Feeding the Hungry Ghost (26 page)

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly oil a rimmed baking sheet.

Unwrap the dough and slice into ½-inch-thick rounds. Place the dough rounds, 2 inches apart, on the prepared baking sheet. Gently press a blanched almond into the center of each cookie. Bake until the cookies are just turning golden, 10 to 12 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let cool. The cookies are quite tender indeed fresh from the oven, but they firm up as they cool.

Store in an airtight container for several days.

You can also work a different kind of magic with this version, which whispers of the Middle East.

Variation: Orange Blossom Cookies

Grate in 1 teaspoon orange zest

Substitute 1 teaspoon orange-flower water
*
for the 2 teaspoons amaretto

Increase the unbleached all-purpose flour to ¾ cup

Substitute pine nuts for the almonds

I met Patrick when I was seventeen and somehow got hired as media-relations assistant for a local arts festival. My first day, he shambled in late, a black-and-white cookie as big as Manhattan sticking out of his mouth, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. He wore a rumpled madras plaid shirt not quite tucked into his khakis. I was inexperienced but not naive. I could tell this guy was not standard issue.

Patrick’s disordered style belied his superpowers. He could take the measure of a situation and make the best of it. In our many cookie-and-coffee klatches, he explained our job was not about creating beautiful content with artistic vision, but about placating rude people, defusing ticketing disasters, and doing damage control when a famous playwright shows up drunk, knocks over a tray of canapés, and does something unspeakable to the hostess.

Patrick was indispensable. To everyone. He would walk into a crowded room, and even with a celeb or two in the mix, he was the one everyone was glad to see.

At the end of summer, the festival ended seriously in the red, and the organizers pulled the plug on ever having another. I went back to college for my sophomore year, now skilled in the ways of appeasing the entitled, tracking down AWOL artists, and finagling free drinks. The end.

Except Patrick wouldn’t let it be. He called every week, even after he moved to New York with his new partner, Marc. They showed up in Miami around Christmas. We took holidays together. Here’s a picture of us at a tatty Miami attraction, with nasty-clawed macaws sitting on our heads. They’re heavier than you’d think. Here’s another picture of us swimming laps in a neighbor’s hot tub. And here’s me in bridal getup, flanked by my gorgeous new husband on one side and Patrick and Marc on the other. Patrick is feeding me wedding cake — carrot, really good — tuxedo shirttail already hanging out of his pants. Marc is giving me sips of champagne; we’re all laughing at the great joke of life. It’s a wonderful, joyful image; but more than that, it says to the world, we’re not just husband and wife — we’re Benjamin and Ellen and Patrick and Marc, and that’s the way it was and would always be forever.

It should have been. You may sense where I’m going with this.

Patrick got a cold. It lasted a long time. He had pneumonia, edema, a bunch of miseries that were not going away and did not add up to a common cold. He got hepatitis — the wrong kind. Despite our physical distance and my busy life, I had to face the facts — my friend was dying.

Marc called one December day. “It’s going to be soon,” he said. “Patrick wants you to be here.”

All my life I’d agonized over everything. But this was very clear. I booked a flight, baked a batch of almond cookies, and flew out the next day, taking a cab straight from the airport to the hospital. It was midwinter; the hospital was dreary and gray and encrusted with gray ice.

Patrick’s room, though, was stifling hot and full of people. It was like all the cocktail parties we’d attended (or crashed), except for one thing — in bed was someone who was my friend and yet not my friend. With his red hair and beard and the hammy thighs he worried about, my Patrick looked like a fun Vincent Van Gogh who ate well and had both his ears. This guy was wasted, emaciated, hooked up to every kind of tube. His eyes and skin were the color of French’s mustard. He was never going to eat cookies again, ever.

I could feel my tears start; but he hated that, so I hugged him. He felt like kindling. He said, “You feel good.” I said I’d just had this spa treatment where they sanded my ass.

“Lemme feel.” Whatever he had become, he was still Patrick.

I undid my jeans and slipped his hand in — gently, because it was bony and rigged to things doing I had no idea what.

The party didn’t last long; it was clear people didn’t want to stick around. It wasn’t just because I’d presented my backside.

So it was just Patrick and Marc and me and an uneaten box of cookies. Sometimes we’d chat, sometimes we fell silent. A lot of the time, Patrick moaned. Over the next days, I got good at untwisting his tubes and swabbing his mouth with a glycerin stick. Sometimes I’d put his hand on my ass, and he’d almost smile.

One morning, he began convulsing. He yanked at his tubes and thrashed and shouted. He didn’t know who we were; but
he looked at me, and in his eyes, yellowed with jaundice, I saw anger, frustration, and horror, a sense of, how could we let this happen?

“Morphine reaction,” the doctor said. “It’s normal.” Not for me. I went down the hall, turned to the wall, held up my cell phone without turning it on and said, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”

Then I took a breath. Patrick didn’t want to do this, either. But he didn’t have a choice. So I put my phone away and went back and stayed with him. Sometimes the only thing you can do is witness, try to bear another’s pain. It is times like these that faith must come in handy, like a pair of jumper cables. Me, I felt hobbled by helplessness.

A nurse gave Patrick an injection and he finally calmed and grew still. Marc left to take a break, and I, exhausted, curled up in bed with my friend and took a nap.

That evening, Marc and I sat in Patrick’s room, talking quietly while he slept, guarding him, listening to the rasp of his breath. Then we both looked at Patrick at the same moment and realized — he was gone. It felt very like he had left the room. I saw a silver mist, like a sprinkling of snow or powdered sugar, hovering above him just a moment, then it was gone. It is pretty and pleasing to think it was Patrick’s spirit. More likely it was lack of sleep on my part.

Marcella had died by then. And Aaron. But you’re not supposed to die when you’re in your thirties. You’re not supposed to die when you’re Patrick.

In grief, your carefully constructed life crashes and falls away, leaving you exposed, flayed, raw, helpless as a newborn. Daily life becomes a matrix of impossibilities, starting with getting out of bed in the morning. You develop sleep alternatives
or new ways of grooming. That they might not be successful is beside the point.

At other times, grief feels like a bone lodged in the throat, a calcification of the heart. The bits of you that ought to be open are obstructed. The pain of loss dulls your senses, creates a force field around your body, encases you in ice, makes you impervious to the world around you, and especially impervious to its pleasures. You shut down.

Grief is a necessary pain. That means there’s no way around it — try to bury it now, and it’ll come back and tsunami you later. But when you’re grieving, the world grants you a little slack. You have license to be weird. In fact, you need to be. It’s the only way you’re going to get through it. Think of it as a healthy madness.

People you know and people you don’t will say or do things intended to comfort. Not all of them will help, like someone telling you it’s for the best. I do not recommend responding, as I did, “Oh, really? And when did you become God?”

People will tell you how it was when their friend/lover/ spouse/parent/pet died. And for every twenty people, one will say something that will make you blink, that will resonate and make you ask, “It was like that for you, too?” Because we all grieve, in our own ways and our own time. No one gets out of it.

In the wake of death, people bring food. The precedent is as old as humankind and initially was about feeding not the living, but the dead. The Celts believed the journey from life to death was hard work, requiring fortification by way of eats — or what they called
lón báis
(death sustenance). It didn’t take long for folks to realize those left behind to mourn weren’t having a day at the beach, either. And we all feel helpless as hell. So we cook to fight death, the enemy, or at least go through the mindless, physical act of putting together something to eat.

In Genesis 25, Jacob made a pot of lentil soup to comfort his father, Isaac. Isaac was feeling off his game and off his feed, having just buried his own father, Abraham (who made it to 175, if you can believe the Bible). Then Esau, Jacob’s brother, comes in from the field and says, “Please let me have a swallow of that red stuff there, for I am famished.” Jacob says not so fast, bro, I want your birthright, because according to scripture, Esau, the eldest male, was due to inherit everything. Esau is so hungry he thinks he’s dying. He also thinks, what good is a birthright to a dead guy? So, fine, Jacob, here you go, hand over the soup.

Esau eats. He lives. He regrets. He hates his brother, he hates himself, and everyone loses. It is one of the earliest recorded histories of families behaving badly at a time of death and crisis.

That tradition endures. But so does the folk tradition of funeral food, the food you bring to the grieving. Over the centuries, the lentil has given way to food no one from Genesis would recognize, a parade of casseroles, spiral hams, deli platters, jiggling bowls of rice pudding, and dense funeral cakes. This is known in my family as DPF (dead people’s food). It is food often absent of vegetables, though not absent of heart.

It is the heart, the caring I focus on when I’m red eyed and ragged out from crying and desperate for something green. I focus on how food lets us connect when all else fails. It is a bridge, the lingua franca of grief.

Patrick, too, was interested in what food can do, in a labexperiment kind of way. Like if you take banana bread out of the oven now, when it needs to bake another forty minutes, walk it over to your next-door neighbor’s oven, and finish baking it there, how will it come out? Pretty well, by the way.

Patrick loved process, and process happens at its own pace. He’d take an hour to make a salad. By the time it was ready,
cocktails had gone on way too long; the lettuce had gone limp, and so had I.

Somehow, toward the end of his days, he’d made a lamb stew, which he froze in convenient if not biodegradable individual plastic containers. Marc found them after his death. He tried to throw them out. He couldn’t.

Over a period of months, Marc heated them up and ate them. Patrick must have known he would. I bet Patrick, an altar boy gone astray, thought of this as a sort of communion, his way of having dinner with Marc even without being there in the flesh, a way of comforting his partner beyond the grave.

It’s part of our human hardwiring to feed those who mourn. It is not a matter of addressing hunger; it is about coaxing and calling the grieving back into the riot of joy and pain and beauty and chaos that is life. Even when you’re not ready. To eat is to engage, to strengthen, to unwrap from that first layer of sorrow’s embrace and partake of life force.

Listen. The world is knocking on your door. It’s saying, let us in. We’ve brought food.

Red Lentil Soup with Indian Spices

This lentil soup is not the one that scotched Jacob and Esau’s biblical brotherly love. It is safe to eat and will sustain and support the sad or sick. Rather than your basic brown lentils, which are serviceable but drab, this recipe uses red lentils. They cook in minutes and with the tomatoes give the soup a rosy, hopeful tint. The spicing is gentle and reminds you things will not always be so hard. The greens add signs of life, not to mention calcium, vitamin C, and tryptophan, the amino acid that promotes a sense of well-being. Can’t have too much of that, especially now.