When I was 16 my Grandma passed away after a 12 year battle with breast cancer, which eventually metastasized to her bone marrow. The refrigerator seemed to magically fill up with food (mostly hams it seemed at the time) from loving friends and neighbors, and I have known ever since that when there is nothing else you can do to make it better, you bring food.
But I didn't really get it. From the perspective of the person doing the cooking, this is more or less it. I want to help somehow. I want to show you I love you and I care. But when I had a miscarriage 11 weeks into my pregnancy, and you brought me food, I found out that it is so much more than this. The day I found out I was having a miscarriage, TWO friends offered to bring supper that night. Multiple others called in the next few days to see if we needed a meal. And the provision for meal time with some really good food and amazing desserts went on for 3 weeks!
During a time that was so dark and sad and uncertain, I felt amazingly loved and supported and "carried." You were the hands of God, hugging me, holding me up, providing for the details.
During the week I have called "The Horrible In-between Place" when I knew I was having a miscarriage, but it had not completed yet, the most enjoyable thing I did was eat really yummy food and lots of chocolate desserts. It was something to look forward to. Some small thing to enjoy. That food tasted so good. During that week, there were some days I had physical pain, and some I did not. On the days that nothing was happening, besides the agonizing worry of "Is this normal? Why is nothing happening? Should I be concerned? Is there still hope? --Oh yeah, there's not," I felt vaguely guilty that others were working extra hard so they could cook for me when I probably could have cooked for myself. But I sure didn't feel like cooking, as physically capable as I might have been. I wanted to read a book, watch a movie, lay on the couch in the dark and just be there in my sadness.
After the hard, painful part, I was weak and exhausted and it would have been physically impossible to cook. As I started regaining a little energy (and probably did too much too soon, only to regret it in a weepy puddle on the floor later), I put it all into making a scrapbook of my brief pregnancy and the miscarriage. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been able to do that. It isn't something everyone does, but I had a consuming desire to record everything, to make sure I would remember. Because it seemed like I had woken up from a beautiful dream, like it maybe never really happened. I needed to have something tangible to keep and look at sometimes. Maybe even more, I needed to DO something.
That week, I couldn't have made a single decision. For a few days I got to relive finding out I was pregnant (a bright page with the word "Positive!" across the top, fearing the impending nausea but finding peace about that, buying a package of brown and blue baby socks, craving a Greek House Lamb Burger during a break from nausea, our kids' reactions over-the-top with excitement, telling our families with fun poems in cards on Valentine's Day, taking my first "belly" photograph to have to starting point to compare to later (ok, actually, I was already looking a bit pregnant and wearing maternity clothes!). The last page of being pregnant caught me off guard and made me sad. I had been so happy... Then the next page. That was hard. Nobody scrapbooks sad things. I did that page all in grey and black, except for a drawing of Jesus with a baby, framed in blue. A little hope.
Anyways, I couldn't focus on other things. I couldn't tell my kids yes or no about something the following week, I couldn't figure out what day to make a plan with friends, I couldn't answer the easiest questions that involved making plans for daily life at all. And venturing out into public, for church or to pick up a few groceries, was gut wrenching and exhausting. I wasn't ready.
So I sure couldn't have planned and cooked meals. I mean, ok, I probably could have. In fact, I felt like I was taking advantage to be scrapbooking and letting someone else cook me dinner. But emotionally, I was inside myself. I had been smushed into a little pile of guts, and wasn't ready to try getting up yet. And what put me back together, piece by piece (and is still doing so) was grieving. Every picture I put in that scrapbook, every tear I shed, every piece of maternity clothing I took out of my drawer, every word I wrote in my journal, every picture I took of the flowers given to me... put a piece of skin and bones back on the mushy pile, so that when I closed that scrapbook and it was finished, I was more or less whole again. I cleaned up the scrap booking table, we had a funeral as a family and planted some tulips and hyacinths, and the next day we went for a little hike. I went to church and out to eat. The next day I got groceries.
I was glued back together, but the glue was still drying. You were still bringing me food. I again felt guilty that I was up and around and functioning, but was still receiving the delicious fruit of your labors. And then I realized that my energy level was still struggling to keep up. As I went back to home schooling, laundry, sweeping, dishes, it was really, really nice to ease back in my not needing to plan and cook dinner. Unless you've been here, too, you will never know how much difference it made.
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