So why not make a soup of what's left? (Kevin Young, on loss)

Last week, I visited the town where John, my daughter's father, lived. He died two years ago and was mentally ill for much of his adulthood. The streets were filled with ghosts, as was the chemist where he collected his meds and the coffee shops he frequented rather than eating at home. I found little comfort in this. I shall not go back there again.

John could barely cook for himself, and maintaining a functioning kitchen was out of the question, requiring me to visit his house regularly to clear out larders clogged with food. (He would buy the same items every week regardless of whether he'd eaten last week's and shove the older food to the back) He'd always preferred nursery-style food and had a childlike and indulgent diet, coming from an old-school Catholic family where the baby (him) was kept a baby for all kinds of dysfunctional reasons. This intensified in his last years. John lived on scones, ham, takeout burgers, the odd cottage pie when I could persuade him to sit long enough to eat a meal, and Mr Kipling's Battenburg cake. He took five sugars in his coffee, and this propensity for sweetness was not linked just to his childhood but was also down to the medication he took, both prescribed- and 'self-prescribed (as he referred to it). He loved his daughter. He was a kind and deeply intelligent man.

My daughter served Battenburg cake at her dad's funeral tea. It was all she and I could do, and it seemed important to acknowledge who he was despite his family’s obvious embarrassment at having someone who was quite mad as a family member. (They are all Freemen of the town.) Our daughter is a pastry chef and more than capable of baking the most exquisite Battenburg, but he liked the neon colours of the Mr Kipling version and the soft, pudgy marzipan covering it, which he'd carefully peel away from the cake to eat later as a treat. I think she felt pretty militant about its inclusion. ("This is my father, and I am his daughter. Take it or leave it.")

When my grandfather was diagnosed with a brain tumour that would take him within three months, he developed a raging appetite because of the prescribed dexamethasone. A lifelong vegetarian, it was an ominous sign when he no longer appeared bothered about avoiding meat He became obsessed with planning his meals for the day and careless about what he ate. We could not feed him swiftly enough or satiate his appetite, so we resorted to long conversations about food, and constant updates on the status quo of whatever was being cooked, to buy time between meals. I baked Nigella’s rosemary loaf cake for him one afternoon, and nothing was left unsaid in the conversation it triggered. Not one word. I baked him the cake and fed it to him piece by piece and then, a few days later, washed and laid him out, ready for the undertakers. When I fed him that cake, it hadn't occurred to me that this might be his last supper.

It was a tweet from food writer Livvy Potts that inspired the topic of this newsletter. She is writing a memoir about grief, loss, and cooking and what happens when one seismic life event- the loss of her mother- leads to others. As usual, all I can do is live with loss, like all of us do, whatever form this takes. Seneca said, "all your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched ", and I heartily subscribe to this view. The writings below are the ones that have grown to mean a great deal to me as part of this living; call it a lamentation if you want to. (It's a bit of a long newsletter this time, so get yourself a drink first.)

Kevin Young's poem on grief inspired the title of this piece. It's called 'Ode To Gumbo, and you can listen to it here. What I love most about gumbo is its mucilaginous texture. It draws up to the spoon, clings, and doesn't want to let go. Just like grief, really.

I enjoy Goya Journal, and this piece about the fish-eating ghosts of Bengal by Amrapali Saha captivated me. Saha writes so evocatively about the spirits heafed to Bengali landscapes and the critical role stories about them have in 'normalizing the paradox of death. Ruchira Paul, a fan of Bengali literature and former blogger, got in touch to tell me more about what she refers to as Bengal's veritable feast of ghost stories. "Even the first and only Indian Nobel Laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a wonderful ghost story called The Hungry Stones. The torpid, river-filled coastal region of Bengal with its tall trees and thick jungles is an ideal setting for ghosts," she told me, although Bengali authors did not stick to the state's geographical boundaries."The stories encompassed all parts of India, from the Himalayan mountain towns to the arid deserts of Rajasthan. The ghosts spoke in several tongues and had regional gastronomic preferences. Bengali ghosts, like their flesh and blood counterparts, are partial to fish, rice, and desserts."

It is not easy to find these stories in translation as the narrative is so regional and culture-specific that Ruchira doesn't think they would translate very well without explanatory footnotes, which, she says, would spoil the fun. However, she did find a translation of Tagore's Hungry Stones (which is not very scary, she adds) here, by C.F Andrews, in collaboration with Tagore.

I wish I could read this in the original: Ghosts Love Chow Mein!

The Sad, Sexist Past of Bengali Cuisine by Mayukh Sen is a nuanced account of how his great-grandmother was required to give up meat and fish simply because she became a widow, mourning a woman he had never met. The splendour of Bengali cuisine is set against the unrelentingly meagre diet his great-grandmother is expected to exist on as marital love, companionship and sexuality are slowly starved into submission. "A woman's libido was a site of such agita that she couldn't be trusted to keep it quiet, and so her body needed to be governed," he writes...

When There Was Nothing Left To Do, I Fed Her IceCream Food is love and never more so than when you are caring for someone dying. But when her mother was dying, Di Gregorio saw how her magical thinking about food could have more meaning than originally thought.

"As she chopped herbs and sliced asparagus and poured boiling water and added the magic dash of brandy to the mixed, soft meat, she kept thinking, but not in a frantic way at all, about never seeing two more people again ... All she wanted to do was make them full of her love, her food, but they could not swallow it." From MFK Fisher's A Kitchen Allegory, about a sumptuous meal where not one mouthful gets eaten. Here we have an elderly mother wrestling with the fact that nobody seems to need her anymore. Time and ageing are made harder when your primary, invested role was feeding people who are now gone.

Swedish funeral candy is a thing. Who knew? Not me. I learned about Mormon Funeral Potatoes, although the jury is out on the history behind the name. One thing's for sure, though: this dish travels easily; it sedates and comforts; it's easy to make (very important when the cook may well be grieving too.) There's such an excellent seam of books about funeral food traditions if you want to read more. One of my favourite aspects of nursing in London was learning about patients’ cultural and spiritual practices…Some of my favourite books on this subject are The Southern Sympathy Cookbook, this one on funeral food rituals worldwide, Elisabeth Luard on sacred food, and Pat Conroy on why dying down south is more fun.

Barbara Pym's novel, Quartet in Autumn, is about a woman approaching retirement age who is losing her job and has had a mastectomy. She slowly withdraws from eating and food in a desperate attempt to regain some sense of control and boundaries of self. Well worth a read, and it's darkly and Britishly humorous too.

'Stuffed', Patricia Volk's memoir about growing up in a restaurant family, shows how to eulogise someone through food. Chapter seven, 'Hash', is a must-read, although the entire book is worth your time.

Beth Howard lived in the famous American Gothic House, and Making Pieces: love, loss, and pie is her memoir about the death of her husband, who died just after they'd decided to separate, adding additional layers of guilt and pain. The pie was her saving grace, along with her RV journey across the States and an eventual return to the town where she grew up and that famous house.

On divorce: Loving Spoonful by Zainab Shah: "She wailed and cursed herself for being a bad mother, for not raising me to respect tradition, my husband, and a woman's expected role. Finally, she stopped and asked me if I was hungry. I was."

Dinner With Moth by Brett Anderson: a delicious eulogy to a friend lost on 9/11, a world changed forever, and a love letter to Galatoires, and New Orleans, both of these no strangers to loss, either.

To end: a very funny and apropos obituary from Gulfport in Mississippi:

"He had a lifelong love affair with deviled eggs, Lane cakes, boiled peanuts, Vienna [ Vi-e-na] sausages on saltines, his homemade canned fig preserves, pork chops, turnip greens, and buttermilk served om martini glasses, garnished with cornbread."