Soft foods during grief

Our first column ran today in The Spokesman-Review. And one of the QAs concerned what food to take to a grieving home.

Go for the soft stuff, the column advises, because sometimes in crisis and grief it feels like a lot of work just to chew food! And many folks lose their appetites.

In her wonderful book about widowhood, The Year of Magical Thinking , Joan Didion talked about how in 1920s-era etiquette books, people were urged to go to the home of someone grieving and lift broth to their lips.

In Joyce Carol Oates superb memoir, A Widow’s Story, she relates having no appetite whatsoever and a great frustration with the food baskets that kept arriving at her door, filling her with rage. Then, she discovered a fruit drink that worked for her.

Better even than meals hastily dumped into bowls are bottles of Odwalla fruit-blend drinks. These were left for me in the courtyard a day or two after Ray died, a dozen or more in a plastic shopping bag, from a woman friend who is a novelist. You have to eat, Joyce she’d said and you won’t want to eat. So drink this .

A friend just introduced me to Muscle Milk Light, a chocolate high protein vitamin drink that doesn’t contain any milk but is yummy and not too bad for you. That might be another option for the grieving.