The casserole has been in the fridge for five days. I think it arrived on the day before the funeral, or maybe someone brought it after the wake—I can’t count the days since I buried my mother under six feet of dirt but I know that for five mornings in a row I’ve opened the fridge door and looked at the casserole.

It is homemade—chicken and barley—in a glazed, navy dish, the round sort with sturdy handles. No doubt it has a matching lid in the kitchen of whoever made it, but now it’s covered with a sheet of aluminium foil. The casserole lives on the shelf above a meatloaf in a plastic tub.

I can’t eat either of them.

Maybe I should have included it in all of the notices: “It is with enormous sadness that the Bauer family announce the passing of Olivia (née Reed), aged sixty-four. She is survived by her daughter May. Please don’t bring May food, it’ll cause more hassle than good.”

The first time, I attempted a safety check. A friend of my mother’s from her bridge club turned up with a shepherd’s pie the morning after my mother finally passed. I tried to ask the usual questions—was the kitchen clear of any breadcrumbs? Did she check the ingredients in the stock cubes? If she added any Worcestershire sauce, did she check that it was gluten-free?

But when your mum has just died of cancer, no one is thinking about your coeliac disease.  

The problem is I need to give all these dishes back, but that means scraping the food into the bin, then washing out the dishes, and then I’ll have to clean my whole kitchen and the inside of the fridge to stop any cross-contamination. It’s all too much. I can barely make myself a cup of tea right now, let alone spring clean. So they pile up, the meat slowly turning rancid, a dry crust forming on the mashed potato, the sauces congealing into a thick, lightly-furred nightmare.

I don’t know how quickly this is happening to my mother’s body too. Maybe she has already passed the date stamped on the tin. How long does a dead person lie in an airless box underground before their meat melts off the bone? 

I’m surviving off dry rice crackers and the one brand of instant noodles that’s safe. The only reason I eat is my understanding that human bodies require energy like a car needs petrol. If my stomach feels hunger, I can’t register it. 

In the past two weeks, the only time my appetite emerged was after I got back from a trip to the funeral home. I brought them my mum’s makeup bag so that they’d have the right shade of blush and lipstick. That was a mistake we made with my aunt Annie—she arrived at the open-casket viewing in an alarmingly lurid shade of coral gloss that she’d never worn in life. With Mum’s makeup in safe hands, I stepped through my front door and realised I’d forgotten to eat since the day before. With a sickening rush, the void in my stomach spasmed and thick saliva flooded my mouth and I needed to eat something, anything, to stop my body from screaming. I opened my fridge to a plastic container covered with several layers of clingfilm that I had no memory of putting there, and I stared at it until the void collapsed under its own emptiness and the hunger disappeared. I put the kettle on and made a pot of instant noodles. 

Nothing dampens my appetite like recalling the consequences of food with unknown provenance.

The last time a grain of gluten slipped into a meal I unwittingly ate, it took a day for my body to realise it was there. By then it was too late to stick my fingers down my throat and force the poison out the way it’d come. So I waited, and sure enough the stabbing in my abdomen ushered in rolling fog that grounded my every thought and shackles that tied me to my bed. The first time I made it to the kitchen—weak and starving, having consumed little but water for two days—a woozy spell sent me crashing to the floor, colliding with the kitchen counter on the way. In the hospital, they couldn’t tell if I was sick and dizzy from the head injury or because my body had decided to wage a retaliatory campaign on my nervous system.

I remember that hellish month—it took that long for the fog to recede—every time I think of the casserole. It’s not a nourishing meal but a game of Russian roulette, and each bite is the loaded gun. It is both perfectly reasonable and infinitely unfair that there are medical interventions for a gunshot wound but no way to save my body once the gluten is inside. I peel off the foil and look at the barley bullets, split down the centre and bursting with malice.

When a friend arrived to help me choose the Order of Service, she brought a bolognese. I love that she thought to feed me; I love that she tried. I still can’t eat the bolognese she made. She’s not used to thinking about every possible way gluten could sneak into a meal, so she wouldn’t have noticed the crumbs on the chopping board or the stray bit of cereal in the cutlery drawer or the “may contain wheat” on the refill for the pepper mill. Now the bowl of bolognese sits next to the meatloaf, below the chicken and barley casserole.

By the time the casserole turned up, I’d given up. I didn’t bother with the questions anymore; I wouldn’t get the answers that satisfied me anyway. I just took it with the kindest smile I could muster, which was grey-tinged and faint. 

My mother was the only other person in the world who I really trusted to cook for me. There wouldn’t be a crumb in sight, and she kept a whole stack of dishes and baking trays just for me. Her coeliac-friendly cupboard, she called it. That was where the gluten-free flours went as well, and the sugar and everything else she didn’t want near the wheat flour and breakfast cereal. Like the rest of her house, I need to clear it all out now. I need to pack my mother’s love for me into cardboard boxes and work out whether I have the kitchen space to keep it.

Mum’s signature dish was the most incredible chilli I’ve ever tasted, with lime and anise and just the right amount of heat that bloomed on your lips like a kiss. I don’t know where she learned to make it but she never cooked from a written recipe. I should have asked her to write it down. 

Thinking about Mum’s chilli—and not about her last, unconscious days or the dirt on her coffin or the fact that I’ll never hear her voice again—I ache to eat something that will nourish my body the way her cooking did. The harsh yellow light from the fridge makes me wince. It’s grown dark outside without me noticing, and now my eyes prefer the shadows. There is the chicken and barley casserole, the meatloaf, the bolognese, the two-week-old shepherd’s pie. 

I close the door and fill the kettle for a pot of instant noodles.

Beatrice Morgan’s stories come life in a little village in England, surrounded by green hills. A nature nerd by trade, she is prone to waxing philosophical about the cosmological consequences of whale carcasses.

Image by: Ellen Tanner @ellentanner