Jareth

I don't want to be rude, but my ancestors would prefer my belly full. The smells wafting from the kitchen grow no less intoxicating during the ritual proper, twenty people crowded in a living room -- some on sofas, but the rest of us on folding chairs that do not match.

I dressed all in black. It suited Samhain. My blackness is nothing more than a cashmere shirt and skinny pants, but the color confused Amber enough when she returned home that she thought I had dressed up. She insisted upon changing before we left. Witches are not averse to black (how could we be?), but people present are not wedded to darker shades. I do not think I overdressed, but perhaps I had misread the dress code—most people dressed as though this were any other night.

After the obligatory calling the corners, a woman plays a singing bowl in which a toddler could nap comfortably, accompanying it with her own wordless song. Rhianna, in whose home we have met, asks up to imagine our ancestors.

People stand before the altar and explain why they brought the dish they did, who this contribution was to honor. My hunger is not less as I listen to them. Surely grand uncles would like the food warm.

I am not callous. The stories are touching and there is a weight to hanging these names again in the air. If there is a conduit between their world and ours, calling their names might be enough.

None of the deaths still in my heart are my ancestors. I have the usual complement of dead grandparents, but I doubt they would want much to do with this affair. On the other hand, my oldest fan, Webfairy (or Gale in her more mundane life), died this month, days before her seventieth birthday. I found out while I was getting takeout Indian food, her partner having posted something matter-of-fact to social media. I stood still while people bickered with the proprietor, unclear how upset it was right to be given that I never met Webfairy in person. Still, she would send me Home Shopping Network edible gifts every Yule. Last year's package was chocolate-covered pretzels, most of which remained in a box above my refrigerator. Long before I was anyone or had done anything, she said she saw something divine in me. When my books started coming out, she would buy them. She said I would visit her dreams, something I always laughed off as her eccentricity. I considered making pretzels to honor her, but then I didn't figure out a recipe I liked and it seemed too hollow.

Webfairy

I have never forgiven Melissa for dying, however inevitable it seemed to those around her. It has been over five years and it still affects me, though there is nothing I could have done. If I summoned her from the ether to answer if she had meant to die from that overdose, she would not have been bothered, though I haven't tried and don't expect to change that. She would appreciate being remembered in a Samhain ritual, though I won't. Not aloud, at least. The only food I could think of associating with her was Taco Bell, which did seem less special than the event required.

Amber goes up and, rocking a little against the awkwardness of speaking in front of the room, tells how she brought doughnuts to honor her grandfather Robert. We went to three separate places to buy them, including farm stands and Dunkin Donuts. While her grandfather did not make doughnuts, he had them whenever Amber would stay with him in Maine, toasting them every morning for breakfast.

The discomfort of this attention brings a quaver to her voice I can hear but may go unnoticed otherwise. Amber lights a tea candle for him, eats a few pomegranate seeds from an overflowing bowl, says his name again, then adds that I will explain about the tuna noodle salad I brought.

I had no intention of doing this.

Amber sits beside me in a folding chair, taking a deep breath to steady herself, and knits her fingers into mine. She then looks over at me, her eyes teary, and asks what's wrong.

"What am I going to say to these people?"

Amber shrugs in apology and offers her default, "You don't have to."

Of course I do now. She had offered me up as sacrifice to the witches. My story, at least.

Five other people go, attaching narratives to pies and fudge, two people who made the same obscure potato dish, someone who makes three scoops of grain a matter of survival. I hear them, but Amber has given my writer's mind this uneasy challenge. I need to find an angle if I am going to say anything about it, trusting someone will notice if I don't introduce my side dish.

It's not a complicated recipe. My mother makes it for summer picnics. Tuna, pasta, mayonnaise, spices, and assorted things. I put in halved grape tomatoes, sliced carrots, and olives, but they are not necessities. My mother suggested adding lettuce, but I forgot. When I asked her the proper noodle for this dish, she said the person it honors would have used elbow macaroni.

It was honoring a person?

I find my perspective and jump up before I can lose my gumption.

"Okay, this is going to sound like my tight five, but I don't think that can be avoided," I say. "I don't know what my grandfathers liked. Cigarettes, whisky, and infidelity, I suppose. I didn't bring those. My paternal grandmother was German, so maybe soft pretzels with mustard, but it has been a while. The dish I would most associate with her might be the cup full of Chips-A-Hoy turned into a sludge with milk, which we convinced her to let us have whenever she babysat.

"I got this recipe from my mother, who presumably got it from her mother. I don't know if that grandmother was much of a cook. She used to feed my mother pickled pigs' feet, lard sandwiches, and scrambled eggs with pig brains. Then she would call my mother fat, so this is not for her.

"This dish is for my pets. Jareth, our baby cat, loved tuna -- like all cats. Our rats and hamsters -- whose names are too numerous -- liked noodles and probably other things I put it. So, this is to honor them."

I push some pomegranate into my mouth, repeat Jareth's name around the seeds, and light a candle.

Returning to my seat, I lean over to Amber. "Satisfied?"

She hugs me. "Yes."

We eat soon after, having exhausted the stories. Having waited so long, I sample a bit of everything, nibbling each narrative. Then, less delicately, I oversample. It is late, and I am hungry for something more substantial.

Within half an hour, Amber and I sit on one of the sofas. One of Rhianna's cats had been reveling at the attention of so many people. It comes over to me with eager, green eyes demanding its due. I had seen it wandering around all night, but it is only grazing into these eyes that I noticed how it resembles Jareth. The thought floods me that this is how my kitten might have looked -- give or take a few pounds -- had he been allowed to grow up.

I pet the cat, my eyes misting, then allowing my tears to roll down.

I understand how strange this may seem to one who has not loved an animal in this way. When I was going through Jareth's leukemia and still in therapy, my therapist found Amber's and my reaction curious until a truth dawned on her. She said, "Amber lost her baby." I told her that I wished she had phrased that differently, but I did not contest it.

I craved to pull this black and gray animal onto my lap and pretend for a second it was my baby cat allowed a few more year, but cats in a room full of partying witches are not so inclined to allow men to use them as grief proxies. I pet it instead, crying as I imagine instead, wishing I could hold it in my arms as Jareth loved and indeed would have kept loving once he weighed too much for it to be effortless. I would gladly have spoon-fed Jareth each morning and evening if I could again watch him zoom around the house before settling on one of our laps. I would have pumped as much money as I could into his treatment if it meant he could have another Christmas sweater photoshoot.

Amber sees my tears and the cat. She knows.

On the drive home, we talk.

"When he died, I went through complex grief," she says.

"I know."

"No, you don't. It's a psychological term. I grieved him in stages. It took a long time."

"I remember," I assure her. "You were not yourself for months. Longer."

"Yeah," she says, quiet in the recollection. She has said before that, if she could time travel once, it would be to save his life. I don't know if there is a moment she could have. Maybe inoculating his mother for Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, but that time bomb must have been in him since his birth.

Jareth's death is not a synecdoche for the other I have lost. Each of my decedents required their own emotions, the similarities between them thin. I mourn Jareth still because I loved him so much and could have loved him even if he lived twenty years. His death looms still because I was present for it, feeling him go, claiming we did this as a mercy. I did not have to euthanize Melissa or my grandparents. I was not there at the moment of their passing. They were not innocent creatures who did nothing but love everyone they met.

last watched: Inside Job
reading: The Psychopath Test