Comfort Food

COVID-19 and all the havoc it was capable of wreaking snuck up on me. I had followed the news in December and even into January, when reports still mostly focused on China and the western world seemed to have a certain air of arrogance that it wouldn’t, that it couldn’t, affect them. 

But on February 9, when the global death toll from the novel coronavirus surpassed the toll from the SARS epidemic of 2002-3, but a day before the U.S. even confirmed their 13th case, my mother was murdered by my father who then turned the gun on himself. 

I shivered in the cold of the February night, just a few hundred yards away from their bodies, waiting for hours to talk to Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents, to tell them what I knew, which is to say that it was, unequivocally, a murder-suicide. 

As the prudent ones among us spent the next month watching the pandemic slowly pan out in Europe and then in the United States, I spent the next month reeling from the loss of my mother, thinking of her last moments running in fear of the person who had controlled her — who had controlled all of us — for so long. 

And while there was little anyone could do to comfort my siblings and me, the community members who had watched us grow up, who saw my mother with makeup over blackened eyes, still brought food. Within hours of being told officially that yes, they were both dead, my sister and I began getting messages from people we hadn’t spoken to in years. Word of the murder spread quickly through the small town that raised us. We sat in my sister’s car, my parents’ dogs whining in her backseat, me holding my sister’s sleeping infant, who wrapped in my husband’s jacket, managed to keep me warm in the cold car, and pondered how they could have found out so quickly. But it didn’t matter, the messages kept coming. 

The next day — after we returned to my sister’s house from visiting my elderly grandfather and sitting with him after he learned the news — the food began showing up. Almost as quickly as the messages had come in the night before, the food and messages continued that morning and would continue for the next week or more. 

First, it was small. Just some cookies and a fruit tray. Then a platter of chicken nuggets from Chick-fil-A and the first of what would be many boston butts. I nibbled on the chicken nuggets even though they tasted like cardboard to me at the time. I left shortly after the boston butt came, never eating more than a handful of chicken nuggets. 

My oldest sister, Sky, and my brother, Cory, and I had decided to go back to my parents’ house. Sky wanted to get the guns out of the safe my father kept in a closet in their bedroom. I couldn’t have cared less about the guns. They only reminded me of the murder, and as I picked them up to load them into Sky’s car, I could not help thinking as I touched each barrel, “This could have just as easily been the one that killed her. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one.”  

Cory and I were focused on finding my father’s truck. He had not been staying at the house at the time, they had been separated and in the midst of a divorce, and he had hidden his truck in the thick woods behind the house before sneaking up to the house, breaking in, and gunning Mama down as she tried to run away. We both needed something to focus on. We could not handle the food, the kind strangers bringing it who asked questions like, “How are you doing?” when they should have known the answer was, “Not good.” 

We needed a task, something to do. My husband, Ron, and I walked miles around the house on foot looking for the white glint of his Ford pickup. My brother enlisted a neighbor and his Polaris for help. We looked and looked for any signs of where he might have hidden it, but either the GBI or the local Sheriff’s office had found it the night before and neglected to tell us, so we continued to search in vain. 

It seemed as if I could only find the truck, I could find something to make me understand why it happened. Or that by searching and not finding the truck, it was a sign that it had not been real, that he had never been there, that the past 18 hours or so had all been some terribly mistaken nightmare. Or that it meant that, yes, someone was murdered there, but it was not my parents, that they fled together just in time. But we could not find the truck. It meant that it had all really happened. 

When we finally exhausted our search and returned to my sister Christin’s house, stopping first to drop off the multitude of guns at a relative’s house for safekeeping and then to buy alcohol for Cory and me to make it through the night, the amount of food shocked me. Everywhere I looked, every countertop, every surface in the kitchen, seemed to be covered with food. What looked like the chicken nuggets and fruit from earlier turned out to be another tray of nuggets and fruit bowl entirely, in addition to what we already had, and there was an incredible spread of Olive Garden on the kitchen table. 

“Did they buy all of the food at Olive Garden?” I asked, pointing to the spread.

Everyone gave a dry laugh. 

I fixed a glass of wine before I fixed a plate of food. I did not want to eat. I did not want to be hungry. How could I be when my mother had just been murdered?

But the fact was, I had barely eaten all day and my husband and I had walked all around what had been my parents’ house looking for the truck. I could feel my stomach grumbling, and so I begrudgingly fixed a plate of chicken alfredo. 

Less than 24 hours after a murder-suicide, there was not time for the casseroles to be baked, the chicken to be fried. Still, all the extended family members, the family friends, they knew that we needed food, and so they scrambled to get us something. And we forced ourselves to eat it. 

The next few days were a haze of food, friends, and all the work to be done, all the things to be arranged after someone you love dies. We were brought boxes and boxes of fried chicken, boston butt and bag after bag of shredded barbeque. Lasagna after lasagna, both homemade and not. There were the “ooey gooey bars” made by the school cafeteria staff at the elementary school where my mother had worked as a teacher. There was the strawberry cobbler from my sister-in-law. There were more Chick-fil-A nuggets and chicken strips from Zaxby’s. More Olive Garden. Even more Golden Corral. There were bags of chips, a giant container of cheese puffs that my brother’s dog got into and ate with giant crunching gulps, supermarket containers of cookies, bags of plastic cups and paper plates, packs of toilet paper, napkins, and paper towels. Jugs of homemade sweet tea, store bought lemonade, and all manner of cokes. There was a homemade breakfast casserole and the  melt in your mouth doughnuts from a local bakery brought by two educators who had both taught or coached my siblings and me and also worked with my mother. 

It seemed that everywhere we turned for a week, there was food. We ran out of counter space to store it all, and had it not been for a community member bringing by a refrigerator normally used for a local nonprofit, we would not have had space to store it all. Lots of bread, casseroles, and shredded barbecue and chicken went into the freezer. We simply did not have the appetite for it. We sent some food to my grandfather’s house, where my aunt, my mother’s sister from out of state, and her family were staying. We begged visitors to fix plates, to take a plate home with them. 

On the day of my mother’s memorial service, the elementary school staff she had worked with graciously offered to feed us lunch after the service in the library of the school. I still remembered checking out books in the same library as a child and going to baby or wedding showers for teachers after school, mainly for the purpose of getting an afterschool snack and making awkward small talk with my mother’s friends as a pre-teen. We filed into the library in our black dresses and suits, our eyes and faces still red from the service and visitation after. It was still unbelievable to think that she could be gone — that in my father’s last selfish act, he had killed her. 

We stood around talking for a few minutes, trying to take our minds off what had just happened, trying to laugh, as the school staff fussed around the food, making their final touches. After a few minutes where we mostly sat silently, unable to successfully take our minds off our mother being dead, they announced that it was ready. We pushed my grandfather to go through first. His suit seemed to hang off of him, and he was able to walk the length of the procession only with the assistance of a cane. My brother walked through with him, explaining, with some help from the teachers and parapros on the other side of the table, what everything was. Once he was seated at a table, we all felt we could breathe a little easier. 

Slowly and reluctantly, with most of the men heading the line, we made our way through the buffet. We got small helpings of the smoked pork chops, the deviled eggs, the pasta salad, the squash casserole, the rolls, the peas. At the end of the line, a teacher with a perfect blond blowout, who used to walk down the halls of the school with Mama and had once taken pictures of two of my siblings and me for a surprise Christmas present — she fixed me a sweet tea. I walked over to the tables set up between the bookshelves where most of my family was already sitting. Ron walked behind me, and we sat just to the right of my siblings and right beside and in front of my cousins from Delaware. We were so close to everyone that our shoulders were a mere inch or two from touching. Although the room was large, most of it had been cornered off with bookshelves, and at least 40 people were in a space of maybe 2-300 square feet, maybe even less. It was not at all abnormal then. I was not thinking of COVID-19 as a major threat for me, only my own grief, but the mere thought of this closeness now makes my heart race.

The first few minutes of the meal were awkward. We were all still settling into our places at the table and our idea of what we had just gone through in the community civic center where we effectively said goodbye to our mother in the eyes of the community that knew her so well, that had watched us all grow up. Soon, we found comfort in the food and comfort in the idea of being together around a table, something Mama would have loved and appreciated. 

After a while, Ron and I were able to joke with my cousins Emily and Kevin, and Emily’s boyfriend Bobby, who we had met for the first time at the funeral. Ron has a way of putting anyone who seems to be sticking out at ease, and I was glad that we had ended up near them at the table. Emily and Kevin grew up in Delaware, and if I remember correctly, Bobby was from Massachusetts. The three of them were Yankees by all intents and purposes and they picked at the array of Southern dishes. They drank water instead of sweet tea or Coke. 

A few more minutes and the whole table seemed to have a story to tell about Mama. None of them stick out in my mind, only because they were the same ones we had been telling for days, the same ones we would continue to tell, but the fact was, they made us feel at ease.

My sister and I whispered about the dishes we did not like, as any Southern lady would do. We joked about the salt dispenser that practically spilled out half the salt on your plate, which reminded my brother of the time I had an elementary school friend over who claimed she loved cheese grits but then poured tons of salt onto the grits and refused to eat them. 

“Remember the time Madelyn — ” he started, not able to finish because he was already laughing. 

“With the grits?” I said, laughing too. 

He nodded his head, laughing so hard that he was silent. 

The rest of the table looked at us as if we were insane and someone said, “That doesn’t sound like a funny story at all.” 

It wasn’t that funny, but the story had been built up over the years in our family and we needed a laugh. 

Everyone continued waiting for us to get the rest of the story out, but we were still laughing too hard. 

“How do you even know what you’re talking about?” Emily asked. 

“I feel like this is just the way they communicate,” Jessica, my brother’s wife said. 

Eventually, they gave up on us telling the story. It wouldn’t have been as funny to them anyway. 

Some of Mama’s coworkers came around to refill our cups and then quietly slip away. Shortly after, they offered cake, both chocolate and caramel. Some people at the table were too full and shook their head no when asked, but I — having always been a fan of dessert and feeling bolstered by the conversation and much needed laughs — said, “Yes.” 

Dessert allowed the conversation and the stories to keep going, and looking back, I am grateful for that. 

The times we felt the most together were the times we were around a table. It was not because of the food. It was because of the Southern hospitality of the food and other gifts, and what it allowed for. Having the food allowed us not to have to worry about cooking, or worse yet, going out in public to get food. It allowed us freedom to reminisce, to talk, to laugh, to cry. More than anything, it allowed us to come together. For the four of us (my oldest sister Sky from my father’s first marriage included) and our significant others to come around a table and to be together, whether we picked at our food or not, whether we sat silently or wept or laughed and smiled at the good times. We were together. 

This togetherness would not have been possible just a month later, as the pandemic continued to spread overwhelmingly throughout the U.S., and I worried that so quickly after I lost my parents, I might lose another loved one. Those who did lose a loved one, who are losing loved ones, might have trays of food dropped off, but the extended family members or friends would not stop to chat less than 10 feet away. They would not get to share a lunch after the memorial made by some of their gone-on loved one’s closest friends. Many of them would not even get a memorial or funeral. 

Some may say, “It’s just food.” And maybe it was just food. But I felt happiest in those dark and depressing days of unbelievable grief, when I was around a table, when I had the family I had left around me, and when I had food made and brought by loving hands in front of me, when I was able to talk and laugh and cry and be physically close to loved ones without having anxiety.

Had my parents’ deaths happened just a month later, we wouldn’t have gotten a giant memorial service with hundreds of people in the local civic center. The lunch that allowed my brother and I to laugh so hard we were nearly crying might not have happened. Family members from out of state like my aunt and her family and even my oldest sister, an ICU nurse, probably would not have come. 

As people now start to become weary of the pandemic, as they start to think it is less of a threat, even as cases once again surge, they may think that it is once again okay to pack churches and civic centers full of people to mourn, to have a lunch where everyone is so close their shoulders are inches away from touching. My heart aches for all those who have lost someone, who are still losing them, that they might not get a moment like my brother and I shared at the table. It may seem silly to get hung up on something as simple as food, as a meal shared, but food was not just food. A meal was not just a meal. They meant so much more. They meant being able to laugh in spite of the horrific tragedy that had just upended our lives, as tragedy is upending so many American lives these days. We needed to laugh. We needed to eat. We needed to grieve. 

But it is not worth it to do those same things as we might have done them in the past. It is not worth it to pack civic centers, to sit so close as to nearly touch. As much as my heart aches for those who I know also need those moments of laughter amidst the grief, as I think about my elderly grandfather, my sisters and sister-in-law who are all nurses, I can tell you it is not worth it. To gather together is to risk losing more loved ones, a risk I know I cannot take, having lost two immediate family members on that cold and brutal February night. Instead, we must think of new ways we can provide comfort to those experiencing tragedy and pain. We must define new ways to reach out that do not include physical closeness. We must ask ourselves, “What can I do?” Because we must do something.

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