Lorraine Ereira – The loss of a loved one from our lives is most likely the most painful experience we encounter on our journey through this world. Our heart wrenches painfully when we recall them, because we simply miss them so very much.

Even as the shock of them passing begins to fade slowly over time, their absence from your life never changes. You long to share things with them again: a meal; a dance; a walk along the beach. If only there was a way to bring them back to you, even for a moment, to be with them would be more than you could ask for.

What is it about them that you miss the most? Was it their smile? Their laugh? The silly jokes they told? Perhaps it was their voice or the way only they could understand you when no-one else could? All these things that made you love them so very much – they are the things you miss. Although their physical being was special too, it was their energy, their spirit, the essence that came from within them that you miss most of all.

What if there was a very simple way to recall that essence? To bring that energy that you miss so terribly back to you for a little while?

It happened to me, earlier this week. I decided to dig out my grannies recipe book. A book with brittle pages, discoloured with age, held together with brown paper and tape, but beautifully handwritten. My mum had given it me and it stayed with me through several house moves, as although I never looked at it, I treasured it. But until now I had no idea of the magic that was within those pages…

I turned them, one by one, with a feather light touch, so as not to damage them. The musty smell arose from between the pages, with the sense of the years that had passed by since it’s original author had last touched it. The front section was all her recipes with a few more from my mum added later. The back of the book contained patterns for making clothes. I turned back to the recipes and chose one I knew I had the ingredients to make.

As I began to measure the ingredients I tried to remember eating the biscuits as a child. I knew I would have eaten them a few times at least, because Grannie was always cooking. She lived with us and was a very big part of my childhood. She looked after us when my mum worked, and I always remember her in the kitchen. Mum would come home and join her, and together they would create their particular blend of magic. But for some reason at that moment I couldn’t remember what the biscuits tasted like.

I mixed, folded, blended and kneaded the dough onto the floured surface, just as my Grannie was instructing me to do. I’d never made these before and I needed her help. She was right there with me in the kitchen! My little, delicate boned; gentle Grannie was by my side. Suddenly I could remember her hands turning out dough onto the kitchen surface, light and quick, she pressed it out, turning it a few times before reaching for her wooden rolling pin. Within minutes a thin, pastry lay waiting to be cut into even shapes and laid onto the buttered baking tray.

“Prick them all over with a fork”, wrote my Grannie in her book all those years ago. As I followed her instruction a sudden flashback of thin, lightly baked biscuits with tiny fork patterns all over them, appeared as vividly as if they were there on the counter, and my mouth filled with the memory of their slightly chewy but crisp texture and buttery taste. I felt my Grannie glow with pride that I had not simply remembered her biscuits but that I had managed to connect to her, so completely. I had recalled her vividly into my present moment, and we had enjoyed cooking her biscuits together – she was still able to teach me the wonderful things she had learned while she was inside a living body.

What I learned was not just how to make her lovely biscuits but that those we love and feel we have lost, never truly leave us at all. The onus isn’t on them to come us, but on us to really remember them. Not with sadness, and the heavy heart that comes with the feeling that they are not with us; but with joy as you realize that you only have to open your heart, and you will find them waiting to embrace you.

As I opened the oven door to take out my freshly baked biscuits, their sweet mouth watering aroma was followed by a vague waft of lavender perfume – as my Grannie came to give them her final approval(?)

SF Source Wake Up World Nov 2020