How To Give And Receive With Care With Janet Reich Elsbach

Grief Growers,

I am so excited to introduce you to Janet Rich-Alsbach because her book Extra Helping tackles a topic or a merging of topics that I have not yet encountered and that is grief and food,

Which is funny that there's not more literature on grief and food because if we're living,

We're eating and if we're grieving,

We're probably also eating because we're still alive while we're grieving.

And reading her book is just such a powerful commentary on what it means to be fed by people who truly care for you and as I was reading,

I was literally suspended in this world where caring and love and really masterful attention was given through cooking,

Baking and serving and like supplying food,

Whether it be through meal trains or otherwise.

And I know we're going to go in so many different directions in this conversation,

But Janet,

I want to start off talking about your journey with your sister and being a caregiver to her as well as what it's like to no longer need to be a caregiver after somebody dies.

Well,

First of all,

Thank you so much for having me on.

I'm really looking forward to our conversation and yeah,

That's an interesting place to start because to me,

That was where I got my fullest immersion in what I kind of call the round robin of caregiving where you are caregiving and then also must by necessity be on the receiving end of care from someone else in order to make that possible.

So that was a pretty deep immersion in that for just about two years.

And I love this visual that you use in the book about the jazz square where person A can care give person B because person C said they were going to pick up person A's kids and they could do that because person D is taking over their shift at work or something.

And so there was really this artful kind of chain reaction visual that I got in my head from that.

Yeah,

I love that idea of it,

You know,

How it comes across or how it lands for people because it really was,

Like I said,

It was a real,

Just a crash course in that it's not a unidirectional flow.

Even right when you're in it,

You must be receiving in order to give.

And also,

I really learned hard the lesson that it all comes around eventually.

So there's that cyclical back scratching circle that happens right in the situation and also just a real faith lesson.

And eventually,

If you have received,

You will be on the giving end and vice versa.

And I had spent more time probably leading up to that on the caregiving end.

And it was really powerful to learn more about receiving because there's all kinds of ideas you develop about what's useful and what's helpful and what's possible.

And then when you have to receive,

You get a whole different window into how you've been offering.

So it was a really compelling education in a lot of ways for me,

Both as a caregiver and as someone who is receiving.

I did a lot of traveling when she was ill.

And so I was away from home really for the first time with my kids at home.

And that just created a dependence on the kindness of others because I just wasn't there.

And that give and take was really part of what I remember the most fiercely from that time.

I think there's a lot of.

.

.

The phrase that's coming to me right now is resistance to receiving because there's a narrative of if I'm receiving,

I must be weak or incapable or not strong right now.

Or if I'm receiving right now,

I'm going to be receiving forever.

Like I will be in this state of weakness,

Inability,

Et cetera,

Et cetera,

In perpetuity.

And what if people knew?

What if people found out from this that I had to receive right now?

So I wonder if you can give us a little receiving 101,

Can take us to school a little bit on how to gear shift.

I get visual of shifting in a car from a giving role constantly output to sitting back,

Sitting down and being served and cared for by others.

Well,

I think there were two factors that really came clear for me.

One is if you're struggling to receive,

A good kind of sense memory to call up is the total satisfaction in every way that you have felt offering what was necessary to someone who is in need.

Just when you get it right,

When you do the thing that really shifts the balance for somebody else,

There's a level of satisfaction,

At least for me,

Like,

Oh,

That was great.

When you're receiving,

You're offering that to somebody else.

So it helps me get out of the head space if I'm burdening this person or I'm putting them out in some way,

Or asking them to do something that's uncomfortable for them.

It helps me so much to remember when you've brought the food or done the laundry or whatever it is,

And you can see that it's made a difference for somebody else,

It's so satisfying.

So you're really offering the other person something really valuable when you let them step up for you.

That's one that I've learned over and over and over again.

Each time it lands a little better for me is that it's not just a quid pro quo karmic balance,

I'm helping now and someday I'll be helped,

Or I'm being helped now and someday I'll help,

Which is also a factor.

But there's a real exchange,

Like a real human,

Something so valuable is exchanged when you let somebody help.

Because if they love you enough to be in the periphery and offering,

They want to be useful.

And so you're really giving them something terrifically important by giving them something to do and giving them information about how to do it in a way that would actually be helpful for you.

So that's been a huge part of it for me.

And then there is that kind of more meta,

Just the bigger human exchange,

Round-robin,

Pay it forward kind of quality where offering and receiving all,

I really feel they all just balance out by the end of the accounting period.

Oh,

I like how you phrase that.

It isn't so much like I pick up your kids,

So then you have to pick up my kids.

It's I pick up your kids and then someday down the line,

You may pick up somebody else's and it doesn't necessarily always even out one to one in between two humans,

Although I do believe that that happens too.

But there is this kind of karmic balance that gets addressed.

Yeah.

And I love how you phrase that because it takes the nagging of the ego out of it and all that crappy meaning that society thrusts onto receiving of like,

Because truthfully I resented the meal trains for a while because I was like,

If I'm receiving a meal train,

It means someone is dying,

Which is,

Was a fact.

I'm like,

We only receive meal trains when someone is dying or in the hospital or when we're not able to do it ourselves.

And so reading your book,

It literally opened my eyes to this alternative perspective of like what would have happened if I had just looked into their eyes and said,

Thank you,

As opposed to literally fleeing the kitchen every time somebody brought another casserole over.

And that was my,

Part of it was being like a sullen teenager,

But I think part of it too was this is a physical scented aromatic reminder in the oven that someone I love is in the process of dying.

Yeah,

That's such an interesting perspective because my first experience,

My first conscious experience of meal trains,

Like kua meal trains,

Like identified as such was around birth.

So I have a much different like original origin story for that in my life.

Yeah,

It's interesting to get that kind of balancing perspective.

And it highlights to me too,

Like I try to focus on that idea of like how you show up for others being so informed by being shown up for,

And that,

You know,

Picture of you as kind of a sullen teenager and just resenting that this was needed,

Not because maybe you were helpless,

But because it meant this terrible event was taking place.

It was like a reminder of that.

Usually shouldn't mean don't show up for those people.

And I hope would more mean show up and allow it to just be however it is.

Like somebody may be,

You know,

Resentful of it.

And I don't mean this as like permission to sort of bulldoze over people's mood,

Because I think it's really important to be responsive to that,

But just allow it to be how it is.

Like recognize that,

Yeah,

For me,

This was a really powerful reminder that this thing was happening,

But we still needed the food.

Oh,

Sure.

I came down and ate it,

But like at 10 PM.

Exactly.

Yeah.

If you're the show-er-upper in that situation,

Remember that this could land all kinds of different ways for people.

Yeah,

And I think you touched on something important there because it was never about the casserole itself or the human bringing the casserole.

It was,

I hate that this is happening,

The larger circumstance of my mother is dying.

And it was not something that anybody could change.

And so everything that happened that was out of the ordinary was a reminder of that.

And so it was just so interesting reading your book because it was like,

It was,

And I don't know if you intended to do this,

But it was actively taking that like bitter sting out of meal trains in my brain.

I'm like,

Oh my God,

I'm going to see this so differently if and when the occasion for a meal train happens again.

And I just thought that was so incredibly powerful.

And I kind of want to shift to your chapter on food for solace because you've got a couple of really wise things in here and it's such a,

So Grief Growers,

If you haven't read this book,

It's called Extra Helping and it's a combination cookbook,

But also musings on why we need food from others or receiving food from others,

Giving food from others for different occasions.

And so there's ones for solace,

There's ones for illness,

There's ones for birth,

There's ones for celebration,

There's ones for large groups,

Which I thought was really neat.

I didn't even think of that,

But that was probably my favorite chapter.

But there's this beautiful stuff I just never would have thought of that way that you included in your book down to when you were talking about food for solace,

You said it feels so inappropriate to bring something as beautiful as a cake or like an ornately prepared salad or something because sometimes beauty and something that's pretty is so painful to look at when you've lost so much.

And so food in this place should be nourishing and have a lot of like depth and breadth to it,

But like something that's mockingly beautiful is almost painful to see.

And I was like,

I've never thought of food in relation to grief that way.

And yet the things that so many people send are like the cakes and the pies and the cupcakes and the donuts and stuff when it's like,

How can life possibly be sweet anymore?

And I was like,

Oh my God,

She thought of that.

I don't,

Wow,

Like I just had so many mind blowing moments.

Well,

I obviously I am a big geek about this kind of stuff.

Like I really,

Really think about it.

But I'm really,

It's just really gratifying to hear that you zeroed in on that because yeah,

I had a really great teacher when I was a new mom,

Who's an herbalist and she introduced me to all kinds of other people that she had learned from.

And one of the strongest threads that came out of that for me was this idea of like balancing out or antidote kind of way of looking at nutrition.

What would,

Like what's the counterbalance on the other side of the scale that would kind of even things out for people.

And one of your prep questions for the interview was like,

What in your lost story,

What drew you back or what anchored you or what brought you back to your feet in a sense.

And for me,

Food was such a natural place to look for that because it's such an immediate,

Constant ever present.

If you get through it,

You must've eaten something like you're eating to sustain life.

Everybody's doing it every day.

So it's the easiest place to start to look for those kinds of balancing things because it's something you have to do if you're going to stay around through the grief experience or the birth experience or the moving experience or whatever it is,

You're going to need to eat.

So it's an opportunity several times a day to look for balance and look for something that resonates in a particular kind of way.

And yeah,

I just love to use Iridin and that's great.

I wonder if we can talk about common meal train or food delivery blunders,

Because one of my favorite stories was from the moving chapter where you brought a lasagna to somebody who had just moved in,

But they had no idea where they packed the plates or the silverware.

And so they ate it out of little coffee cups once they figured out how to use the oven,

Which is like new house,

New oven,

Don't know how to do it.

And these seem so like hashtag first world problems,

But also you have these other chapters of bringing a place setting and a fork or a flower and a vase or something to somebody who's in the hospital and cannot leave.

And so these small little things that make the experience better,

And then the small little things that like,

If you think of this,

You're really going to save the day.

Well,

I would say the first,

When you said blunders,

The first thing that comes to mind is soup in the floor mats of my car.

Like good containers are really the place to start because spilling things in your car on the subway or on the dog,

Those are things you definitely want to avoid,

Like arriving with half as much soup as you left your house with.

So I really feel like a little arsenal of,

It doesn't have to be fancy stuff,

Mason jars,

Which you can get on the cheap pretty much anywhere.

Coming all these different sizes have really secure lids and are a great way to transport things.

So I think that just a basic set of equipment there is really important to avoid my least favorite blender,

Which is spilling something.

And then I really feel like just being curious and open is a really valuable way to avoid a misstep or an overstep.

One of the things that's changed since I first came into the meal train game is that there are now online tools where you can register the family or the person that's receiving.

And those,

Although I tend to favor human interaction over electronic,

The advantage of those to me is that it's much easier to fill out a form that kind of outlines no dairy,

Hate,

Green beans,

All those kinds of things than it is to communicate that face to face,

Kind of getting back to that idea of like,

You don't want to burden people and you don't want people to know what your actual needs are because of some idea you have about how independent and strong you need to be.

It's much easier to fill that out on a form.

Lacking that,

If somebody hasn't done that,

If you're participating in feeding someone to just ask,

Like,

What are you sick of?

What are you craving?

Because I feel like craving is a,

I think I read something about that in the book,

Like appetite and craving are really powerful to teachers in terms of healing and restoring balance.

What your body is calling out for and it's just drummed out of us,

As babies,

We have it.

And then over the course of a lifetime where you're exposed to diet culture and nutritional theories and fads and shoulds and shouldn'ts and all these kinds of things,

We lose that connection and illness and crisis like grief are very revealing.

They kind of peel the layers back and what your body is just calling out for is usually a really pure signal for something that will balance things out and will support or restore the person.

So talking to people about that,

If you have the kind of relationship where you can do that,

Like,

What are you craving?

And that carries over to like,

Not just nutritionally,

But just situationally because there's,

Obviously I'm a food nerd,

But,

And I should emphasize,

I'm a home cook food nerd.

I'm not like a trained chef,

Any kind of thing like that.

But any kind of help that you're offering,

If you approach it with curiosity and if you make it okay for someone to talk about what they really need or what they really want,

Then you've really moved the needle.

Like not just for that person,

But I feel like collectively for all of us,

We have these weird notions about privacy and like you were referencing sort of self-responsibility and what ends up happening is that people go through life with no roadmap for how you handle grief or how you handle a grave illness,

Because it's all sealed over.

It's all handled in where we think privacy should be.

And we don't culturally give people much of a roadmap for,

We don't have a lot of ritual,

Like common,

Commonly held ritual around how to process grief personally,

Or how to respond to someone who's going through grief because we've kind of tucked that all away.

So if you can approach that with some kind of curiosity,

Some kind of like make it okay for the person to say to you,

I am out of clean underwear,

You know,

Or whatever it is.

I had my college roommate lost her husband a few years ago and we live very far apart now so it wasn't like I could show up with casserole.

But I said like,

What's the thing that you can't ask like the people who are in your daily life?

Like what is the thing that is driving you nuts?

And she wanted to make cookies with her son and she didn't have some essential piece of baking equipment.

And she just felt ridiculous.

You know,

All the people who had a ringside seat at her loss saying to them,

Can you get me,

You know,

A set of cookie scoops or a roll of parchment paper or whatever.

And I was able to send that to her and felt,

You know,

I was thousands of miles away,

But I felt like I was actually offering something and she received something that she really needed.

So I feel like those kinds of dynamics,

We don't train people to come up in a tradition where that's understood.

And so that's really where I like to urge people forward.

That's really wise because you write in the book about this question that you hate the most which is please let me know if there's anything I can do.

And I also hate this question and I think every single person listening is like,

I would kill someone to never hear that question again.

Like that's the stakes I would do if nobody ever asked me that ever again.

Because Lord knows what we actually want in the aftermath of loss or like who are we to start delegating tasks to people who've just offered themselves up.

And I love that your mission here is like ask the pointed questions.

What are you craving?

If you could have anything to eat in the world right now,

What would that be?

Or if you could have,

You know,

Anything in this moment that you can't share with your inner circle or your friends,

Clean underwear,

Deodorant,

Toilet paper.

I loved in the back of the book you had like a checklist of like fun things to say.

I'm on my way to the store,

I'm passing by your house on the way home,

Can I pick you up toothpaste,

Attire,

You know,

Any of these things that people might need but may not be willing to admit.

And you're like,

I'm already here,

This is already helpful to me.

So allow it to be helpful to you as well.

And like,

I love the idea of attire.

Can you bring me a whole tire?

My life goal is now to have someone say yes,

Can you bring me an R17?

I was thinking in my brain,

I'm like,

What department is the exact opposite of toothpaste geographically in the store is like,

Oh,

They put the tires really far away from like the shampoo and the bath products.

I don't know why I went that far.

But I guess cat litter might be more appropriate.

But that just struck me.

Yes,

And I kind of want to shift conversation into being ill or unwell or grieving.

And there's a lot of conversation,

Especially as you mentioned,

Diet culture of like food as a healing cure.

And so there's a lot of room for what I lovingly and dreadfully like to call food politics to show up in the basket that gets brought to the table of like,

You're craving this,

But I think you should really have this to help you with chemo to cure your cancer to help you with your heart arrhythmia to help you sleep at night,

Like whatever it is.

And so people are putting all kinds of weird ingredients and vegetables and herbs and stuff in your food.

And you're like,

I just really want like,

Italian wedding soup with meatballs in it.

Like that's what I really want.

And I underlined this line on page four,

People are helped by what they perceive as helpful.

And I literally doodled next to it.

This is not the place for food politics.

This is a small gesture of exactly what they want.

Yeah.

That's,

I really feel pretty strongly about that.

And I used to work as a counselor for new moms.

And but that's a territory where you get a lot of very helpful opinion that just isn't terrifically helpful.

And certainly watching my sister go through cancer,

Another place where everybody's got a story about what they think is going to be great or make the difference for you.

And it just,

If you have a relationship with someone where that kind of information is actually wanted,

There's no mystery about it.

You'll know,

Because they'll say,

Can you help me figure out what I should do for this?

If they haven't said that,

Odds are so high that it's not the right time to offer up whatever you think is going to be the cure.

Just find out what they want and give them what they want.

Because it's just not that,

If it's the time,

You'll know,

Because it'll be really clear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just the sense of,

You wrote in the chapter about illness,

If you're feeding a patient,

Feed that patient,

As opposed to somebody else that you knew who went through chemo or somebody else that you knew who had kids and craved XYZ.

I wonder if you can speak a little bit to how food,

And this is a leading question,

But how food has the power to give us our humanity back.

Because I think,

Especially with the emergence of fast food or I eat most of my meals standing up and a lot of other,

Like I'm just constantly rushing somewhere.

The prospect of eating food in a place where I really feel like I need it,

As opposed to food as an obligation that I need to consume in order to stay alive.

Just these small touches that can give us our humanity back when we feel like we're not at our best.

Or maybe we're in a place where we're feeling inhuman,

Like when we're grieving or when we're ill or when we've just given birth to a tiny human and we're like,

I'm not sure that I'm entirely human right now.

Yeah,

Well,

If you think about those tiny humans,

They come out pre-programmed to slither up the belly and find the source.

Like appetite is the first impulse.

So you could get whatever number of calories someone determines you need in order to stay alive and functional.

You could get a little packet every day that had those in it and just squeeze it down the gullet and you would stay alive.

But everything else about food,

Its smell,

The texture,

The way it looks,

Where it came from,

There's so many places in it that are both evocative of things that have happened to you before,

Where you ate it before,

Who first made it for you,

Any kind of sense memory like that.

And also an opportunity for connection,

Like one of my favorite meditations is when I'm feeling sort of put upon by making food just for myself or my family or to kind of stop and connect to where it came from.

Somebody grew it,

Somebody picked it,

Somebody put it in a box.

It's a really natural place to find connection to the earth,

To other people,

To the cultures that that particular food comes from.

It comes up several times a day.

You have endless,

Pretty much endless opportunity to make those kinds of connections.

So I think that's part of the value there is that we're animals,

So we're programmed in a certain kind of way to respond to smell and flavor and the right color berry and tapping into that is really restorative.

And now I've talked for a full minute and I don't remember what your question is.

The question was about how food has the power to give us our humanity back,

But that's funny because as you were talking,

I got this visual of roots going back down into the ground because I think a lot of the source of inhuman feeling is feeling disconnected.

And so to reconnect with where food comes from,

Who made it,

What part of the world it's from,

The dirt it was grown in,

The sunshine it saw,

Even like the planes,

Trains,

And automobiles that got it to where we got it from is almost like,

Okay,

We're all doing this.

We're all eating things around the world.

And so it just feels so much more human of an experience.

And the other thing,

Thank you for reminding me of the original question.

Oh,

Sure.

The other thing was that struck me at the time that you asked it was this idea that we talked a little bit about of illness and grief and all those sort of major life events.

There's that feeling that you've kind of slipped into this alternate universe.

You've left the regular world and the rest of the world is going on without you paying its bills and catching buses and laughing at YouTube videos.

And you're in this,

Like behind this pane of glass watching this happen.

And getting back to that idea of like the antidote or the counterbalance to eating,

Standing up at the counter just to keep yourself going or to,

I'm caregiving for this person.

So I've got to call the doctor,

Make sure the car's gassed up,

Do the laundry and,

Oh,

They need something to eat.

So let me just put something on a tray and drop it off in the room while I go off to do this other thing.

It can become this checklist item.

I need to eat enough to keep going.

I need to give that person enough calories to keep going.

And it can be instead a real opportunity to connect.

Like eating in community with other people is one of the first things that kind of falls by the wayside.

If you have a great illness or you're eating off a tray in your bed or you're in the hospital or whatever,

And that idea of like when the times that I sat with my sister while she was eating,

Even though there were a thousand things that needed to be done and that I could have been doing,

Those are some of my favorite memories of the time that we spent together when she was ill were the times that I just sat down with her.

Like this isn't a checklist item.

This isn't actual opportunity to connect.

So I think that if you can root yourself a little bit in that idea,

Even though caregiving is so,

It turns your life upside down and shakes it by the cuffs.

Anytime that you can,

Even if it's just for yourself,

Even if it's just instead of standing at the counter and shoveling this thing down,

What could I do to make this like actually pleasant and restorative for myself?

Like I could sit down,

I could put it on a plate.

I could just,

Excuse me,

Think for a moment.

I could just think for a moment about where it came from or something like that.

So that to me,

That's another way that it connects to restoring humanity.

I love that.

And that was one of my,

I have so many favorite parts in your book,

But that was one of my favorite parts in your book too,

Is where you were talking about,

There's so much reclaiming of humanity when we eat with somebody who cannot leave the bed because there's such a community experience in either feeding someone if they cannot feed themselves,

Or if they can feed themselves asking questions or sharing stories,

Or can you pass the salt shaker or kind of whatever it is,

Even if it's for like 15 minutes,

Even if the meal is a smoothie.

Like there's just,

There's a presence there that's absent when a nurse comes in,

Drops a tray and leaves to visit her next patient.

And like,

This is not a gripe on nurses.

They have schedules just like we do,

But I imagine there's such a feeling of inhumanness or loneliness or isolation that comes from not being able to do something as human as eating in the presence of other humans.

Yeah.

And that sense of isolation.

I mean,

More than anything,

Obviously I wrote a book with recipes in it,

So it was oriented around food,

But it's really that idea of isolation that I'm hoping to balance out or address,

Giving people a place to start.

For me,

Food is the simplest.

You know,

Food's my love language,

So that's the easiest place to start,

But it can be just about anything,

Just a place to begin knitting those little connections back up again because all of these experiences can be isolating and can have that feeling of like,

I'm the only one who's ever gone through this or nobody else could possibly understand.

So it's great to have ways to reestablish community,

Basically.

Yes.

And I underlined this phrase in the front of your book that said,

The notion of care.

And I was like,

Oh,

This is what this book is about.

Yeah,

It's full of recipes.

And like,

Holy crap,

Some of them are less than four steps,

Which is right up my alley.

I'm like,

If it's more than four,

I can't handle it.

But everything else,

I'm underlining and dog-earing pages and things like that.

But there was this phrase of the notion of care and I was like,

This is what this book is about.

It's people showing up and not necessarily the quality of the food or even the presentation of that food,

Even though we've spoken a little bit about that in this interview,

But just the showing up and being present.

And on that topic of isolation,

I don't know if I can flip to it,

If you'll give me a moment.

I think I can find it.

There was this beautiful and heartbreaking thing that you wrote about showing up versus not as a friend to somebody who's grieving.

And it says,

A friend who says,

I don't know what to say,

But I'm here offers a live connection.

A friend who is mysteriously absent is an additional drain on a person who can ill afford more sorrow.

And I got chills when I read that because even if I didn't want people to show up with casseroles,

I knew they were showing up.

And there's a very obvious distinction between who shows up and who does not in the aftermath of loss.

And then there's very distinct feelings that get assigned to who shows up and who does not in the aftermath of loss.

Yeah,

That was why I underlined that it doesn't have to be food,

But food is just,

For me,

Seems like the easiest because there's no,

I wonder if they need something to eat.

Everybody needs something to eat.

You can stop wondering.

They need something to eat.

But really just giving people a place to,

A little bridge to get over that idea of,

Oh God,

I don't know what I would say.

The other one I hate besides,

Let me know if there's anything I can do,

Is I can't imagine what you're going through.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

Bet you can.

You just don't want to,

Which is fine.

That's fine,

But it's not that you can't.

But we let all this sort of lack of education or tradition around how to respond,

Paralyze us.

And then we're like,

Yeah,

I don't want to do the wrong thing,

So I'm just going to do nothing.

And people have a really long memory for that feeling of isolation,

That feeling of being forgotten or overlooked or just left alone.

And it does make a big difference if you can just say.

.

.

And also the other thing is you don't have to do it right away.

Generally speaking,

In a crisis,

There's tons of people who show up in the immediate time around that.

It's later.

And as I'm sure you know,

The arc of grief is so long.

So reach out,

Establish like,

I'm here,

I haven't forgotten about you.

And then,

Especially if this person is a little bit resistant or doesn't seem to want it,

Don't take that as gospel and like this enduring position that this person has that they don't want.

Well,

I tried,

But she said she didn't want anything.

So come back because I guarantee in a week or two weeks or a month,

That feeling will change.

So it's a year this Wednesday since I lost my mom.

It's a year.

By most people's standards,

The statute is up.

But the days,

It can change from sunup to sundown.

It can change from Monday to Thursday.

It can change from April to May.

It just keeps morphing and changing.

And so there's almost always a time when it's going to be welcome.

Even if the person's first response has been resistance,

Circle back and just say,

You know,

Like,

I got this extra tire in the back of my car.

I don't have the tire.

Do you want the tire now?

Just trust that it will change.

And that's another thing that I've learned really powerfully from going through my own muck in life is it's not a static thing.

Your grief is not banana flavored and three by three.

And that's how it is from the time it hits you until you,

Quote unquote,

Move on.

It's a constantly changing,

Morphing,

Shifting thing.

So there will always be a time that comes around later when somebody might be more receptive.

So just keep showing up.

Yeah.

Because more than that,

More than the whether or not the tire is actually useful,

It's like I haven't forgotten you.

Right.

Out of like,

I'm still thinking of you and aware that this has changed your life.

And I'm ready to show up for you.

I want to share a story with you about a food that reminds me of my mom.

And then a time years later,

When I had something similar,

And I was literally transported back to a memory with her.

And I wonder if you have a story like that to share also,

And we can kind of do a story swap here to wrap up our conversation.

Sure.

So my mom,

Her favorite food in the world was angel food cake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream.

And in the summers,

I mean,

We'd make it out of box.

It wasn't like,

I don't think any of us knew how to make merengue or whip egg whites or anything.

Like I don't even know if you whip egg whites or whisk them or something.

But we always made the kind in the box and our family were not big drinkers growing up,

But there was always a wine bottle in the kitchen to turn the pan upside down on as it cooled.

So you get that,

You know,

The springform pan on there.

And I remember for many,

Many years,

Always in the summers,

When the strawberries would start to come out,

My mom would make angel food cake probably twice a month for three or four months.

And so we'd always have it in the house and she'd sit on the back porch and eat it on little plates on big plates,

You know,

On napkins and stuff until it was gone.

And then we'd make it again.

And after she died,

I don't think I had angel food cake again,

And it didn't really register with me.

It was kind of one of those foods that I didn't notice vanished with her death.

And then a couple years later,

Probably four or five years later,

I was on a trip in Seattle.

And the dessert menu had a merengue kind of strawberry dessert on it.

And I'm normally like the world's biggest chocoholic and I all I want to eat is like the giant fudge volcano thing that explodes when it comes to the table.

And for some reason that night,

I picked the merengue and as soon as I broke into that little crust on the outside,

I put it into my mouth and the person that I was with immediately saw my face change.

And they were like,

Whoa,

What was that?

And I was like,

They literally just brought my mom to the table.

And it was the coolest,

I get chills telling the story now,

But it was the coolest thing.

And we went back like two days later and did the same thing.

We got the same exact meal over again because I was like,

I want to have that experience one more time because it was a memory unlocked by food that I forgot I lost because I literally closed my eyes and I was sitting on the back porch with my mother again.

And we were eating box angel food cake in the middle of the summer.

And oh my word,

And for anyone who doesn't believe in the power of food,

I'm like,

Oh,

I think you just haven't had a memory unlocking experience with food.

That is such a beautiful story.

I'm laughing.

It's not a food memory.

But one of my mom's just rituals of self care was she used to take a bubble bath at the end of the workday and always use this particular kind of bubble bath.

And again,

I completely I mean,

I obviously remember that she was very committed to the bath,

But I kind of had forgotten about this particular bath product.

And after she died,

My sister,

My surviving sister bought us each a bottle of this bubble bath that my mother used to use.

And she sent me a bottle of it.

And she said,

I don't know if I believed in sense memory before,

But Vitabath made me a believer.

We took the cap off of that and it was like,

Whoosh,

Just decades back,

Boom,

Right back there.

And we would all like sit by the side of the bathroom and talk to her and stuff like so it was just like this really complex,

Nuanced memory.

But that's what it's kind of what we were talking about before that smell and flavor and all those things are so powerful.

They're so much stronger than cognition and all our ideas about stuff.

It just boom sucks you right back to that moment,

Which is why I think that's where so much of the value lays in those.

My mom,

I live in rural Western Massachusetts,

So we used to walk in the woods a lot.

I still walk in the woods a lot.

And in the wintertime,

She would bring an orange and we would peel the,

This is before you could get sumo tangerines and clementines,

Whatever.

It's just an orange,

Just a dopey,

Naval orange.

But she always brought an orange when we went hiking,

Especially in the winter.

So that feeling of tearing into the rind and those oils,

Those smells that come up and you do that.

And just feeling that cool,

Tart,

Sweet,

Juicy orange in your mouth as you're surrounded by the snow and the trees and everything.

I still love to do that,

Even if I'm walking by myself and the ones I love having an orange in my pocket.

Yeah,

Literally just handling it,

That hands on and then the oils come out of the top and oh my gosh.

Wow.

Yeah.

I love ending on that note because it's just a beautiful,

And again,

Like you said,

A powerful reminder that food and the things we literally put into our bodies can also bring these memories out of our brains,

Out of our bodies.

I mean,

If you think about it,

Your body is made of that angel food cake.

You are composed of that food cake.

It's like this calling up this thing.

The reason it resonates is you grew on that.

Your cells were made of that and your bones and your teeth and everything.

It's in there.

So it has this deep echoing feeling,

Which is just,

That's a beautiful story.

Thank you,

Rishi.

Oh,

It's like,

Yeah.

I mean,

There's the phrase that's coming to me as I am composed of this.

And it's like when you hear a song that you haven't heard in 10 or 15 years,

You're like,

Oh,

I know this song.

I've heard this before.

And there's like a recognition of this belongs to me in some way.

This has built me in some way.

And that,

I mean,

Even echoing back to handling an orange in the cold weather and breaking into that peel in the cold weather is,

Yeah.

Because I smelled that as soon as you started talking about it.

I said,

I know what cold smells like.

I live in Chicago.

I also know what orange smells like and to put them together.

It's just like so sharp and bright and almost like crystal.

And I was like,

Oh,

I know exactly what that smells like.

Oh my gosh,

That's so gorgeous.