Grieving Patricia Pickens: Dinner Plans

"When you lose a parent, you lose your past..." ~ Ken Haugk

RecIpes are peeks into the past. 

Following a recipe helps us taste the past.  When I lost a parent, I lost the past, but recipes reclaim.  Seeing, hearing and touching my mother are no longer possible.  Through recipes I can taste and smell my mother's cooking.  Recipes help me cope while the past fades.

I need a set of instructions, formula or procedure as I grieve my mother.  Improvisation has its place but twelve years after her death, I need a recipe.  Journeying Through Grief is proving helpful.

The recipe requires one book to be read at specific intervals during the grieving process.  Three weeks, three months, six and eleven months mark the times I am supposed to read the next pamphlet.  The temptation to keep doing what I've been doing is severe but I am choosing to use a recipe to move on.  There is a part of me that bucks coloring inside the lines.  Conscribed routine is suffocating.

Yet within me, something needs to be snuffed out: a clinging tenticle of grief's pride.  Losing my past, like a recipe, requires the slaying of a thing.

About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. 13Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” ~ Acts 10:9-13

As Peter was proud of his ceremonial cleanness, so am I proud of my relationship with my mother.  Posthumous, whistful recollections of her aphorisms captures imaginations.  Grief can be a talisman for the needy, whipped out when convenient.  Recipes often require meat but to include the meat in the dish, the preparer must get up, kill and eat.

There is a thing living in me that needs to be killed and eaten; a prideful constrictor with tentacles touching heart, mind, body and spirit.  How long it has been and from whence it came is unknown but reading Luke the Physician and Ken Haugk persuades that now is the time.  My mother is fine but I am not.  I need a recipe to deal with my grief.  One of the ingredients will be the flesh of my unprocessed grief.