Always Eat the Damn Pie

 

Somewhere in Texas, at a funeral reception, a chocolate pie nearly started a war.

It belongs to one of the funnier and truer scenes in When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, the memoir by Kim E. Dooley. The family has just buried her father-in-law. Everyone is tired and sad in that complicated way you get when the person you lost had been slipping away for years. And there, in the refrigerator, sits a chocolate pie. Her favorite.

Her husband cuts her a slice. Simple enough. Except a cousin appears to announce that the pie is spoken for, reserved for the sister's family, because someone had called ahead to ask what they needed and the sister had said a chocolate pie. When a second cousin asks for a piece, she is told to eat a cookie instead. Meanwhile, a sister-in-law floats through the room with a lime sherbet pie, sweetly offering everyone "key lime pie from the Florida Keys," which, Kim notes, having actually been to the Florida Keys, was not a key lime pie.

You could not script it better. And that is sort of the point.

Kim grew up Southern Baptist in Orange, Texas, and she writes the way the best storytellers talk at a kitchen table. She lets the absurd stay absurd. She does not pretend the day was beautiful. It was, by her own account, one of the worst days of her life, and not because of the loss so much as everything ridiculous that piled on top of it. She sang badly. She fell down the rectory stairs in her lilac sling-back heels. And then she sat in a room and watched grown adults stand guard over a dessert.

What she takes from it is not a tidy lesson tied up with ribbon. It is something quieter and more useful than that. People rarely notice when you mess up the way you are certain they do. They do notice when you fall, but you can laugh at that too. Humor, she writes, is how we survive grief and family chaos and our own imperfections. So take the slice. Sit with the people you love, or at least the people you happen to be related to. Let the day be what it is.

If you have ever stood in a kitchen after a funeral, holding a paper plate and trying not to cry and laugh at the same time, you already understand her. This is a book for the woman in the middle of something hard who needs permission to find it a little bit funny. Who needs reminding that a life is measured in moments like these, not in how gracefully she got through them.

So here is the only instruction worth keeping. When the pie is in front of you, and the room is full of people behaving badly, and the day has already gone sideways, do not wait for anyone's permission.

Eat the damn pie.

When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley is available now on Amazon, for anyone who could use a good laugh and a little grace on a hard day.

Live link: https://booksbykimedooley.com/

Name: Kim Dooley

Email: k-dooley@techtraininggroup.com