually needed in those first weeks.

He did not need to be cheered up. He did not need distraction. He needed to feel that the loss was real and that the person he lost had mattered and that someone understood that without needing him to explain it.

His mom had grown up in Jamaica and she made a particular kind of bread that he talked about sometimes. Not often. Just occasionally when food came up, or when someone's home cooking was especially good, he would mention the bread his mother made and the way the house smelled on Sunday mornings when he was young.

I found a cookbook of Jamaican home cooking. Not a glossy restaurant book. An old one, the kind that feels like it came from someone's actual kitchen, compiled by someone who learned to cook the same way Gil's mom did. I wrapped it with a candle in a warm bread scent. I included a card that said only: I know how much she mattered.

He called me a few days later.

He said he had sat with the cookbook for an hour. He had found a recipe that looked almost exactly right. He had not tried to make it yet but he was going to. He said the candle smelled like Sunday.

You cannot fix grief. You should not try. But you can show up with something that says: I see what you are carrying and I am not looking away from it. That is not nothing. That is actually everything.