The Body of Grief as Rice and Butter by Alison Lubar

How do I keep all these little parts inside? What remains?

The Body of Grief as Rice and Butter

by Alison Lubar

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A body, from a body, from a body, from a body. Trans-generational grief engenders both tenderness and bitterness. Since their incarceration during the Japanese Internment, my grandfather, his sister, and their mother have processed this trauma in ways that have affected my mother and me. Each of us have broken some cycle; all of these broken rings still rattle around somewhere. Is each more like a link on a necklace, or chainmail? And just because there’s an opening, doesn’t mean that it’s ever lost.

I have Auntie’s badge from the camps. Its brittle plastic coating holds a yellowed photo of her at thirteen. We were both chubby in the same ways. Now, she has begun to fold into herself, eighty-four years later. She is the last one left, and has lived the longest. Everyone else was eaten from the inside– stomach cancer from the asbestos rice, or stroke from refusing to eat anything without butter.

The butter is not to blame. Neither is the rice. I eat them together, mixed in my little red rice-maker from Target. It was less than twenty bucks. Its nonstick coating scratched from white roommates using tablespoons to scrape generic long-grain onto their plates. You have to use something wooden, at least, to part the starchy bottom from the pot. Left overnight, a translucent veil covers
the sides. That means I didn’t rinse it enough. If it was still laced with talc to prevent sticking, this would kill me in twenty more years. And nonstick coating is a rumored carcinogen; there are many ways of slow implosion.

How do I keep all these little parts inside? What remains? Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory, but forsaking Proust’s madeleines, I conjure apricot cookies, matcha mochi, even potato chips, which go best with prosecco. I eat my way back to love, and through loss. I imagine everyone I’ve lost not as grey dust, but something metaphysical that sticks somewhere. And sometimes begins to grow. If you are what you eat, I am all memory.

First published in Literary Hub, 2025.