Tags
balance, bereavement, cancer, dinner table, family, Grief, healing, hope, meal time, Rainbow Baby
I do not know where to even start about the significance of the dinner table for me. I guess it started in the childhood of course where my family always ate meals together no matter the mood and now that food is my livelihood, the simple act of sitting together at the end of the day, no matter how high the ups or how low the downs, is what remains a constant, a table that always waits for us and brings us together, like a glue that glues our broken hearts and family together.
It is not always pretty or joyful, but we have few rules that bring even the hardest days and sharpest moods to its softer edge.
I will not go through them all but the first and the most important rule is that we go around and say three things we are grateful for that day. You can skip, but only once, and no one can leave the table until everyone went. I do not know when I started this, but I know it was when Bianka was little. There were only a handful of times since then where I was not in a good place and could not go and where I have broken a rule and skipped for the day.
Bianka’s grateful thanks always included loving everyone and if you knew Bianka, you knew that she always had hugs, kind words, smile, and love for you. So when she was gone, our little family went from four people sitting around the table saying our graces to three people doing the same. It felt so strange, so empty, so imbalanced, so sad, and so wrong. That empty chair kept staring at us, haunting us with its never again expressed words of gratitude. Aside from the obvious that our child has died and we were just trying to keep our heads above the water and breathe to stay afloat, living for our younger daughter Kalie Bella, something felt off, the constant was constant no more and our dinner table times felt intense, electrified, forced, and uncomfortable. The one thing we all loved the most and that was the center of our family life each day was simply not the same anymore without Bianka.
Until we added another seat to our dinner table.
I really did not expect that this simple act of bringing Luka Rose to sit at the dinner table and try her first solids and “eat” with us was going to shift the dynamic of our little family so much. But it did. And I am so grateful. Luka did not replace Bianka nor we put Luka into Bianka’s chair, but we did place her directly across Bianka’s seat, as if she is facing her big sister across this void of never knowing her but being part of her.
Luka has brought our dinner table back to its equilibrium, not the same one as before, but to its new balanced scale of joy and sorrow, that will now forever be our life. And here is the video of Luka joining us at the dinner table for the very first time so you can see for yourself what this little human has already done for our family.
I guess it is called healing.