Death for Dinner
Traci BrimhallINGREDIENTS:
12 black balloons, if you remember
8 sugar skeleton teacups, or inherited glasses
1 pan of cornbread
1 double batch of chili
1 batch of lentil soup
RECIPE:
1. Lower the lights, stir the soup again, listen for the doorbell to announce the arrival of the first guest of your death dinner. Most guests don’t know each other. They’re invited because each of them had talked comfortably about death before. You knew it would be a strange invitation to send—Come have dinner with me and chat about dying!—but you went to a website for hosting death dinners, watched their videos, clicked through their questions, and received their sample invitation to send to friends, who said “Hell yes, count me in!” and saved the date on their calendars.
2. The doorbell continues to ring. The counter fills up with bottle after bottle of wine. The cutting boards fill up with new cheeses. Everyone introduces themselves as you pour drinks and count who is here. You pull out your planner, doublecheck the invitation list and look at the table again. Eight seats,
six friends, plus you. One place setting is unaccounted for. Or maybe subliminally you meant to invite any lonely spirit to join the dinner party. You think it’s foolish to believe in signs, even though you’re desperate for one. And you’ve been experimenting with being a believer lately, so you decide not to clear it. You ask everyone to grab a bowl of soup and join you and the ghost at the table.
3. “To start the evening,” you begin, “let’s bring a sense of gratitude to the table and acknowledge our ancestors.” This feels so out of character to you, but this script is what the death dinner website sent you to give a sense of purpose and order to the night. You do not normally call your dead ancestors. You don’t invite them to your table, but you’d recently talked with someone who lights candles for her ancestors and talks to them. You asked her what they talked about, and she said she tells them about her day and asks for their advice. She didn’t do that when they were alive, but she’s closer with them now that they are dead. You felt that constriction around your heart the way you always do when you feel envy.
4. “Let’s raise a glass to someone who is no longer with us, someone you admire deeply, and in no more than twenty words, share why you admire them,” you read the instructions off the script, stumbling over someone else’s language. As a child you would start dinner with grace. You could hide in that language like any prayer without an “I.” The guest to your left begins. There are more than 20 words in everyone. Everyone keeps introducing themselves and their losses—the grandparents and parents, even the babies. You all keep raising your glasses, and keep remembering your loved ones and saying their beautiful names.
INGREDIENTS:
6,243 memories of past meals
1 inherited cookbook
4 pages of handwritten recipes folded in half
1 glass dish your mother put her rings in when she baked
1 yard sale where her matching canister sets and chipped floral plates disappeared into other people’s homes
RECIPE:
1. Remember when your mother loved to host parties when you were younger, laying out the table with tablecloths, runners, candles, her wedding china and white cloth napkins in fake crystal napkin rings? The house was full of music, games, and friends. Kids would be sent to bedrooms or basements while the house roared. Even after she started to withdraw from the world and curl into herself like a fallen leaf, your mother still loved to prepare elaborate meals on holidays. A Christmas Eve feast, a special Christmas morning Dutch pancake and Bailey’s in your coffee. When those evaporated, too, it was takeout cheesecake and champagne while watching Hallmark movies.
2. One of those Christmases toward the end she gave you a cookbook with all the recipes she thought you needed, though there was no Christmas Eve feast in there. No Dutch pancakes. No takeout number for Cheesecake Factory. There were recipes you remembered, and some you never remember eating. You remember Taco Bell after soccer practices, buckets of KFC at the park after church, pinwheel cookies hidden like relics or like sins in the freezer.
3. It was her cookbook that helped you grieve her after she died. You made a beef stroganoff you swore you never had in childhood, though it was delicious. You make creamed corn,
apple turnovers, dinner rolls from scratch, all sorts of things You’re sure she made at those big house parties when her life felt like it might fulfill her. Each birthday you still celebrate with her, a slice of cheesecake, a movie whose ending you can predict in the first five minutes, though you’ll cry when love finds the characters anyway, their happiness so beautifully choreographed that a gentle snow falls on their sweet confessions.
4. Your mother’s best friend said her heart failed because it carried too much unforgiveness. A fire burned in the restaurant’s fireplace even though it was summer. You stabbed the wilted spinach of your salad and nodded because betrayal is that easy, because the dressing made the greens shine, and the taxidermied duck bolted to the wall was not listening. Someone else could say your mother’s love came easy but not her forgiveness. Some days you hate God for how he forgives, all that grape juice you swallowed thinking about blood.
5. One thing your mother’s cookbook didn’t cover was a standard wake casserole. Most families have something that’s a good goto for anyone experiencing major life events—births, illnesses, and deaths. Neighbors, friends, and community members all pull out the recipe cards for lasagnas, baked chicken and orzo, lemon bars, tricolored pastas, and tuna mushroom casserole. When your mother died, all the countertop surfaces were filled with dishes covered in aluminum foil. Trays and trays of food no one had appetites for, and there was no freezer space to save anything, even after you resurrected a tasteless pinwheel cookie from the back and let it thaw on your tongue like a communion wafer.
INGREDIENTS:
7 friends
8 empty plates
4 empty bottles of wine
1 printed script from deathoverdinner.org
1 spirit, you hope
RECIPE:
1. By the time you finish your introductions at the death dinner, an hour has passed, your bowls are empty, and half of you have already cried. All of you have laughed. You’ve learned a lot about each other’s family histories, your fears, your values. You’ve shared the lives and deaths you admired, those you lost too soon, and those you are in the middle of losing who keep begging the hospice nurse for some candy and a goddamned cigarette already.
2. You want to do this for hours, to keep listening to these stories and watching everyone’s faces as they look to each other for recognition and kindness. You can already feel a movement and a strange warmth, like your heart is trying to change positions in your chest. You finally find the strength weeping requires. But it’s a weeknight. Everyone needs this dinner and conversation, but everyone also needs sleep. So you ask everyone to choose one remaining questions from the script to answer before you all say goodnight.
3. Even though you know most of them well and you’ve talked about death before, they share things you didn’t know—losses from cancer, suicide, heart attacks, overdoses, and car accidents—all share what they want and what they might regret. Everyone’s answers feel so bare and honest, so considered. Though you think about death often, you
don’t have answers or clarity in this moment. The loss of your mom should have made it more clear to you—what to leave behind, things to be sure to save. But your mom didn’t have many friends left by the end of her life. You don’t know which of these friends could help you make end-oflife decisions, what they should do with your body, what experiences you’ll leave undone for them.
4. If your mother died with unspoken confessions, you had no way to heal it. Your family has no relationship with sin-eating. You don’t pass food over the body of the deceased to absorb any remaining sins and pay someone to eat it. That old ritual seems like a hail mary for souls a family is unsure about, wanting to make sure any possible uncleanness is sopped up like gravy into day-old bread. You wouldn’t want someone to wander around carrying around your mother’s sins anyway. That’s part of your inheritance as a daughter, each of her stories and traumas ingredients to make something you haven’t quite found the instructions for yet.
5. After the guests leave, clear the table of its dirty glasses and dishes. Put the cloth napkins in the laundry and the leftover soup in the fridge. The place setting for the ghost lingers. You don’t know if a spirit sat at the other end of the table, but your spirit moved around in your chest—fully awake and leaning into the edges of you like a child’s face pressed against a car window. It feels too meaningful to clear it the same way as the others, but you don’t know how to clear a ghost’s plate. “Thanks for coming,” you say to the air, as if it were a guest. As if maybe it was your mother after a long absence. You want to make the moment answer your need, so you drink the ghost’s wine. You feel a touch warmer. A little forgiven.