A Eulogy at the Kitchen Sink.
Grief is like salt in the pot. It gets added to you layer by layer
These days, I’m grateful for the kitchen sink.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
When my mind becomes too busy with trying to navigate through complexity or I am swimming in the stormy ocean of emotion, my feet 100m from the bottom - I turn outward. I rely on my hands to make sense of the chaos inside by making something tangible in the world. For the last 108 days, the city I live in and love has been in a strange lockdown. So I turned my hands to butter and flour, each week turning my kitchen into a little factory of love morsels. Flaky, sweet, sticky, savoury. Pie crust, chutneys, fried chicken, brioche by the dozen every week. There’s a fine layer of cinnamon dust on everything.
There’s also a fine layer of dust on my heart. This year has seen the passing of dear friends and family members and the suffering of others close and dear to me. Every so often, I shake off the dust and look out to the horizon - for a moment my heart feels freshly pruned. In honesty, the roots of my heart are deep set now and strong. They are robust enough to hold in drought or storm. Time is strange like that - it turns grief into an anchor that becomes hope in the bottom of your soul. The groundstay of a helium balloon. It turns on the tide of acceptance, when you no longer tell the sand from the tideline.
Grief is like salt in the pot. It gets added to you layer by layer, increasing in depth and complexity each time. Sometimes by the time you’re ready to eat, it’s impossible to distinguish the saltiness from the meal. It’s soaked into your bones and impossible to separate. Whatever is in the pot, salt will amplify it and bind it together.
I have found that grief is meant to be integrated into our being, not escaped or walked away from. What can be trivialised to sadness, is actually one of the deepest, most complex and beautiful expressions of Love that we can find in humanity. And so I want grief to be deeply grafted into my being. To walk, talk and breathe in this everyday life with an almost holy acceptance of grief in my body and soul.
To know what can be lost is know that each choice for love is accepting that loss is not a risk, it is an inevitable beauty in the vast wash of human interaction. Do not mistake this for pessimism or hopelessness - far from it. It is with great joy that grief has become the great witness of how I have loved, even if it has not always been returned.
I love an untidy stain on a tablecloth. I want to live with the stains of love over my life.
I found this resolve at the kitchen sink, washing dish after dish and scraping burnt caramel. It took 3 weeks, 10 or 20 mins at a time to slowly wear away the crust that formed at the bottom of that pot, while I was making bitter toffee marmalade. In a funny alchemy, that thick layer of tough black sugar helps protect the rest of the batch and gives a smokey, thick toffee note to the whole batch. But then comes the work. You attack it with boiling water and baking soda, then vinegar. You scrape and then you rest it. Another round with a Steelo, until your own hands are raw and you relent to gloves. It took weeks and then a final hour to restore the pot, although my hands and arms feel the effect of all that elbow grease.
It’s true that grief can require some work in the immediate instance and I do not look forward to scraping the pot again. But I love the marmalade. I love the texture that a good sear creates. I know that every time I turn my internal chaos into the output of my kitchen - I will need to clean, tidy and reorganise it. I do the work over and over again because the result is so beautiful. Not the food but the humanity that happens over a shared table. I love an untidy stain on a tablecloth. I want to live with the stains of love over my life.
I had to lead a funeral earlier this year, an unexpected privilege that has stayed with me through this months in solitude, watching people fight and wrestle for beliefs, values and some, for their lives. Like so many things, I wrote the words I would say in my head, while my hands were busy in the kitchen sink. That’s where eulogies come best these days, integrating grief into the rhythm of life.