When her husband, Bill, died six years ago, Michele Zawadzki squared her shoulders to the grief.
They had been together for 47 years — since high school, when they were prom dates — so she knew that life without him would be trying. She worried about taking care of the car. When a pipe broke in her toilet, spraying water all over, Zawadzki, 68, didn’t know what valve to turn off or whom to call. Mail for him kept coming to their suburban Chicago home.
What she didn’t expect, though, was how difficult it would be to turn on her stove. Or how it would feel to walk supermarket aisles, past the foods he loved.
In the checkout line, she’d watch the clerk scan produce she knew would rot and bread she knew would go stale; she was still shopping for two, but eating for one. When her freezer filled with excess food, she started throwing out meals — throwing out his portion, really, because he wasn’t there to eat it.
“There are triggers everywhere with food,” Zawadzki said. “You’re used to cooking a certain way. It’s debilitating.”
The connection between food and mourning runs deep: In almost every culture, people bring dishes to the survivors in the weeks or months after a death. But for a spouse, accustomed to sharing every meal with a partner, the grieving can go on long afterward, renewed constantly by the rhythms of shopping, cooking and eating.
“It’s almost like the sixth stage of grief is cooking alone,” said Jill Cohen, a grief counselor in New York, referring to the theory of the Five Stages of Grief. She said many of her patients bring up eating issues in therapy.
A 2016 study focused on the links between eating and widowhood. (Bereavement counselors now use “widow” as a gender-neutral term, like actor or waiter.) Grocery shopping and preparing meals alone could be painful and overwhelming, the study found, and could often lead widows to skip meals or eat in unhealthy ways.
“Cooking and mealtimes are some of the most overlooked aspects of grief,” said Heather Nickrand, lead author of the study. “How many people are actually asked: ‘How is the cooking or grocery shopping going? Are you eating OK?’ ”
In response, she founded Chicago-based Culinary Grief Therapy, which uses demonstrations and group discussions over meals to teach participants how to cook, eat and shop for one. She runs training sessions and attends conferences, helping other bereavement groups develop their own versions of the program.
Zawadzki regularly attends the gatherings, which are held in a large commercial kitchen where the participants learn straightforward recipes with minimal ingredients.
“In the beginning, I just didn’t want to cook. I’d make a bowl of cereal,” said Diane Kantak, 78, who shared a cooking station with Zawadzki at a recent session. Kantak had been married for 54 years when her husband, Francis, died in 2013.
The two women chatted as they chopped. Zawadzki helped an older woman near her station pry the lid off a jar, and ducked cheerfully as someone passed a colander over her head. When the group sat down to eat, many spoke about how hard it could be merely to plan a menu.
“It’s simple things like, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ ” said Pat Smith, 60. “And it’s like, ‘I don’t know. What do I want for dinner?’ ”
Zawadzki agreed: “You don’t have somebody to bounce your ideas off anymore.”
Noncooks at a disadvantage
For partners who weren’t the main cook, especially older men, widowhood poses a new set of challenges. Many know only a few recipes.
“I’ve still got her spices in the cabinet,” said Johnnie Footman, who is in his 70s, at a recent meeting of a bereavement group for men in New York City. “I leave them there as a memento, even though I don’t use them.”
This meeting specifically dealt with food issues, but the men have been gathering for years, sharing the details of their lives.
Sitting around the table together, talking about what happened during the day: This is what many widows say they miss the most.
Some don’t even eat their meals at a table anymore, opting to eat on the couch or at restaurants. Without a spouse sitting opposite, the kitchen table can feel unbalanced, a seesaw for one.
“That has to be relearned,” said R. Benyamin Cirlin, executive director of the Center for Loss & Renewal, a bereavement practice in New York. Eating solo “is really a sign of one’s changed identity.”
That sentiment was seconded by Deborah Stephens, 64, of Irmo, S.C., whose husband, David, died nearly two years ago. “I am trying to find out who I am,” she said.
Like many widows, she lost the taste for food. For months, Stephens would go entire days on a cup of coffee in the morning and a cheese stick in the afternoon. “Food was the last thing that I wanted,” she said.
Hard to let go
For Jeanne Heifetz, the New York home she shared with her husband, writer Juris Jurjevics, is the place where he is most present — and most absent. Jurjevics died unexpectedly last year at 75. Since then, Heifetz, 59, has been struggling to adjust.
In her refrigerator, a large hunk of Latvian bread, which Jurjevics’ sister brought them a few days before he died, still sits unfinished.
There is also a bag of grapes, which he was halfway through eating; they’re probably raisins by now, she said, but she can’t bring herself to throw them out.
To help widows through their grief and sense of identity loss, Nickrand, founder of Culinary Grief Therapy, hands out a cheat sheet, now released as a book, to class participants to help them cook again.
One suggestion is “Change routines: Consider having your meals at a different time of the day, in a different room, or serving foods you typically did not have.”
Food will always be a part of Zawadzki’s relationship with her late husband. Every year, on the anniversary of their first date, she goes to the same little restaurant they went to when she was 15. She orders a chocolate ice cream soda and a turkey BLT, which they ate on that day more than 50 years ago, and sits there, thinking about him.
“He’s probably looking down saying, ‘Really, Michele? Really?’ ” she said, laughing. “But it works for me. I’m holding onto those memories, and I’m finally able to laugh with him again.”
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December 09, 2019 at 03:30AM
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