the grief of the last meal

The last meal my Dad ate, the last meal he cooked, was almost too perfect, too fitting, too on the nose for the meat and potatoes type of eating he often did. That last night, after he and my Mom went joyriding around my hometown, reminiscing on all the songs that were popular and in tune when they first met and fell in love, he sauntered into the same kitchen were I matriculated into the cook I am now, seasoning liberally a marbled ribeye and stabbing a russet potato to later stuff with butter, salt, pepper and sour cream. The steak sizzled and moaned in a skillet sheened and shimmering with canola, A1 sauce waiting to later join in accompaniment. 

My Dad had been sick for a long time—more than a decade—and in the last year of his life in particular his health deteriorated in ways that none of us could anticipate. This made what essentially was a final cooking rally even more perplexing. He often barely had the stamina to work his full-time job let alone standing and cooking for minutes without taking breaks or sitting. 

But he cooked for him and for my Mom, close to midnight, mere hours before he would no longer be alive. I think about this last meal he had often. I wonder how it tasted swirling around his mouth, thrashing against his tastebuds, dropping down his throat to be later digested. Would he have savored it more lovingly and intensely had he known it would be his last? Would he have made it ceremonious and ritual dancing with life itself? 

The rite of last meals, last moments, last bites, last goodbyes have long been pointed to as something of note. We mark them in our personal lives as needed, ceremonious rituals—a meal to mark what is coming to a close. A graduation dinner, a moving-away dinner, a retirement dinner. Most of us can call to mind The Last Supper in the Christian Bible, where the Jewish Palestinian Jesus knew his death loomed and prepared a feast with all who were beloved. A living wake, if you will. 

Intent. There was intent in thinking through what would be needed mentally, emotionally and psychologically to mark the end and to signal to our bodies what was to come. In thinking of these rites that we wrap around our communities that become more than ritual but social events, I think of how using food to mark the end of things is too applied to those who are incarcerated. These men, women and children who are embroiled in a violent carceral system that grinds up Black people, destroying families and instilling trauma and brokenness in its place.

You know what I think about most though when I’m reflecting upon all the Black men who were murdered on death row in the past decade? Their last meals. And most of us jovially ponder this for ourselves. What we would order as the last meal if we were to find ourselves in the unimaginable situation of knowing with certainty that we are moments away from our death. With smirks and laughter, in some pathetic attempt to distract ourselves from the dire realities that some Black people do indeed face, we list off those chili dogs we’d down that otherwise our heartburn, acid reflux and high cholesterol could not handle. Or we say fuck it all to lactose intolerance and would opt for a strawberry milkshake, extra whipped cream, extra cherries. 

When Troy Davis was murdered in my home state of Georgia in 2011, I was haunted by the men in him I saw through his eyes. My uncles, cousins, neighbors. And in revisiting his death, I learned a few things about the food he ate on that last day. 

When his murder was finalized, he was able to put in a last meal request. He scrawled in big letters that he wanted nothing and would be fasting. He refused his breakfast tray first thing and also turned down lunch around noon. As the 28 guests he had trickled in and as the last left, it was early dinner time. He refused that, too, only opting for the grape drink on the tray among the standard dinner meal of grilled cheeseburgers, oven potatoes, baked beans, cookies and coleslaw. Then he said a few prayers and took a nap. 

When he woke up, he reached out to his attorney, checking to see if any last minute appeals would save him. And at this point, he had a change of heart. He wanted some food. But as the waiting for appeals, waiting to be saved, had expired, he was ushered away. He did not get to eat one last meal. 

Raphael Warnock, then only a reverend and now an elected official, explained at the time that he refused that last meal not because he wasn’t hungry but in fervent belief. He was a man of faith and maintained his innocence up until the last moment he was alive. Warnock said that Davis “continued to insist this would not be his last meal.” 

This story has remained with me. He refused what he didn’t believe to be his last meal but it actually was to be his last meal in some cruel, sick fate. But then when he requested food he was ultimately denied and died shortly thereafter. How would his murder and subsequent been different if he had been able to get that last meal? And what would he have eaten? What would’ve been that last decadent meal to cross his tongue? 

Somehow the silence and nothingness of that, that quiet wonder, continues to move me and bend what shouldn’t be into something that is known. That a meal is never quite just nourishment, never quite just something to mark the passing of time throughout the day, never quite just something to casually be done. But an imperative of what it means to live and rather, too, to die. 

Duplicitous. Food and meals are never predicated in solitaries. Just as grief for Black people has never been a single, solitary instance of experience. It has always been one of compounded, of stacking upon each other, making mourning necessary business of what it means to leave, dragging those burdens and ghosts of what has been lost as we try to discover what it means to be here and now, while being besieged by what is no more. And in thinking of last meals—for my Dad, those incarcerated and punished in a carceral system that has steadily intended to both victimize and traumatize us, of ordinary endings in life—we can see the pain of what they are even if the ritual feels, looks and seems beautiful. 

Because when there is a last meal, when there is a plate that will never again be set upon a table or cleaned once emptied again, there is a hearty whisper of absence. And our grief is never more fierce when one of us has been lost forever, as evidenced by a bare, lonely plate. 

Thank you for joining me for Season 1 of the dead zine focused on food. Thank you for still being here as I tended to my own grief since my unanticipated absence from this space in April of last year. Next month begins Season 2 of the dead zine focused on the Black body—how grief impacts our bodies in innumerous ways, from the physical impacts of mourning to how more and more Black people are turning to cremation instead of more traditional burials. Until then, tend to your grief and don’t make it small. 

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