The best food for grief

This isn’t some metaphor. It’s soup. (Okay it’s also a metaphor)

Welcome to Not a Doctor. I’m Melody Schreiber, a journalist and the editor of What We Didn’t Expect.

I find myself grappling with a strange stage of grief — I want to keep talking and writing about it, but not all of the time. In the previous stage, my brother was in every word; nothing felt real without acknowledging pain. Now, I find myself getting curious about the outside world again, asking questions and trying to find answers again.

Yet I’m irrationally afraid that, if I begin talking about anything else, it will seem as though I’m fine again, that my pain was only temporary, that this loss didn’t really alter much about my life. And I suppose this reveals other, deeper fears: that I wasn’t there for my brother, not enough; that I could have done more to help him and chose instead to do other things; and, as time wears on, that I will forget him and what he meant to me.

I know that I did what I could with what I had. I know I couldn’t live his life for him. I know he will always live in my heart. Still. Who doesn’t have regrets?

All of that to say: I’m trying to ease back into the writing that I love, while also trying to remember my brother and share in the grief that so many (too many) of us are feeling right now.

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So, let’s talk about something practical you can do to help people who are grieving. Let’s talk about soup.

Some soup arrived on my doorstep last week from a dear friend — someone who has known far more than their fair share of loss.

I’ve always been just okay with garden-variety chicken noodle soup. I mean, it’s fine. It can be great, even, but it’s rarely my first choice on a menu.

But when I started sipping on this soup, it struck me as basically the ideal food for difficult times — and not just because it’s a warm, comforting meal.

Soup keeps you hydrated when you’ve spent the days and nights crying. It doesn’t weigh on your stomach like other foods. And it’s easy to keep and heat up. (Even though I did manage to mess that one up, and reheated leftovers for far too long. Whatever, it was still amazing.)

When you feel like you can’t eat anything, you can always sip on broth.

The soup reminded me of another stressful, but amazing, time: welcoming a new baby. Soup is one of the foods often brought to new parents in cultures across the world.

Maybe it’s the grief talking, but somehow this one meal made me think about beginnings and endings; how the love spurred by one makes the other so much harder.

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Last night, a memory resurfaced: the first time my brother met my son.

He had driven my parents two hours to visit a week after my baby was born. That day, we ended up getting some bad news: my son had a hole in his heart, and a few months later, he would need to undergo open-heart-surgery to repair it.

At the time, I felt vaguely awful that my brother’s first visit with his nephew was marred by bad news; my memories of the entire day are clouded with fear and sadness.

But now, I’m strangely glad my brother was there. I know that we were there for each other during some of our worst times, even if we couldn’t always be there in person. And I know that I’ll keep finding him in my memories, even when I feel like I’ve exhausted all of them.

And then last night, as I was writing this, struggling to say what’s in my heart because my heart feels like shattered glass right now, my mother posted a picture of me holding my brother for the first time. In the photo, I’d just turned 11, small for my age and skinny as a rail. My brother was a big baby, and in the photo, he looks to be half my size.

I can’t stop looking at the way we looked at each other. So full of curiosity and wonder and love, already. And it reminded me of another picture taken in a hospital. In that one, the proportions are much different: I’m a grown woman, and I’m holding my tiny preemie.

But the love is the same.

My brother taught me so much about loving each other, about taking care of each other. About investing your whole heart in someone because they deserve it, even when they don’t realize that themselves. Even if you know your heart could be shattered by their loss — it’s still more than worth it.