For you to make food or buy food or send food or deliver food to people who could use a little extra love in their lives right now? Just because of this series? As a way to show support for us, our son Afton, and the people in your lives? It is all way too cool and I love that this is my job. I get to talk about food and love and life and it’s just awesome.
Awesome, even when it’s not actually awesome. Even when it’s more like nasty, painful, dark as night, can’t breathe, awful. Coming back to this space after going through such an incredibly traumatic and transformative experience was, to be honest, completely horrifying. Like, how do you do it? How do you act? Should you be normal? And what’s normal like again? What were some of those dummy food things that you always used to say before – and how soon is too soon to bust those out again? What will people think if you mostly just talk about sad stuff? or if the only food that sounds good to you is plain white bread with butter, and maybe, MAYBE some basic creamy potato soup?
The sacred presence of Afton in my life has shown me – or maybe just reminded me – that there is always room for honesty at the table. Both in real life and online. We made room for honesty with this series, mostly because we didn’t know what else to do. There was maybe a shred of honorable-ness in it, but it was mostly selfish: I needed Afton’s story to stay close. I needed work to mean something to me. And then in that honesty, we watched you all love and care for us, watched you literally pour out your hearts for our son after who was barely with us for one day and never even opened his eyes. A tiny guy weighing one pound three ounces that exactly zero of you had ever met. And you did that through serving YOUR people and participating in a food series, of all things. Friends. You are not basic. You’re the ultimate love warriors.
This series has helped me land on something that I think I felt all along but never knew how to articulate: that beyond the business side of this blog-as-my-job gig, it’s the stories, the community, and the soul here that are the always-on light of this corner of the internet.
Your words are not just comments. They mean something to us.
Your acts of generosity are not just distant concepts. They are real and they inspire us.
This Feeding a Broken Heart series has been you and me, joy and healing, memory and honor, love and grief – and it has all felt really, really good.
One thing that this experience did not do is make me have less words. I’ll be done now. So I’m showing off. This post is dedicated to your inspiring stories, so go watch yourself be awesome.
