Jenny and I were so excited to talk, laugh, and share our grief and our joy.

We discussed the story and song behind her debut picture book, but we also discussed the following:

• How to normalize grief conversations with children.

• How children’s picture books become sources of healing.

• How silence can be the best response when we can’t find the language to comfort a grieving friend.

• How we carry our loved ones in the past, present, and future tense.

• And why community is so important.

Leave a comment and let us know what resonated most with you.

A picture book adapted from the hit song “Are You Here” by We The Kings.

Get more from Yolande Clark-Jackson in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

N was born in Mexico, has three children, now adults, the oldest one now a parent as well, but when we moved in, her youngest was just a little older than Harmony. In our backyard, the children could say hello to Ruth and her dogs on one side of the backyard fence and on the other side, five-year-old Harmony and three-year-old Divine would be squatted or sitting on the other side of her youngest son who was seven. They talked and shared toys and whatever they could push through the diamonds in the fence.

I think back to those days often and marvel how a fence full of diamond-shaped gaps was once large enough to hold a whole friendship.

When Divine was diagnosed and the recipes were being collected in our neighborhood for Divine, N gave us two recipes, one of them was called “noqui.”

I thought it was a Mexican dish.

I learned much later that it was actually intended to be a gnocchi recipe, but the correct way to spell it got lost in translation, and back then I had not seen the word before, so I copied as she had given it.

Like most of the donated recipes in that cookbook, Divine couldn’t try gnocchi because of the special diet she was on, and after she died, the cookbook became more of a memorial to a time and our collective effort than meal plan options.

It wasn’t until 2019 when recreating N’s recipe in the restaurant kitchen of one of my former students that I learned about the error. When I heard Eileen laugh at the spelling error in the original cookbook, I instantly felt an immediate impulse to defend my friend and neighbor, and to explain the language barrier.

What’s the difference between her recipe and an Italian version besides the way she spelled it? I thought in the moment.

Would a rose by any other name smell quite as sweet? Not by comparison. But perhaps in the spirit.

The spirit of the donation is what mattered most to me then, and the memory of N’s kindness and love is still as sweet.

I eventually learned how to both spell and make gnocchi correctly.

I won’t share N’s recipe here because this series about the people and the stories behind the recipes donated to the Divine Cookbook or those that are inspiring the next edition.

But for this installment of the Food, Memory, Love, Loss series, I decided to write about N”s noqui because I’m still thinking about what we lose trying to translate what we hear and feel into something simple enough that even a child can understand when we have books full of failed attempts.

How do we translate grief and longing?

How do we get a recipe, or a bowl of “noqui”, to carry the spirit of what we actually meant?

And if we can’t — what’s left standing anyway?

Perhaps the writer is always trying to get to this. Maybe each of us fails at getting the language right. Maybe food, music, and art do a better job than words. But as a writer, I feel compelled to keep trying. And I’m not alone in this.

When I think of my children at the time, N’s children, and the fence we all once shared, I’m left with a new question: how do you hand a child something as large as loss, in a form small enough for them to hold? Whether it’s a bowl of noqui or a book of art and rhymed lines.

Or maybe it’s not about size at all, maybe it’s about what we offer each other to help carry it. N offered me a recipe. In a few days, I’ll sit down with children’s book author Jenny Robinson Clark, who is offering her readers a story.

Jenny’s book, Are You Here?, is her own attempt to translate grief and longing, she and I will be in conversation about the story behind it on Tuesday.

Are You Here?

Does this resonate? Let me know in the comments.

What’s your version of “noqui”? What was the imperfect thing you received that still carried exactly what it needed?

Thank you for reading.

I hope you find Between Grief and Joy a space where you find mirrors for your experience, windows to understand others and confirmation that your emotions are valid, your healing is supported and you are never alone.

Until next time,

-Yolande

Since 2012, Father’s Day has included images of sweet baked beans topped with crispy strips of candied bacon.

My Father’s Day has changed. I went from celebrating my own father every year cards, ties, letters of gratitude, to helping my children find creative ways to celebrate their f…

Read more

Muma was someone I only remember as a stationary figure. She sat in the kitchen. She sat with us on the back porch, and she sat in her chair in the bedroom watching wrestling or basketball. She wore glasses, her reddish-gre…

Read more

This morning I was thinking about how Memorial Day began as a formal act of mourning.

In the years a…

Read more

In 2001, we built a cookbook on hope and a promise. People gave what they had whether it was their own version gnocchi, their grandmother’s stew, or a fusion of cultural cuisines. They trusted that something good would come from the giving. It was a pre-sale. A leap of faith. The recipes arrived before we knew exactly what we were building, and by the time the book was printed and placed in people’s hands, the person it was meant for was already gone.

That is what food does. It shows up before we’re ready. It comes in casserole dishes for grievers and stays behind after everyone leaves.

MEMORY

I haven’t opened The Divine Cookbook the same way twice. The first time, I was keeping a promise. Now when I pick it up, I’m doing something closer to archaeology. A excavation and a brushing away what I thought I knew to find what was always underneath. The handwriting of someone who is no longer here. A dish I watched being made but never thought to ask about until it was too late to ask.

Memory is funny that way. It can sharpen and deepens with time. You not only remember the event but you can also see more acutely what the event meant.

LOVE / LOSS

I wrote a poem for the beginning of that cookbook. I called it “The Recipe.” I was younger then, and anticipatory grief was still something I couldn’t name but thought I could organize into a list with steps and measurements. Maybe I also hoped it was something I could bake, boil or fry. I didn’t know then that grief was part of love because at the time, grief only tasted like fear, heartache and wanting.

“Where is the recipe that teaches me how to boil a stew that would immortalize you?”

I didn’t know then that I was asking a question I would spend decades trying to answer. But I know now that love and loss don’t separate cleanly. They cook down together into something you can’t always name, but your heart can always recognize in a smell, a bite, or even in someone else’s kitchen.

WHERE THE WILDFLOWERS GROW

This week this book worked its way into my thoughts about food, care and community.

I picked up Terah Shelton Harris’s novel expecting a story. What I got was a mirror.

As I got to the heart of the book, food shows up the way it always does in real life. It allows us to experience the loop of care. For the main character, sharing a meal becomes the first act of belonging in a family that wasn’t hers by blood. Then preparing a meal gives her language when she doesn’t yet have words for what she feels, for what she remembers, and for what she’s still grieving. Harris moves through all four of the themes this series is built around: food, memory, love, loss as well as how to hold both grief and joy and heal in community.

I’m still inside the book. I’m not ready to say everything it’s doing for me yet. But I will say this: there is a conversation I want to have with this author, and I’m working toward it.

This is part of an ongoing series: Food, Memory, Love, Loss, were I trace the stories behind the people and recipes that shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. Each installment lives here, on Between Grief and Joy. The next one is already finding its way to the page.

If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment below and be sure to share it with someone who understands that cooking has never really been about food.

Thank you for being here.

P.S. If you want to pick up a copy of the book, the link to purchase is here

Read more

She was very much a homemaker, very much the consummate mother. I had fun memories of her in England, and you know, I just remember her being this sort of very proper kind of moral character of the household.

Read more

Archaeologists study soil to learn about a period of time because it tel…

Read more

Read more

Read more

In the summer of 2000, a group of us family members gathered in her kitchen in Springfield, Ohio as Grandmaw packed up six baked pies for after-church servic…

Read more

I first shared “What if you grieved with your teacher every year on your birthday?Why my student remembers the day I could never forget”in 2024. It was my first post in this platform. It remains one of my most popular posts, and I think I know why: it’s about what it means to hold both—a birthday…

Read more

“Got it,” I said obediently, and then I added the word fusion to my notes.

Read more

Read more

Read more

When I first wrote this, I was thinking about Beverly and her generous spirit. Rereading it now, I see how it connects to everything the cookbook represents: …

Read more

In 2001, my next-door neighbor Ruth met me in front of my house one day and said, “There has to be something else we can do.” That led to her idea: a fundraiser cookbook to raise money for alternative therapies for Divine’s cancer treatment.

Read more

I met it last night with a glass of cool water and thirteen wishes for the new year. I met it in quie…

Read more