CHAPTER 5
On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces.
—Isaiah 25:6–8
I live in my body. My very existence is made possible by my physicality, this fleshy imperfect organism that is all my own. Dallas Willard once wrote that the body is “the original and primary place of my dominion and my responsibility. It is only through it that I have a world in which to live… It is only with and through this body that I receive a place in time and space and human history.”1
Despite the miracle of our physical materiality, we all want to crawl out of our skin sometimes. We resent the confines of our bodies, disparage their shape or size, and fear their deterioration. Our devices allow us to deny our bodies’ limitations and perimeters. We can mentally teleport ourselves to our preferred destinations at any time of the day or night. The digital world has disembodied us. Much of our lives is cognitively far-flung, rarely rooted in the physical space our bodies actually occupy.
Most Homo sapiens throughout history have had to think more about their bodies than privileged twenty-first-century Americans. In a world of scarcity, people have been necessarily preoccupied with what they will eat and drink and what they will wear (see Matt. 6:25). My body, on the other hand, is unusually well cared for. I have remarkably easy access to food when I’m hungry, water when I’m thirsty, warmth when I’m cold, and treatment when I’m sick. Vaccines and antibiotics have eliminated many common deadly illnesses. Because the resources needed to take care of my body are so readily available, it’s easy to forget how crucial my physical well-being is. The placated body is easy to ignore. My good health in many ways feels like a foregone conclusion.
Rather, I am typically preoccupied with the parts of my being that I’ve deemed need more intentional tending, the things that are more susceptible to hurt or upheaval. My thoughts, my emotions, my spirit—these are the parts of me that are prone to harm, the parts that really matter, right? These are the parts that make me, me.
To compartmentalize the various aspects of our being is a flawed and sometimes fatal way to live. The body cannot be severed from the spirit any more than paint can be removed from a mural or melody can be extracted from a song. It is every bit as vulnerable to harm and needs just as much care as the spiritual and emotional life. A symbiotic relationship exists between my physical and nonphysical selves, and when one is wounded, the other suffers. My health, physicality, thoughts, emotions, and spiritual well-being all coalesce to create me. They are all an essential part of my identity.
When I grieve, it is not just my heart that grieves. My body grieves too. Exposure to danger or loss sets off a series of physiological responses. Our autonomic nervous system and endocrine glands are designed to make us sweat, increase our heart and respiratory rates, relax our bowel and bladder muscles, and make more glucose when we are faced with a threat. This readies us for instant action, allowing us to combat the thing we sense is hazardous to our security. But the chemical messengers that trigger all these reactions often continue to circulate long after the perceived danger has passed. Many people report living in a state of heightened awareness and stress for many weeks after a significant loss. Some say it feels like panic.2 Persistent, prolonged panic.
The most immediate physical symptoms of grief are fairly obvious: fatigue, digestive issues, muscle weakness, headaches, joint pain, and changes in sleeping and eating habits.3 But research indicates that grief has the potential to have a hidden and long-term impact on our bodies. Studies show that bereavement is associated with elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that is linked to cardiac risks, reduced immune function, and overall reduction in quality of life. Assessments of individuals in the first few weeks of loss report increased circulation of inflammatory cells. Altered heart rate and blood pressure are observed for months after a loss. In fact, an increased risk of mortality exists for individuals suffering from grief, up to 40 percent for a surviving spouse.4
Our physical bodies tell the story of what we have experienced emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We may believe we can overcome the physical impact of trauma and loss by maintaining a certain level of mental fortitude or spiritual tenacity. But we cannot forever outsmart the physicality of grief and trauma. Not even our numbed-out, well-fed, drugged-up twenty-first-century American bodies are invincible.
Our ancestors seemed to understand the physical impact of grief. The Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages tell the story of Sir Gawain discovering the dead body of his brother Gaheris. The narrative says of Gawain that “his legs gave way, his heart failed, and he fell as if dead. For a long time he remained thus. Finally, he got up and ran to Gaheris, clasped him in his arms, and kissed him, but the kiss caused him so much sorrow that he fell again, unconscious, on the dead man’s body.”5
This extreme physical reaction to death was not unusual in medieval literature, nor was it uncommon in traditional mourning practices of the day. Many understood that encounters with grief and loss could overcome the body and initiate a physical reaction that was similar to death itself for the bereaved. In fact, grief was often listed as a cause of death in medical records from long ago.6
But as we learned from the Irish keeners, the church has at times pushed back on grandiose displays of physical and emotional turmoil. The canons of the patriarchate of Alexandria stated: “Those who are in mourning must remain in the church, monastery, or house, silent, calm and dignified, as befits those who believe in the truth of the resurrection.”7 A popular saying of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux from the Middle Ages was, “Non culpamus affectum, sed excessum” (We do not blame the emotion, but the excess).8
I wonder who in the church would have dared to scold or charge with indignity the “excess” of our Savior Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, whose own anguish became so manifested in His physical body that His sweat became blood.
The morning after a miscarriage is hard to describe. The air feels heavy. Languid. Time stands still.
This was my first pregnancy. After a couple of years of trying to have a baby but not succeeding, we were shocked and elated to get a positive pregnancy test just a day before my thirty-third birthday. We spent the next month and a half dreaming and arguing about names and nursery decor, all the things nervous first-time parents do.
But during a routine ultrasound, our greatest fears were realized. At some point around the nine-week mark, the baby’s heart had stopped beating and the womb had started to collapse. I had the doctor check a second time, and a third. There had been no outward sign that anything was wrong. No bleeding. No cramping. She held a box of tissues in front of my blank, tearless face. I was stupefied, but there was no doubt. Even my untrained eye could see it on the grainy ultrasound image. I was no longer pregnant. At least not exactly.
Miscarriage is a peculiar kind of death. It is a death that lives in your own body. The fatality is a part of you. A life has expired within the depths of your own anatomy and yet you go on living. A myriad of feelings ensue. Disbelief, guilt, shame, the feeling of being unclean, the feeling of being betrayed by your own body.
Due to the late nature of the loss, my doctor recommended a dilation and curettage process to remove the remains of the baby. This would be safest for me and ensure a more speedy recovery and opportunity to once more try again. Trying. That’s all that motherhood had been for me up to that point. Striving. Hoping. Losing.
The ultrasound and diagnosis were on a Wednesday. I asked for five days to pray for a miracle, so a follow-up ultrasound was scheduled for Friday, then another on Monday prior to the surgery, just to be sure. Yes, we prayed for a miracle, but my body, heart, and mind recognized instinctively that the baby was gone. We awoke that Thursday morning to a bright, sunny July morning that somehow felt gray and dull. The vibrant greens and yellows of the meadows and hillsides surrounding our house were muted outside our bedroom window. We both called out of work that day and lay in bed a long while, still and mostly silent, reorienting ourselves to the new reality that felt absent, most chiefly, of hope.
It’s hard to know how to pass the time that first day after a loss so significant, the in-between of the death and the end. I felt like a walking corpse. The baby was still with me but was gone. When I finally had the energy to roll over and ask Tim what he wanted to do, he replied matter-of-factly, “We should probably go blueberry picking.”
Right. Of course.
Old Orchard Creek Farm lies almost thirty miles down a winding, scenic mountain road from our house. We’d been talking about going for a few weeks, as it was full harvest season for blueberries. I pulled on an old T-shirt and we loaded ourselves into our Honda CRV, making our way through the soft Appalachian countryside.
We picked almost a year’s supply of blueberries that day. We breathlessly climbed the hillside covered in old blueberry bushes and greedily filled our buckets, bees buzzing all around us and sweat trickling down our necks. I ate fistfuls of them as we picked, the sun beating down on us all the while. I carried that tiny, silent, still heart within me up and down the orchard rows until the colors of the land became vibrant again. When we got home, we washed the blueberries and laid them out on our kitchen table to dry. What we could not eat or make into pies that week, we froze and used in smoothies and berry cobblers for months to come. In our sorrow, we labored, gathered, and gleaned. And we were fed.
I will always remember the wisdom of my husband, that his first inclination after learning that my body was passing through the valley of the shadow of death was this: Let’s go feed that body. Let’s give it sunshine. Let’s let it breathe.
If there is one mourning tradition that has remained largely intact in the Southern part of the United States, it’s funeral feasts. Feeding the bereaved family is our ultimate grief ritual.
Growing up, I remember tables and tables of all kinds of casseroles, fried chicken, and deviled eggs being served after a visitation or funeral. There were apple pies, those wobbly Jell-O molds, and KFC biscuits arranged neatly in bread baskets to give the appearance that they’d been made at home from scratch. My mom would often cook and deliver meals to families who had lost loved ones. Beef pot roast, chicken casserole, and strawberry pretzel salad were her specialties. Even before the internet and the advent of meal train websites, a bereaved family could expect weeks of home-cooked meals to be delivered by neighbors, church communities, and coworkers. I’m not sure how it was all coordinated, but I do know this: a grieving family was never lacking in calories.
For the Southerner, there is very little symbolism or, frankly, nutritional consideration, in the food that is offered. We have a tightly held conviction that there is no sorrow that an abundance of butter cannot soothe. But historically and globally, the food served to the bereaved was symbolic, an art form in some ways. The symbolism provided a physical representation of sadness and helped to tell the story of the loss. Food played a precise role in the ritual of burying the dead and was often specifically designed to nurture the broken body of the bereaved.
Traditional Jewish practice calls for the meal of condolence, the first meal served after the burial of a loved one. The meal is prepared by neighbors and should include bread or rolls, the staff of life. It should also include hard-boiled eggs to symbolize the cyclical or continuous nature of life. Some note that the boiled egg is the only food that hardens the longer it is cooked, therefore serving as a reminder that a person must harden themselves in the face of grief.9
In days gone by in Switzerland, men would wrap lemons in their handkerchiefs and place them under their hats during funerals. After the ceremony, they would place the lemons on the graves as a way to symbolize the sharpness or bitterness of death and grief.10
Belgian funeral foods are traditionally black, devoid of color to symbolize the bleakness of death. Dark breads and cakes are served on black plates. Red wine is forbidden due to its color, so only white wine can be served. Fortunately, chocolate is allowed.11
In many countries, including England and Holland, it was customary to serve a kind of cookie or biscuit at the funeral service. The name or initial of the deceased was printed on the wrapper or imprinted directly on the cookie. Sometimes the cookies weren’t even eaten by the mourners, and instead were kept for months and even years as a type of souvenir from the funeral, a token of remembrance of the dead.12
These cookies may have evolved from an older tradition of eating “corpse cakes.” In Germany, corpse cakes were made of leavened dough by the woman of the house of the deceased. The dough would be left to rise on the chest of the deceased after he or she had been covered with a linen cloth. The dough was thought to absorb the qualities of the departed loved one. It was then baked and the virtues were passed on to the mourners who consumed the bread. Similar traditions, of placing food, drink, and even snuff on the body of the dead before serving it to friends and family, were common in Central Europe and Ireland.13
In the Greek Orthodox Church, it is traditional to make a mourning dish called koliva to be eaten on the ninth day of grieving. A typical koliva recipe calls for a mixture of wheat berries, sesame seeds, walnuts, almonds, raisins, and pomegranates. The dish is full of nourishing ingredients: protein, healthy carbohydrates and fats, and antioxidants. This tradition predates Christianity. The seeds symbolize the life of the departed; once they are consumed, the spirit of the departed lives on in the mourner’s life and body. Christian tradition looks to the words of John 12:24 to affirm the ritual: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”14
Fortunately, this tradition of eating at a funeral is one of the few grief rituals that, in many cases, has actually improved over time. In the Middle Ages in Europe, massive—and expensive—funeral feasts were expected to be provided by the bereaved for the community of condolers. It was considered shameful if you were too poor to provide a decent meal for the funeral guests.15 But as time went on, the needs of the grieving family were considered to be the primary concern.
There have always been practical considerations connected to funeral foods. The traditional funeral pie of the Amish is the raisin pie because the ingredients aren’t seasonal and therefore can be made at a moment’s notice. It also travels well in the event that the bereaved friend lives some distance away.16 Ham is a traditional component of any good British funeral tea. Ham leftovers can be kept by the bereaved family for several days and are appropriate to serve at any meal of the day. So common is the practice of serving this dish at funerals in Britain that the dead were often said to be “buried with ham.”17
All these traditions acknowledge the physicality of what has transpired. They recognize that the bodies of the bereaved have taken a beating, and that proper dietary sustenance is needed to aid in restoration. The physical act of nourishment at least begins to address the relational amputation that has transpired in the death of a loved one.
Eating is often the first right step after loss. As the anguish rages inside you and all around you, the physical act of eating and drinking forces you back into the bodily rhythms and routines of everyday life. It’s often the one “normal” thing you do in grief. In some ways, eating is an act of defiance. As food journalist Lisa Rogak writes: “There’s no better way to prove you’re alive… than by eating.” She goes on, “When you’re sharing a meal after a funeral, you’re really poking a thumb in the eye of death. After all, with the simple act of eating, you’re assuming you’re going to need the fuel for the future you expect you’re going to have… You can ask any caterer: most people eat a lot more food at funerals than at weddings. And that cuts across all cultures.”18
I profoundly underestimated how powerful the physical sensation of grief would be. I felt like my brain had been put in a blender; like I had swallowed a bowling ball; like my skin was crawling with ants; like my heart, not just the metaphorical one but the literal one, had been launched into outer space.
Every significant loss I’ve experienced has been accompanied by some form of physical illness in my own body. Days after my grandmother died, I got food poisoning from a suspicious dish of baked fish and rice in Uganda. I became ill hours before boarding a long flight from Entebbe to Monrovia, Liberia. I was so pale and sweaty the flight attendant almost didn’t let me get on the plane.
My body handled my first two miscarriages as well as could be expected, but by the time I had my third miscarriage the day after Ash Wednesday, I was well worn down by years of loss and infertility. Two days after I stopped bleeding, I experienced one of the worst stomach bugs of my life. I became so dehydrated that my heart began racing and my blood pressure plummeted. Tim had to rush me to the emergency room for treatment and I felt weakened and fragile for several weeks after.
During the three weeks leading up to my sister’s death, I came down with a horrible virus that plagued me for almost a month. My fever soared to over 103, and the day she died I was still suffering from severe night sweats. In the hazy days that followed her death, my throat was raw and my ears were ringing. By the time we gathered for her funeral, I had lost almost fifteen pounds.
Because of these experiences, my memories of acute grief are profoundly somatic in nature. Bereavement to me feels like physical pain, a true ache in the bones and fever in the body. Loss is a memory I carry in my flesh, revisiting me at the cellular level. Nevertheless, in my pride, I assumed that if I could simply sort through the emotions I was having, then the body I inhabited would follow suit. I once again expected that the psychological aspects of my being were superior to the physical, that they could somehow hit some magical override button. Perhaps we are all recovering Gnostics, resentful of the ways our corporeity and empirical matter seem to hold us back and reveal the truth of how we are actually doing.
My friends saw what I could not see in the mirror. My body was losing the battle against grief. During a quick trip home in the midst of my sister’s illness, my friend Christin delivered platefuls of pad thai and sushi. She sat with me on my couch and we cried and stuffed our faces, the first real meal I’d had in days. She tucked my baby into bed, and then all but tucked me in as well. The day after Rachel died, my friend Joni drove all the way to my hometown in Tennessee and took me out to my favorite local dive for breakfast where we ate eggs and chocolate chip pancakes dripping with maple syrup. My parents’ neighbors delivered trays full of sandwich meats and cheeses, providing sustenance not only for us but also for the endless stream of close friends and family who had come in to offer support.
My mother-in-law from Wisconsin was down south during this time to help with the kids and she marveled at the distinct quality of Southern hospitality: pies, baked veggies drenched in butter, lasagna with endless layers, stews, barbecue and baked beans, cornbread casseroles, and all sorts of Southern delicacies showed up daily at our front door with a hug and warm words from church ladies, former colleagues, and old friends. I requested some of the recipes from those dishes, forever expanding my own repertoire of meals.
When I returned home after Rachel’s death, I found that my fridge and pantry had been stocked with milk, eggs, bread, leafy greens, yogurt, and cereal by my friends Lizzy, Emily, and Laurie—who also happened to clean my house from top to bottom while they were there. My friend Erin, with help from our church worship team, put together a tote full of healthy snacks to grab for the countless long road trips back to Tennessee that would follow in the months to come.
Pound by pound, fiber by fiber, cell by cell, my body re-formed and healed. And while the pies and pancakes served as an important and much-needed distraction from the pain of the initial loss, it was the long-term, habitual selection of real, healthy, nourishing foods that made the greatest impact. Nutritional psychiatrists note that serotonin, the ever-important neurotransmitter that mediates mood and inhibits pain, is primarily produced in the gastrointestinal tract. Whether or not you have good or bad gut bacteria facilitating this production plays an essential role in your overall health. Good gut bacteria comes from real, simple, and wholesome nutrition.
The brain requires a constant source of fuel (i.e., food), and if that fuel is high-quality, containing lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, the brain and its functional capacity will have some protection from oxidative stress, the damaging “waste” or free radicals that are produced when the body uses oxygen.19 Simply put, the food you eat has a significant impact on your body, brain, and emotional fortitude.
I can honestly say that food, and I mean proper nutrition, brought me back to life after grief, almost as much as Scripture, prayer, and counseling. The daily ritual of scrambling an egg, of blending a spinach smoothie, of microwaving a hearty stew prepared by a friend—this moment-by-moment choice to be present in my body, to nurture my body, and to honor my body and all it had been through—was vital to my recovery. Meals became like liturgy to me. On the days when I could think of nothing else to do but cry and fret, I would remind myself, “There’s one other thing to do.”
Eat.
Author Janet Reich Elsbach writes, “The things we survive have one common thread: if we got through it, we must have eaten something.” She goes on to describe the food offerings great and small that she received in the aftermath of her own sister’s battle with cancer and eventual death:
The bar of chocolate in an envelope, the bowl of hand-arranged seeds festooned with flowers, the homemade gingerbread people and the store-bought bagels, the pocket-sized gestures and the trunk-loads of food all made indelible impressions. Each one was a strand in the rope that tethered me to the land of the living and together they eventually pulled me to my feet again, altered but upright.20
Food is featured prominently throughout Scripture. It was an irresistible desire for the forbidden fruit that catapulted the world into chaos, and it will be a wedding supper that will mark the world’s ultimate restoration. Feasts were embedded in the worship calendar of the ancient Israelites and were often held after long seasons of suffering. Jesus’ miracles repeatedly involved the provision of food to hungry crowds, and the writer of Ecclesiastes lauds the savoring of food and drink as the antidote to disillusionment.
Why does food hold such a powerful and captivating place in our imaginations? Perhaps it is because the act of eating is experienced both by the body and by the soul. It is banal in nature, required for the preservation of our individual bodies and the species at large, but it is also extraordinarily pleasurable. Unlike many of the other mundane tasks my body requires of me to keep it alive, eating is truly enjoyable. God made food to taste good, to bring joy. Eating is both necessity and indulgence, survival and celebration.
The act of eating seems to be a first step in a person’s reemergence from the valley of the shadow of death. After Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, He immediately instructed those attending her to give her something to eat (see Luke 8:53). Poor Eutychus, who fell to his death after falling asleep on the windowsill during one of Paul’s long-winded sermons, was raised from the dead and straightaway headed back upstairs to share a meal with his fellow believers (see Acts 20:9–11). It was only after Jesus had provided a net full of fish and cooked up a savory breakfast on the shore that the disciples even recognized their resurrected Lord. The sharing of a meal together was the first act of true fellowship and communion they experienced with Jesus after that gruesome and traumatic day at the cross.
It is as if eating is proof of life. It shows that the survivor has chosen to go on living—to nourish her body so as to proceed, painful though it may be, into another day. It is also, perhaps, a choice to begin savoring once again the beauty and goodness that life has to offer. It is an act of faith that abundance still exists, even as you recover from an encounter with sorrow. Even if one is simply going through the motions, to eat is a holy act. So holy, Christ chose it as one of the church’s most central acts of worship. Tish Harrison Warren writes: “Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done ‘in remembrance of him,’ Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his followers to do something impressive or mystical… but instead he picks the most ordinary of acts, eating, through which to be present with his people.”21
We cannot subsist on sorrow alone forever. Sometimes the grief can be so all-encompassing that it seems to commandeer our most commonplace habits. Job said sighing became like a meal to him (see Job 4:24); and the psalmist said his tears were his daily food (see Ps. 42:3).
In stark contrast, Isaiah writes of a time of joy after a time of long suffering. On the Mount of Zion, after the Lord had brought justice to the earth and salvation to His children, the people feasted at a great banquet together. Not only did they eat meat, they ate only the choicest pieces. Not only did they drink wine, they drank the finest, aged wine (see Isa. 25:6). This holy replacement of sorrow for sustenance, of destitution for feasting, is part of the healing God brings. It is a physical, embodied restoration that God enacts in our lives. He not only addresses the emotional wounding; He resuscitates the visceral, material parts of our being as well. This, after all, is the true miracle of the resurrection—that both body and soul are brought back to life.