Stale white bread and grief

“I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, ‘It tastes sweet, does it not?’ ‘You’ve caught me,’ grief answered, ‘and you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow, when you know it’s a blessing?” ~ Rumi

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What do you eat when you are grieving? Is it toasted slices of hazelnut bread smeared with small pats of grass-fed butter and sprinkled with salt? Is it an ooey gooey creamy cheese casserole dotted with broccoli, cheddar and thumb-length penne? Or is it fresh-from-the-oven cookies with melted chocolate chips? The kind that leave imprints of butter on parchment paper and demand you have napkins on-hand? Research says sugar turns down the stress response in the brain. When we crave sugar or carbohydrates, our body might be signaling an imbalance in serotonin, which impacts our mood. Left lopsided, low levels of serotonin can lead to depression. I’ve been there before. I’ve fed it with sugar and I’ve fed it with other substances, too. Neither helped. But the bread and cookies tasted pretty damn good.

Did you know your gut produces 95 percent of your serotonin? So what we eat really matters. Not just because of its nutritional value. It also impacts our emotional well being.

I recently ready Cheryl Strayed’s essays, “The Love of my Life” and “Heroin/e” while crying in my bathtub during the middle of the day. I know this sounds sad, so know that despite my tears I am actually very happy. I attribute much of that to what I eat. I cried because her essays about her mother’s death made me miss my own mom. They reminded me of the dry sandwiches I ate in the hospital during the weeks leading up to her dying. I don’t remember what was sandwiched in between the slices of bread that I picked up in the cafeteria line on the top floor of the University of Minnesota hospital. But I do know those carbohydrates were stale, bland and bleached white. Once I ate that bread my body treated it just like sugar. And perhaps that gave me some momentary lapse of relief.

Below is an essay I’ve submitted to several publications. So far all of them passed. This doesn’t mean I failed, it means I should keep writing. But instead on continuing to send it, I thought I would share it with you.

If you like what you read, please send it to friends to share. I am applying for a writer’s intensive through Substack and trying to grow my subscriber list before I submit my application next week. Thank you for sharing this, and thank you for reading.

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I am a passenger in the back of an ambulance and we are traveling from the intensive care unit of a hospital to a small suburban hospice. There are two paramedics, a mother, and a daughter. The mother is dying. The daughter is me.

My mom was determined not to die in a hospital. She was very clear about this wish. Too sterile; time ill spent. She would die with family in a hospice or in her home. And now here we are, in neither. The lights on top of the ambulance are flashing. Its siren is wailing a dull tone. We are the most important passengers on this two-mile stretch of highway in the middle of the afternoon on this sun-soaked July day. Work commuters and playdate carpools and leisurely drives to happy hours must pause for us and we will drive by and some will be annoyed and some will feel sad and little kids will shout, “Look! An ambulance.” I think of my friends who are working summer jobs at the golf course, lying like lizards in the sun, riding around in speedboats on midwestern lakes listening to mindless music and talking about nothing. I am here with my dying mom. And I want us out of this ambulance so she can die in the manner she wished.

“Is she dead?” I ask the paramedic. I try to connect my eyes to his but he shifts his gaze down, away from me and to the floor. He looks at the paramedic sitting beside him. Down at the floor again. Why won’t either of them talk to me. Did I do something? I am certain my mom is not breathing anymore. Neither of them are fussing over her oxygen tank like before. My mom’s body is corpselike. Just moments ago her torso was lurching forward and back, her lungs pleading for air through her yellow oxygen mask. I’ve never seen anyone die before. I don’t know what it looks like and I don’t know what to do. I stay close to her and I take big deep breaths. I hold her hand. “It’s ok mom,” I whisper quietly, so the paramedics don’t hear. “We are going to be ok. I love you. Go be with your dad.”

And then she was gone.

I felt her leave.

I want the paramedics to tell me what I know, but they won’t. The ambulance is void of her scent, the one I memorized into the hardwiring of my sense of smell upon my birth. My mom is now a tiny body plugged with tubes and an oxygen mask. I read once that scientists collected enough data to claim the soul weighs 21 grams. How can something so powerful be so light.

The ambulance turns into the parking lot of the hospice and still, neither paramedic will talk to me. I haven’t let go of her hand. Her palm is still warm. If her palm is warm then perhaps there is still life inside. Maybe her cancer is gone and she will lay in her hospice bed and heal. Maybe she will come back to life as my mother again.

I am only 22 years old. I still need a mother. Who will I cry to when someone breaks my heart? Who will I call if I forget the recipe for the creamy garlic pasta sauce, the first recipe she taught me how to make? Who will hold my children when they are newborn babes so I can nap in the sun? Who will love me the way she loves me? The kind of love that can never splinter, never break.

The back door of the ambulance opens and sunlight seeps in. Her stretcher is wheeled into the home and I trail behind. I am devoid of life, like her. I have been living off small bites of dry sandwiches from the hospital cafeteria. They don’t satiate me.

My dad is driving to the hospice in his own car, so I am alone. They would only allow one family member in the ambulance. Being the only child, someone she wished to be with her when she died, the family chose me.

The interior of the hospice mimics a home as much as it can, given that it was built to accommodate people touching hands with death. Worn-in couches donated by families, a cozy kitchen nook, a refrigerator flush full of casseroles and pies and all the other things families try to eat as they enter the first stages of grief.

My mom’s room has a small bed with a duvet of muted florals and a powder blue blanket neatly folded over the lower half. But the duvet cover will never be unmade and the blanket will never be worn because my mother does not die in this hospice. She died in the ambulance on the way there, with her daughter holding her hand. Not in the way she wished but in the way it was to be.