Recipe For Grief
My Millennial anxiety almost killed me when I realized that there are some things you just can’t Google. Like my grandma’s special Christmas cookie recipe. Or how to live my life without her.
Step 1 — Take a spoonful of dad talk
It was a lovely summer morning I passionately hated, as I knew I had to stay indoors preparing for my university finals. As I stumbled to the kitchen for my procrastination breakfast, I found my dad sitting on our balcony smoking. He had stopped smoking years before, due to pressing health issues, so it immediately signaled trouble.
“Sit here next to me for a second,” he said.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked impatiently, sure there was.
“There’s nothing wrong…” he started kindly. That’s his secret ingredient: being calm in a crisis and keeping such a comforting tone that you genuinely believe nothing terrible happened “…but your grandma died this morning.”
It’s always him who breaks the bad news. Partially because my mom’s emotional threshold is a Coke commercial, so in a real-life sad situation, she can’t even formulate words through her tears. My dad, being a Mathematics teacher and the product of the 1940s, sees everything from the point of logic. It usually upsets me how blunt he can be when it comes to situations like my first boyfriend breaking up with me or Friends ending on TV. Still, at that moment, I appreciated the presentation style. My final exams were the following day so it wasn’t a good time for an emotional breakdown.
Step 2 — Mix it with dry university exams and a medium-size ripe funeral
“I see,” I said as I put my emotions in a jar, next to the others brewing for therapy.
There was not one tear that could escape without a flood. There was not one honest word that could have left my mouth without making me collapse in the admittance of truth — my beloved grandma was taken by cancer. “I see” a reaction with the emotional equivalent of receiving a “Your subscription payment failed” e-mail.
But at the moment, the best I could do was to escape into the importance of my exams, so without further ado, I went back to studying. When my exams arrived, I felt strong for not crying and hoped my grandma stuck around as a ghost to help me. I was more focused than ever before.
The exams were over, but I still didn’t feel like crying. “Tomorrow,” I thought, “today was my exams. Tomorrow I will deal with my emotions.”
This went on for a while. I kept my fingers in too many pies, and it was just never a good time for thinking about my grannie’s death.
“I’ll do it at the funeral,” I thought. But the funeral came, and my half-baked idea of releasing my grief in front of a hundred people failed miserably. I made myself busy directing the guests, thanking them for coming, and comforting my mom. I lost a grandma, but she lost a mother, so I had to be the stronger one.
After the funeral, I thought: maybe I was just wise and understood the circle of life even more profoundly than what I learned from the Lion King. I kept telling myself that she was old and this is just how things are. We are born, we live, we die.
I didn’t cry during the summer. Or during autumn. Then Christmas was approaching. The first one without her.
Step 3 — Put it in a Christmas size pot and let it boil
When I was a little kid, my grannie took me out for walks in the snow while my parents secretly dressed up the Christmas tree. When I was older, she would mention this every year “Remember when I took you out for walks while your parents dressed up the Christmas tree?”
Then she would give me some money, the same amount for 20 years. As a young child, it made me feel like the queen of the world! I had my own cash, and I could buy anything. As an adult, having a well-paying job, I just felt bad taking a portion of my grannie’s pension.
She also expected me to show her what I bought from the amount she gave me, which became more and more challenging throughout the years. Her money was worth less and less until I had to triple the amount, to get something more presentable to show her than a pair of socks.
But the best thing about spending Christmas with my grannie was making her special Christmas cookies with her. It was called Zebra, and it looked exactly like a traditional cookie but tasted completely different — as I learned through a series of disappointments in bakeries. I always helped make these cookies, but mostly I was just making sure there was enough chocolate sauce left in the pan I could carefully scoop out with my fingers while watching her doing the heavy lifting. I was only supposed to eat the leftover sauce, but because that was the highlight of our collaboration, she started making a lot more than needed.
She was a natural partner in crime, a cheeky winker, an I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about-er when my mom asked how much chocolate I had eaten that day. She was a player, and I was sure she could cheat death too. Well, I was wrong.
In 2012, a few days before Christmas, my mom asked me what kind of cookies we should bake.
“Well, the ones grandma used to make!” I spat out angrily, suggesting that it was a disgrace even to consider anything else.
“OK, I’ll find the recipe,” my mom replied.
Later that day, I found her sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by a pile of cookbooks and handwritten recipes.
“I can’t find it!’’ She looked at me in desperation.
“What do you mean you can’t find it?” I lashed out at her.
“I went through all of her cookbooks, and it’s nowhere,” she said with watery eyes.
This really stirred the pot. I grunted in anger and marched to the kitchen, shouting to myself, but really, to my mom. “You see, that’s the problem!” This prompted my dad, who caught this last part.
“What is?” he asked.
“That we don’t freaking write down our recipes in a book or something!” I replied while pulling and smashing every kitchen drawer, unsure if I was looking for the recipe or pen and paper to start the long-overdue family cookbook.
I settled with a rusty pencil and an old phone bill with a blank backside. As I landed on a chair, almost breaking it, I continued my outrage. “We just freaking live our lives, and we never ask each other “Oh hey, how do you make this delicious food that only you on the entire planet know how to make?” My dad looked at my mom, asking for an explanation with his eyes. “And then someone dies, and we’re all damned,” I continued.
I turned to my dad with determination.
“Dad, you start, you’re the oldest, tell me the stuffed cabbage recipe!”
My dad was still puzzled but seeing my state, he chose to play along. “Ok, so you take a medium-size red onion…”
“You knew she was dying,” I turned to my mom, still furious. “I didn’t because no one bothered to tell me. But you knew she was dying, so why didn’t you ask for the recipe on her deathbed?”
At that moment, this did not sound ridiculous to me.
My mom went from watery eyes to blueberry-sized tears. “I’m sorry,” she said inarticulately, likely apologizing for not telling me how bad my grandma’s state was, as she didn’t want to distract me from my uni exams. She attempted a hug, but I shrugged her off and ran to my room.
She once again followed me, agreeing to play a part in my running around the house drama, where I thought I could just leave my emotions in one room if I ran quickly enough to another. My feelings eventually caught up with me.
“I hate that she’s gone,” I boiled over, spreading fiery tears everywhere. I did hate it. I hated that she was so lovely that she left us all with so much sorrow and so few cookie recipes. My grief started bubbling up unstoppably. I cried for an hour. But that wasn’t all. Of course, it wasn’t.
Step 4 — Let it cool then serve with fresh acceptance
For years my grannie visited me in my dreams, and I woke myself up with the sound of sobbing. I was so shaken by her loss that I needed to gather my strength for months even to start processing it. And I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a point when I can confidently say, “yeah, I’m over it.”
On that Christmas eve, my mom presented her version of the cookie. Taking the traditional recipe as a base, she made her best effort to recreate my grandma’s version. It tasted crap. But nothing tasted nice that Christmas.
In the following Christmases, we made repeated attempts to recreate the cookie. It feels like we are getting closer every year. But deep inside, a voice in my head, one that is good friends with my dad, tells me that it’s just the original taste slowly fading away. Alongside the crisply painful memories of my beloved grannie. And I’m starting to think, that’s okay.
Bon appétit.
