grief and beef stew

I made this stew for my great-aunt in London the last time I saw her before she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a couple of years ago. She passed away after a year-long battle just a few weeks ago, and I’ve been trying to find a way to honor her memory. I never knew my grandmother and so my great-aunt was always one of the great maternal figures in my life, and losing her was a blow I’m hard-pressed to describe with words.

My aunt was a giant among the men and women of her time. A groundbreaker, a trendsetter, a trail-blazer. She grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in Iraqi Kurdistan a bold, independent young woman in a time and place where that was not the standard at all. She and her sister never married or had children, instead choosing to live their lives on their own terms. She traveled internationally, became a beloved teacher and women’s sports coach, and relocated to London later in life during the war. There, she made a life for herself all over again, in a little basement flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and thrived. She traveled every chance she got and made friends as easily as she breathed. There was very little she was ever afraid of, and nothing at all that she couldn’t overcome. She was, for so many years, my icon, my ideal of who to be when I grew up- a fearless, strong-willed pragmatist with a thirst for adventure and a zeal for life.

For all she was independent and awe-inspiring, it must be said that there never was a kinder woman. People loved her as soon as they looked at her and she never wanted for friendship or company. She could soothe a bruised feeling or a scraped knee with practical aplomb and the sensible tenderness of your own mother, and she cared for her nieces and nephews and their children as if they were her very own. When I made her this stew a few days before Christmas, two years ago, and heavily, alarmingly, over-salted it, she still ate every bit of it without complaint.

My aunt had a garden behind her little flat in London. High walls, lush greenery, a little patio with a soaring trellis and a tremendous grape vine all cut it off from the hustle and bustle of London so thoroughly that you felt as though you were somewhere else entirely. A little slice of paradise she’d made for herself. She was so proud of it. There are so many memories still there- barbecues and family get-togethers, chasing little cousins through bushes, long, drowsy naps in the little swinging bench hung under the trellis. It takes a special sort of person to take an ordinary place and fill it with that kind of magic, that love that stays in your bones forever.

Brain cancer is ugly. It changes you, and the people around you, and it is a terrible way to die. There’s no way to paint it nicely. I wish we’d had more time with her, I wish that she hadn’t suffered so much, and I wish she were still here. But there’s no sense in regretting things you have no control over, and she’d tell me that now, if she could. Life is full of terrible, tragic loss, and the only thing we can do is hold each other a little tighter until it’s our time to go. My auntie was brave and steadfast to the very end, even when she was frightened and in pain, which is all any of us can aspire to do when it’s our turn.

At her funeral, her nieces and nephews brought dozens and dozens of cuttings from her grape vine and her rose bushes (her pride and joy) to give to the mourning attendees with instructions: to plant the cuttings in their own homes and gardens, and let that little piece of her live on with each of them. I think she must have smiled, at that.

cake that burns your tongue, salty apple pie, and learning to fail with purpose.