AFTER THE LASAGNA

The title is a reference to someone passing. Yeah you read that correctly. What the hell does death have to do with lasagna?

Welcome to today’s lesson. Just like I used to tell my students: I’m not going to teach you WHAT to think, I’m attempting to teach you HOW to think. Today, let’s think about one of two things in life that are guaranteed to happen: sometime, someday, we are all going to stop breathing, our blood will stop circulating, our organs will power down and we will cease to exist.

Death is so scary that some people will stop reading right now. Nah, no you won’t. Why not? Because you also can’t look away haha. You’re thinking about the title, the fact that I said there are TWO things in life that are guaranteed to happen….so what’s the other one? ALSO….you can HEAR my voice in your head right now which is a bit creepy but you know it to be true. Secretly, you love it. Why, just the other day, a loyal reader told me that when her email notification pings each week to announce the arrival of my blog, she “gets a little charge.” I told her to take her fork out of the toaster while holding her phone and that should fix the problem.

Right. Speaking of forks, toasters and death, let’s get on with it, shall we?

It’s all about the lasagna. For about a week anyway.

Someone that you know fairly well passes away. Old, young, sick or suddenly, but the outcome is the same: they were physically here and then they were not. Friends and family gather to pause time; speeches are given, services are held, and everyone that was closely connected to the person who has passed grieves for a time. For reasons that could have all kinds of reasons, there is always, at some point, food.

The first time this hit close to home was when my father died. I was 21, he was 51. He had lung cancer. Things went quickly. There is no convenient time to leave the planet and my old man was no exception: He left the Earth 5 days before Christmas. He wanted no services, which I think was his last snub of the religious upbringing that was his main complaint of childhood in New York City.

No services meant little to family and close friends and I soon realized that many people wanted to be physically present for my sister and mother through this time.

If you have been through this experience in your own life, you know that time becomes blurry….so I don’t remember if it was 2 or 3 days before Christmas, but my childhood home was full of people, and food. So much food. Food coming from family, friends and the neighbors. Platters, pasta dishes, cookies and baked goods. Apparently everyone thinks that death makes us ravenous.

Let’s not forget what I wrote about the timeline: a few days before my father passed, my Italian mother and half Italian sister bonded in the kitchen saying little but cooking lot. SO, there was enough food under that roof to feed an army.

On Christmas Day, the house was empty save for our tree, a few gifts that now didn’t matter, my sister and a guy she was seeing at the time (awkward as he was there to comfort her but was not a long-term thing and so I barely knew him) and my mother, who was now a widow. I don’t think I drank, and I know I didn’t eat much. A few extended family members offered to stay for the holidays but we shooed them away as we didn’t really want them being depressed along with us. SO, we had 350 lbs. of leftover dishes and mom remarked that this would be the first Christmas in her adult life that she didn’t have to prepare a meal. She didn’t mean it to sound sad…she tried to make a joke about us having a spread for 100 people but it came out like she had no one to share her meals with now. It was the shittiest Christmas ever.

People checked in on us after the holidays and when I returned to college for the spring semester, my friends were great about taking my mind off of my loss. My sister returned to her final semester of high school and my mother adjusted to a house without her husband of 26 years. In other words: the lasagna stopped coming.

I suppose that it is a normal flow of events: everyone sort of drifts back to their lives, their routines, and their daily business. Except the family who has lost the loved one. I explain it like this:

When the loved one is a family member, a new hole opens up in your existence. It is a hole that will never close and never disappear. The hole becomes a part of you. It changes sizes and depth depending on the time of year, the day and sometimes the hour. At times, especially soon after the person’s death, the hole might as well be The Grand Canyon. All at once beautiful to remember and think about, but impossible to cross, impossible to put into words unless one has experienced it and impossible to explain how it became so wide and deep.

Other days and hours, the hole is small enough to jump over, walk around, and even shrinks to the size of an anthill opening. It’s still present but you hardly notice it. The challenge comes when the hole behaves as the plates under the Earth: at times, without warning, it shakes and opens, threatening to swallow you whole. For almost a year after my father died, certain songs would bring me to tears. If something came on while I was driving, I needed to pull over first and then stop the music to gather myself. So overwhelming was my grief that I once found myself inside my mother’s house alone and called out his name just to see what it felt like to say ‘dad’ out loud one more time. It was so weird hearing no response. The hole opened further when the passage of time revealed that I no longer could remember his voice or his laughter all that clearly. He was vanishing into the hole that would never close.

As I age, I have lost more family members, close friends and a few former teachers and colleagues. I have also lost a few students. It always hurts, but the only hole that still remains is the one that opened when my dad died. It’s still there, although all these years later I open it only when I choose to, and that is usually to teach my kids about what he was like and to keep his spirit alive in the memories and times that I carry. I have tried to take the best of him and make it parts of myself.

A little more than a week ago, I lost another close friend to muscular dystrophy. A few days before he passed, we exchanged some text messages. I knew he wasn’t well, but I still was not prepared to receive a call from his family. Since the beginning of 2025 one of my closest friends in my world lost his wife, and several friends of mine have passed from MD as well. It is becoming too normal and I desperately would like a break from bad news. I know that as we all age, it might be too much to hope for.

So, after the lasagna stops coming, here is what I do: I take time for myself. I check in on people that mean a lot to me. I engage in meaningful conversation whenever possible. I use humor and try not to take myself too seriously. I deepen my bonds with as many friends as possible be it by an inside joke, a memory, or randomly sending a message letting them know that I am thinking about them, they are important to me and that I love them.

I am a people watcher and a people reader. I look for the best parts of you and I steal them. I take them with me and integrate them into the fiber of my being. If you pass, the best part of you will live on in me. I am the sum of all of you. If you are reading this and we have met, THAT is what I do when the lasagna stops coming. I see you. I’m here. You matter to me.

Stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned.