Holidays

Ho ho hold up!

Holidays are always a difficult time of year for anyone, there is so much pressure and expectation around every holiday and adding grief to the mix is only adding rocket fuel to a bonfire. There are interesting interactions between grief and expected grief. People around you have a very defined picture of what you "should" look like or feel like. I've discussed my anti-should campaign before and I am sure that it will surface regularly as it is a very worthy and cunning foe.

My father was an Autumn death. The way we talk about people getting married, surely we can apply the same broad stroke language to the dead? But I always did think of my father as an Autumn. Perhaps it was his already older age as well as his physique and manner that lent him the bearing of an oak tree. He was tall and full of knowledge and held onto information the way an oak tree jealously holds onto it's leaves in the Fall. He was also a great craftsman, wood working, leather braiding, rawhide and metal crafting, his favorite tea (also my favorite) smelled exactly like a November woodfire. I used to sneak sips of his tea as a child until I was allowed to drink my own. What other four year old drinks, let alone can pronounce Lapsang Souchong. Try throwing that around on the playground when everyone else is drinking capri sun. My favorite season is Fall and my father was always involved in what I consider Fall activities. Building fires, making huge piles of leaves to leap into, pointing out trees and collecting acorns to make tiny hats for my toys.

He died on November 9th so the first holiday after his death was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was always our holiday. When parents get divorced they trade holidays like it's a hostage negotiation. My mother had the advantage of adding every Jewish holiday to her list of demands so every day that ended in an unpronounceable phlegm attack was off the table but my father got Thanksgiving. When my mother and step father became Kosher the rules applied to everything and everyone and my father and step mother had to adapt and quickly become experts on the intensely complicated and obsessive rules of Kosher. Monday bacon and eggs for breakfast. Friday smoked herring and pogrom. I had always shown an interest in cooking and as I learned about Kosher I became the enforcer of the rules. I was an incredibly obedient child and became strictly Kosher on the spot. I had separate pots, pans, cutlery, plates, knives etc... even separate electric burners to cook on and plastic sink bins to wash everything in. I even had my own soap and sponge! Kosher is like medical grade food handling and weapons grade OCD. NO CONTAMINATION! For those that don't know my father wasn't Jewish, my step mother isn't Jewish and yet they adopted and adapted to these new restrictions being enforced by a 7 year old without (much) complaint. Can you imagine?

One evening Sherry (my step mom) was making pasta, patiently waiting, and waiting and waiting for the water to boil in my pot on my electric burner. It would take about 45 min boil a normal pot of water. A watched pot never boils, well a kosher pot doesn't even try. After an hour of fussing with this the pasta was cooking and I came down into the kitchen and like a hawk I clock the wooden spoon that Sherry was using to stir the pasta.

"Is that my spoon?"

"What spoon!!" Sherry cried as she flung the spoon behind her, realizing that it was not a dedicated Kosher spoon. Too late the damage was done. The wooden spoon had contaminated the pasta and I didn't eat it. Again, I was 7. To her immense credit Sherry didn't beat me to death with said wooden spoon. In fact there was no argument at all. We had tuna sandwiches for dinner. They wanted to be so careful, knowing the incredible pressure I was being put through to adhere to this new life and knew that it would tear me apart to fight not just two households but two religions. Children make very poor crusaders and my father never put me in a position to fight a religious war. Leave that to the middle east he would say. They've had more practice.

I started doing the majority of the cooking at the house by the time I was 9 or 10. Every day that I was at Dad and Sherry's I would make dinner after school. Dad became the trusted sous chef, his knife skills were impeccable and at 11 he had me take an intense knife class at Viking culinary in Bryn Mawr. I was about 20 years younger than everyone else in the class. At 10 I hadn't quite mastered Thanksgiving dinner and instead of getting a full sized turkey my dad got a turkey breast. Since it was only the 3 of us, a whole bird was beyond unnecessary. Now, again I can't stress enough how much I love Thanksgiving and even before I started cooking in earnest it was always such a show stopper going to my grandmother's and seeing the big golden turkey come to the table. I was star struck and knew that I had to have that every year. This year I didn't think would be any different and only in the way a child can, I see a flat aluminum pan in the oven and still expect a full turkey to appear, I was ready. When the lid was lifted and revealed the simple turkey breast I was utterly crestfallen. My devastation was comical but I swore to never let that happen again and for the next decade I bombarded our house with ever increasingly elaborate and outrageous Thanksgiving meals. There was never another turkey breast fiasco!

The first Thanksgiving after his death I was deep in the grief fog. I felt so detached from my body and what was going on around me. I spent a long time in that fog, going through the motions of living but I was in a trauma shock. There is a fight or flight reaction that we have instinctually but you can't fight or flight from death and to me it seemed like my brain shut down everything non essential as a way to protect me/it and process things that I wasn't even aware of at the time. I was exhausted all the time. I couldn't move for days at a time and I didn't understand that my brain was working overtime behind the scenes and it sucked every bit of energy out of my body for months. That Thanksgiving I spent with Kienan's family in Chicago and Michigan. It was the first Thanksgiving not with my Dad and also the first time meeting the extended members of Kienan's family. It was a wonderful trip and everyone couldn't have been nicer. Now, I am a typical neurotic east coaster. Sarcastic, dry and speedy. The wholesome genuine niceness of the Midwest freaks me out to my core. It's lovely, but I have no idea who to interact with it. "What do you mean, have a nice day? Are you trying to mug me? If I pay you will you stop smiling?"

There is a Jewish custom of tearing your clothes or wearing a torn ribbon for the first month of mourning and I did it diligently. I wore it longer than a month. There was something comforting about a visual grief reminder that people around you could recognize. It was a "Grieving person, proceed with caution" bit of armor. The morning after Thanksgiving the entire family is gathered for breakfast and one of Kienan's uncles spots my pin and ribbon and says "Oh what is that? Did you win something?"

Again, this came from only a place of absolute genuine curiosity and pleasantry. I couldn't quite help myself, "Well, I didn't quite win something so much as lost it."

He looked at me slightly confused. "It's a mourning pin," I quickly interjected.

"OH, Good Morning" (notice the spelling) he beamed at me.

.....I just sort of slowly backed away with what I can only assume was a dazed look on my face and immediately other members of the family smacked him upside the head, realizing exactly what had happened. He came to me later completely abashed and mortified and I of course understood his totally innocent mistake and laughed it off. It was my favorite moment of the entire holiday. My advice is when you are mourning, spend time with Midwesterners.