On Love, Grief, and my Mum's Kitchen Table

Growing up, my mum prepared every meal to be eaten at the kitchen table; big pots of stews or curries would sit in the middle for people to ladle out their own portions. Dinner times were an ever changing ebb and flow of people. Anyone who happened to be in the vicinity of our home around dinnertime would be invited to take a seat, pull up a plate.

I have eaten a communal dinner with: my mum’s friends; my friends; other family members; visitors to the city; and casual acquaintances. All of them, at some point, have been welcomed and fed in the McKeever household.

A variety of dips and sauces and side salads would clutter the table so that there was hardly space between each item. Knees would knock into each other, arms would cross over on top of each other, far more people than should be possible would find themselves squeezed into my mum’s small kitchen.

Even now, years after living at home, every time I return I find myself falling into the easy rhythm of being in the midst of it all. It’s so simple to get washed away in the cacophony of voices, the thickness of the Belfast accent, the slew of people saying things like: pass me the salt please?; could you get me a knife there?; does anyone have the butter?

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The kitchen table in my mum’s house was not only populated at meal times. As a teenager, the kitchen table was where my friends and I found ourselves most weekends too.

The group of us would be crammed into the space, pouring sticky shots and rolling constant cigarettes. Drinks, tears, laughter and secrets were spilled across the table’s surface in equal measure; relationships were formed, shattered and reformed once more. People passed joints around, and shared drinks, and kissed each other.

Whenever someone inevitably drank too much, whenever their head tipped towards the floor and their stomach started to churn – the rest of us would always be there to hold back hair, pour glasses of water and push slices of bread and toast onto whoever it was this time.

Eat this, it will absorb the alcohol, someone would always say, half frantic with it. Packets of bagels and pita pockets would be torn open, butter would be spread sloppily onto poorly sliced pieces of Tiger Bread. Take this, it will help, we'd slur, more than half-cut ourselves.

Hosting these weekends became a standard practise in my life. My mum’s calm acceptance of spills and general rowdiness meant my home was a safe haven for pre-drinks, birthday parties and general teenage mayhem.

Each morning after one of these nights, I would stand and wash dishes at the kitchen sink, wipe away the dregs of tobacco and half used sticks of filters, sweep away the mud from the floor and the sticky patches from the countertops. I would bin the empty plastic bags of bread, tip the crumbs out of the toaster. I would throw open all the windows and let the smell of lingering smoke slowly drift away.

It is a smell that years later, I still associate with home.

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Most of my memories centre on food. Moments become clearer and more significant for what I was eating at the time.

As a child, my dad and I often went on holiday to campsites in Brittany. I have vivid memories of driving onto the ferry in my Grampa’s car, shoved in the middle of the back between my granny and dad, eating packets of Choco Leibniz with my Walkman headphones on.

It is remarkable to me how my memory works. I can hardly place what I ate for dinner last night, and yet the walk from our caravan to the small shop at the edge of the campsite still feels visceral in my mind: I can still remember the way my hand fit into my Grampa’s; the dusty ground that coated my sandal covered feet in dirt; the French man who stood behind the counter and smiled at me as I stuttered out a terribly pronounced deux baguettes, s’il vous plait. All of this still feels real and living in my head, as though it happened only last week.

I am still easily able to recall the childish glee I felt when I was given the responsibility to carry the warm loaves back to the caravan. I can still remember the way I loved ripping the top off and shoving the hot bread into my mouth. I can still picture the thick slices of brie that would sit in the middle of our white plastic table, the fresh tomatoes with their earthy smell, the flaky croissants slathered in salted butter and fruit preserves, the brewed coffee in chipped white IKEA mugs.

The last holiday that my Grampa and I went on before he died was in France. I was only six, and subsequently, most of the details blur together in my mind with all of the other holidays from that time.

Despite this, the food that we shared stands out.

Even now, over fifteen years later, I still think of my Grampa when I eat a fresh baguette. I picture him when I see a thin stemmed wine glass filled with red. I remember him when I smell the earthy richness of a tomato plant.

In the quiet moment when I bite down into a cherry tomato that's been gently warmed by the sun, my Grampa’s smile feels sharper in my mind than ever.

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In November 2020, after my sister Hazel died by suicide, I found myself once more around my mum’s kitchen table.

As far as cities go, Belfast is small. The news of Hazel’s death had spread quickly and awfully around our community and in the weeks directly after the funeral, we found ourselves with near constant visitors. There was a stream of people arriving in force to pay their respects to my family.

I can’t quite explain to you the strangeness of those weeks. There was joy in it, pleasure in seeing so many people I loved after so long stuck in isolation and lockdown. There was tragedy, too, sorrow that people were only willing to break the government restrictions under such unwelcome circumstances.

In this time, so many people brought us offerings that my mum's kitchen was quickly filled to the brim with a variety of foods. There were cakes, both homemade and shop bought. There were pancakes and loose leaf tea and milk and sausage rolls. There were kimchi soups and vegan cheese and fudges. There were bottles of beer and wines and spirits. There were fresh traybakes and still-warm bagels.

All of it gathered, filling up the kitchen table, the worktops, the fridge. It got to the point where we were turning food away, begging people not to bring any more, asking the visitors to take it home with them.

Sometimes I would look at the tower of food and wonder how the table didn’t collapse under the weight of it.

Sometimes I would look at the tower of food and wonder how I didn’t collapse under the weight of it.

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When you lose someone you love, what you learn is that people don’t know how to talk about grief. A death in any family becomes a heavy topic of conversation, and that’s multiplied by a hundred when it’s a suicide. People want to say things like, I’m sorry for your loss. Or maybe, I wish we could have done more and I’m sorry that it ended like that, but these statements are empty, hollow.

When you lose someone you love, what you learn is that people don’t know how to talk about grief, but they do know how to pass you a plate of food and say have you been eating? They know how to pass you a plate of food and say keep your strength up.

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Hazel was a good cook. She was naturally talented at it, good at getting different components to taste good. She took pleasure in it too: she cooked and baked often, even in the times when she was deeply depressed, baking seemed to be a refuge for her.

The last thing that Hazel ever said to me was that she was baking a vegan chocolate cake in honour of my birthday, even though we were separated by the sea and I would not get to taste it myself. The night before she took her own life, she baked a vegan chocolate cake again.

Throughout my teenage years, I too struggled with a deep depression. Often antisocial and almost always unhappy in my own skin, I sequestered myself away most of the time Hazel was cooking while we lived together.

Due to my isolation, I cannot remember or describe the way she moved in the kitchen. I can’t explain to you the way her hands looked as she chopped vegetables; I am not sure whether she got stressed as she had to alternate between different meal components or if she tackled it with calm precision. I am unable to say how she looked when she tried to make something new, if she was confident or worried.

What I do remember is this: Hazel calling me down to try something she’d made; Hazel, smiling as she presented a dish to the table; Hazel, cheeks warm from the heat of the oven, happy to have us all eat what she prepared.

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In James Baldwin’s, “If Beale Street Could Talk”, he writes:

Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I’m going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.

Every time I sit back down at a table with my family, I think of this quote again. It is, to me, the simplest expression of love that you can have for someone else. Here is this table, here is this food, here is this love.

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Baby. Baby. Hazy. I love you.

I’m going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.