“His soul swooned slowly, as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” — “The Dead,” by James Joyce
Like many other American families, mine gathered on Thursday for Thanksgiving. Relatives journeyed from their homes in the region to gather together, at my mom’s house, over a feast, contributed to by all who joined. We loaded our plates up with turkey and a smattering of vegetable sides: the scoops of roasted sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, braised cabbage, cornbread stuffing, bright arugula salad, cranberry sauce, creamed corn casserole, and dinner rolls was all too much for our plates to even hold. We watched the Green Bay Packers manage a rare win against the Detroit Lions, clinking glasses of Champagne to celebrate a football victory, the close of another harvest season, and the joy of being together.
Every year, I grapple with the holiday: it’s yet another reminder of the fact that we live lives rife with moral and political contradictions. The settler-colonial project I was born into is not something I want to celebrate, but I am eager for opportunities to gather with family. Devin Kate Pope articulated this well in “Gathering to feast isn’t the problem:” “I acknowledge and am working in the reality that the history of Thanksgiving as it is generally told upholds and covers over the horrors of settler-colonialism. I don’t gloss over this and I believe that Indigenous Lands must get back into Indigenous hands. I also believe that people need to feast together in ways that build relationships and keep the work of healing and liberation going.” The energy derived from sharing food, asking about recipes or inspiration, cooking alongside each other, bumping shoulders in a convivial kitchen is infectiously life-affirming, and can be an encouragement to see and act beyond ourselves.
As I was finishing the braised cabbage this year — stirring in a few splashes of vinegar, a dash of salt, and sautéed red onions — my grandmother asked me about what I was making. What started as a simple enough conversation led to wondering about where my father’s mother’s archive of recipe cards were now: which of my aunts or uncles had them? She passed away well before I was born; I know Girlie through photographs and conversations like these, conversations that reminisce about her meatloaf and barbeque sauce recipes, her homemade bread, her ritual of drinking a Manhattan with my grandfather when he came home from work. When I read M.F.K. Fisher’s recipes and reflections on simple, economical, yet fulfilling cooking, I think of Girlie’s own practices: they would have spent much of their time in their kitchens during the same post-war years, and cooking was something Girlie did out of the necessity of feeding a Catholic family’s worth of mouths; she recorded these practices, preserving them, and unbeknownst to her, they continue to be praised and celebrated today.
My dad passed away over Thanksgiving, two years ago, the holiday that he would identify as his favorite, citing the menu, not straying from his love of meat and potatoes. His holiday preference is something I’ve struggled to understand, my mind darting first to the horrors that this country has continuously inflicted in the land it calls its own, as well as elsewhere. Then, though, I force myself to reflect on the ways he used the holiday as an opportunity to build relationships through gathering over food and to look outward, beyond himself and our immediate family. I think of the years when he opened our home to friends from abroad, or times when I was in high school and he and I served up warm Thanksgiving meals at soup kitchens. I think of his commitment to teaching regional Indigenous practices and foodways — and the gravity of their erasure — to his 5th grade students.
There is very little linearity to grief. In the immediate days, weeks, months of experiencing loss, I was experiencing grief in its rawest form, and perhaps that was the newness of it, and the newness of my dad’s physical absence from my life. The time since that period has stretched, becoming more distant; my grief is evolving as time flows and life continues to unspool. It follows cycles, feeling more acute at birthdays and holidays; it also infuses itself into everyday life. And rather than a void, sometimes it feels more like fond remembrance. The lessons that I’ve learned from my dad and the curiosity with which he experienced the world are with me every day; my grief has settled into my soul, acting more as a guide now than the incomprehensible despair that it once was: it pushes me toward outwardness, to share what I learned from my dad with the world.
In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” a poignant coda to his collection Dubliners, he writes of people gathering to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany together: folks young and old gather to dance, sing, share stories, and eat a carefully prepared meal. The story culminates with a reflection of our relationship to our dead, underscoring that relationships persist after death, that memories of our dead are affirmations of our life, and that life and death exist alongside each other, even as part of one another: “His soul swooned slowly, as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
The date of my dad’s death and the date that Thanksgiving falls on will not always exactly coincide, but it’s the holiday that I will always associate with my dad and with his absence. Since he’s passed away, Thanksgiving has taken on a new significance for me: it’s a chance for me to connect with his memory, to come together with loved ones to share memories of him, and his mother, and others who have touched our lives, all in an expression of gratitude of the very ability to gather. In feasting on Thursday, we were able to commune with our dead, recognizing their everlasting places within each of us. Feasting was a reminder of our responsibilities to our dead: to perpetuate life and love, to continue to share that beyond ourselves.
ohh i was just revisiting “the dead” a few weeks ago for similar grief reasons- this was so lovely.
This is such a touching reflection on grief and food and relationships, and how they all overlap. Thanks for writing (and for including me) <3