Cooking for someone who is very sad.
Warm bread. A stew. A room quiet enough for them to eat without performing.
There is a kind of dinner that has no purpose except to be there. To feed someone who has forgotten to eat because grief is loud and food is quiet.
Do not cook anything ambitious. Ambitious food asks to be discussed. A grieving person cannot discuss food. They cannot discuss anything. Cook something they don't have to think about — something they can eat with a spoon, one-handed, while looking somewhere else.
Warm bread. Salted butter. A stew that has been on the stove long enough to smell like a childhood, not necessarily their own. A room where they don't have to perform being fine, or being sad, or being anything.
Sit with them. Do not fill the silence. The food is already filling it. Grief is a room that gets smaller when you try to explain it and larger when you sit still inside it.
You don't need to say much. The food is saying it. Salt. Fat. Warmth. Presence. This is the oldest language we have.
