Three-quarters of the way through a grueling 10-day hospital stay for my older daughter, Orli, the cookbook author Joan Nathan called me from hospital reception. Her daughter, she said, had read about Orli’s latest surgery via social media. Could I come downstairs?
I met Joan in the hospital atrium. Out of her bag she pulled a full Musakhan, the Palestinian chicken dish baked in sumac over pita with pine nuts and onions, Yemenite saffron rice, hamentaschen. In her arms she carried a six-braid German-style challah, studded with nigella seeds. It smelled like joy.
Joan told me about a time, decades earlier, when her own daughter, herself now a mother, was a baby being treated in this hospital. She mentioned moments when others had stepped in to care for her. I couldn’t stay to hear more; every moment away from Orli was one I couldn’t retrieve.
Still, the divinity in Joan’s appearance was not lost on me. She is perhaps the person best known for Jewish cooking in America — she once had a PBS show. Like many others, I knew her first through her books, her columns, my mother’s carefully clipped out recipes. I laid out her beneficence in the paltry hospital parents’ space, a bounty set against the stark light of the half-empty vending machine, the broken coffee maker, my tiny hospital sized ginger ale poured into an even smaller plastic cup. In Orli’s room I set the challah down on a paper plate and took a photo.
Life in the hospital was often grim and boring (once, when an actor in an Elsa costume stopped by, I took a photo and labeled it “Elsa in Hell.”). The worst was returning to a communal refrigerator to discover your own food, from a few weeks prior.
It was startling to receive Joan’s meal, but not entirely surprising. We were not unknown to each other. I interviewed her, once; she belongs to my synagogue. What was shocking was the way, when Orli died one year later, Joan stepped into our lives, unobtrusively but decisively.
Just days after shiva ended, in the bleary hours when the endless march of visitors ended and reality set in, Joan wrote and invited us to dinner the following week with her daughter and daughter-in-law. She wasn’t precious about it, she wasn’t gentle with our feelings, she just asked.
And then, she asked again. To her table. To take a walk. To see if our younger daughter, Hana, wanted to learn how to make an omelet, or to try out recipes for a children’s cookbook. Joan has a harried energy; you feel like each conversation is a continuation of the last. We were handed decades old condiments from distant lands to wrestle open, queried on our thoughts about new dishes. We were added in, in other words, like a spice. Sometimes we talked about Orli, but not always.
In fall, I invited her into my sukkah, the temporary outdoor hut Jews sit in for our autumn festival. I panicked to cook for her, but then she took notes on one of my family recipes. In winter, when I shyly suggested we celebrate a night of Hanukkah together, she made it a party — brought in other children for Hana to meet, had cookie dough ready for the kids to roll out and cut into edible dreidels.
What is necessary in grief is often the most basic, and the most difficult — consistency of presence. Joan is 81, about four years older than my mother. She lost her husband, Allen, just weeks after Orli was diagnosed with liver cancer in late 2019. One afternoon last spring she offered me a spoon to share her bowl of ice cream and told me a story: After her first two children, she lost twins. One was stillborn, the other lived outside the womb, but only briefly. Still, she continued to live, she had people to live for. “I mostly consider myself lucky,” she has told me. She went on to have one more child. She offered the story not as comparison, but as context.
I’ve come to see that, after loss, part of what fuels a person’s ability to keep living — and not just survive — is a continued engagement with curiosity.
In mourning, and in crisis, food is often an action, an act. It is typically how we meet the needs of those whose pain we cannot imagine, especially when we feel stymied by our limitations. It is often dropped off, for the family’s benefit, and for our own. It can be done without offering, or insisting upon, presence.
In the early weeks of Orli’s bewildering diagnosis, our home was inundated with food. We set up a cooler on our stoop for drop-offs, an online form filled up with well-meaning friends, acquaintances, synagogue members, others. It was a relief, in those early days, not to have to think or work, to just open a container and collapse.
But it was not sustainable. Hana and Orli wanted recipes they recognized. Plus, I missed the normalcy, the rhythm, of cooking. We thanked everyone and turned inward. When Orli died, last March, our table was swollen with sweets, babkas and rugelach and cookies, a spread we no longer had enough people to consume. Food felt overwhelming, irrelevant. Tasteless.
Joan met Orli early in the last summer of Orli’s life, a few months after that hospital drop off, at a picnic, on a perfect weekend. It helps that, in this relationship, Orli is not simply an idea. She once heard Orli’s scathing wit, her snark.
The other day I stopped by to see Joan; she was just back from promoting her new memoir. She lamented she had no food to serve but then pulled out lavash bread from a local bakery and a silver bowl, cold from her fridge, filled with a new idea: eggplant and walnuts and cashews, blended. She spread some on bread for me, insisted I try it.
“Let’s walk,” she said, grabbing her keys. “Doesn’t it feel good to walk?”
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