The Box of Salt

And other tales of grief and loss and hope.

Photo by Faran Raufi on Unsplash

When my mom died in 2023, I took home a box of salt.

It was just run-of-the-mill kosher salt, the kind I keep in my kitchen at all times. I’d cleaned out her pantry, donating things still usable to a food pantry in town while tossing a bunch of other stuff.

I don’t know why I kept the salt. I don’t know why I kept a lot of things she left behind, to be honest, but that fucking salt came home with me. For many months, it had a home in my cabinet, and I used it to refill the little salt box I keep on my stove for cooking.

One day, over a year after she died, I went to refill the salt box from the cabinet. And that day, I poured the last flakes of the salt from mom’s box into my own.

Almost instantly, the grief hit. I sank to the floor in my kitchen, wracked with the kinds of sobs that come out first as just air and crumple into broken, wheezing, desperate wails that I’d never vocalized before and have never really done since.

She was really and truly gone.

Grief is a motherfucker in so many ways, but chief among them is what a sneaky fucking bastard he is (it has to be a he because it sucks just so damn much).

I’d spent years being my mom’s primary caregiver as she beat lung cancer but COPD and heart disease came to finish the job, and in the last handful of months, navigating hospice and end-of-life care with my only sibling all the way across the country, a kid in high school, and a demanding job. It was the hardest, most soul-wrenching, confusing, rage-inducing thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Her death was not peaceful. Watching the CO2 rob her brain of cognition, watching her gasp for breath and lose so much fucking dignity as her body shut down one system after another, gradually, torturously…the agony of witnessing it must only have been secondary to experiencing it, though I hope the aforementioned cognitive impairment offered some mercy to her in the final days. She died in the early hours of a Tuesday in March of 2023, just four days before my beautiful daughter turned 16.

I remember when I went home, her confused, sweet dog Stanley in tow, I was mostly just numb. Exhausted and numb. A guilt-saddled relief and a profound, suffocating sadness just sat somewhere deep and silent inside of me, and all I could do was keep breathing, but somehow I couldn’t make much sound. I cried very little in that first year, and many times wondered what was wrong with me because I couldn’t. The tears would burn the corners of my eyes when I thought of her, but they were just…stuck. Waiting.

The day the last flakes of salt poured from the box that had been hers, something inside me broke cavernously open. It’s as if the grief knew I would finally be willing to feel it, to handle it, and let it pour out of me without governance. And so it did.

It’s been a few years now, and the grief still hits in weird moments. Sometimes it makes me laugh, because she was a stubborn bitch in so many ways and I’ll run into a moment that I wish I could share with her but I know would also somehow be a pain in my ass. Sometimes it’s quiet and gentle, like the day I sat among my very old oak trees in the house that I bought last fall—the one she never got to know about or see but would have loved—and I know without a shadow of a doubt that she is here with me, in the generational wood and the wild undergrowth.

Many have written about grief far more eloquently than I have here, to be sure. But I was reminded of her and that moment on my old kitchen floor again today as I opened a fresh box of salt.

Love and loss get atomized into the tiniest corners of our lives. The reminders, the what-ifs, the memories, the aches, the regrets. They’re so rarely big, sweeping, monstrous things you can run from or vanquish. They’re tiny little bits, strewn into the corners and crevices of your soul, like jagged flakes of salt.

I’m grateful to have a fresh box to pour from today. To remember her each time I grab a pinch of pointy grief to season my days with, to appreciate how it adds flavor into a life that could so easily be so very bland, sparkling with richness and brightness because I knew her. Because in so many ways, I am her.

And while I miss her desperately and will never stop being so fucking angry with her for leaving me, I’ll always have a box of salt in my kitchen to remind me that I had the deepest, most sacred privilege of a lifetime in walking my mother home.

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