The casseroles arrive in the first nine days
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 3 min read
Nine days. That is how long the food lasted after my father died, by my mother's count, which she kept on the back of a church bulletin because she could not keep it in her head: fourteen dishes in nine days, then one more on day sixteen from a cousin who had been out of town, then nothing.
She was not complaining. She had made a good many of those casseroles herself, over the years, for other people's nine days, and she understood exactly what they were and what they were not.
They were a way of standing at the door without having to come in.
What the first nine days are for
Nobody in a house where somebody has just died is able to think about what is for dinner, and the women who bring food know this because they have been in that house. The casserole is not nourishment so much as the removal of a decision, and in the first nine days the removal of any decision at all is a mercy. My mother ate standing up at the counter, out of the dish, for most of that stretch, and I do not think she tasted any of it, and I do not think that mattered.
The food also announces, to a house that has gone quiet, that people know. The doorbell is part of the gift.
My mother counted the doorbell separately, in fact, on the same bulletin: twenty-two rings in nine days, eight of them from people who did not come in, which she said afterward were the ones she minded least, because they asked nothing of her face.
Week six
The difficulty with the ninth day is that the need does not end on it, and the thing needed changes into something that cannot be wrapped in foil. By week six my mother was eating properly again and would have been insulted by a casserole. What she could not do was sit in the kitchen at six in the evening, which had been the hour my father came in from the yard and which was now simply an hour, with nothing in it.
I suspect that most of us who bring food in the first week know this and bring the food anyway, because the food is possible and the sixth week is not; you cannot carry an hour to someone's door. Or you can, but it looks like inviting yourself over on a Tuesday with no occasion, and sitting in a kitchen where you are not needed, and it is awkward, and most people, including me, would rather make a lasagna.
A woman from my mother's quilting circle did it anyway. She came on Tuesdays at a quarter to six for most of that spring and did not bring anything, and my mother, who had thanked every casserole with a card, never thanked her for it at all, because what she was doing did not have a name.
Nine days is the length of the first kindness. The second one does not have a count.