The Books We Love to Death

by Elizabeth Brady

In 1990-91 I served as a short-term missionary in Burkina Faso, West Africa, in a bush village called Fada N’Gourma, the market town for the Gourma tribe, east of Ouagadougou. I lived in a mud brick house on the mission compound helping in the office for the director and his wife, Ruth, who ran the bustling guest house.

Each day I took my break in Ruth’s kitchen where she had assigned me a stool to sit out of her way while she worked. She would have a drink and taste of whatever she was cooking waiting for me on the counter as she shared her stories, recipes, and adaptations that she had come to learn over many years of cooking with ingredients that were available in the local market. She had a Joy of Cooking hard bound cookbook that she had brought with her on the ship from Canada—each page had since been laminated with clear packing tape. The book was decorated with her marginalia, inserted notes, and the spine had long given up, so it lay on the counter like a rare book.

“Why don’t you buy a new cookbook?” I asked her one day, munching on a baked pie crust remnant she had sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

She looked at me with a smile of wisdom, well earned, confident, and unoffended by my youth and lack of understanding.

“Why would I do that?” she asked me.

“Because your cookbook is falling apart, you wrestle with it every day!”

“It is a treasure. It is not replaceable,” she said and smoothed out a page to make out her own writing.

I recalled that conversation many years later watching the snow twirl and dance while I waited in the warm car to pick up my daughter from high school. Our son, Mack, Iz’s younger brother, had died suddenly on New Year’s Eve 2012 of sepsis, two weeks shy of his ninth birthday. There was not a single aspect of life that was not touched by Mack’s death. To better manage the deafening quiet of the after-school hours without Mack, I began picking Iz up from school to create a new routine for us which lasted throughout her high school years.

Someone I did not know had reached out to me after Mack died to share their own story of sepsis and included a copy of Martha Whitmore Hickman’s daily devotional Healing After Loss published in 1994. It is an intimate 4x6 size book which I promptly tucked in my purse to carry with me. Over a couple years of daily use, the book became a treasure to me. It was tear stained, full of my penciled notes in the margins, with sticky notes protruding throughout to mark particularly poignant quotes.

That winter day waiting for my daughter in the parking lot, I pulled the book out of my purse and the cover fell off. Of course, I would tape it back on when I got home later that day. But, in the moment I paused to remember Ruth and her cherished cookbook. The notion that I had told her she could just “buy a new one” made my cheeks prickle. I had learned so much about grief through Hickman’s devotional and had followed up on many of the authors she quoted to read their own words in full.

When Sunbury Press accepted my manuscript, Oil for Your Lantern: Sharing Light After the Death of a Child I had a Zoom meeting with the publisher. He asked me why I thought the book should be so small, that 4x6 inches was the smallest category. I shared with him how special it was for me to carry Hickman’s book tucked easily into my purse or backpack. The intimate size allowed me to enjoy quiet moments throughout the day when I reached for the book even to read one quote. Thankfully, he agreed with me and approved the 4x6 size for publication. I have had several people mention how much they like the intimate size of Oil for Your Lantern.

Learning to live after the death of someone we don’t know how to live without is never-ending, as is our love for them. I have wrestled with the stories and experiences of others as I have found my way into a new identity as a bereaved mom. As Ruth learned, adapted, and evolved her cookbook over decades in the bush, I wrestled Hickman’s devotional into the taped, worn, tear-stained treasure that lays on my bookshelf today. If I had the offer to eat the book like Ezekiel, I think I would have! Instead, I loved it to death. 

Elizabeth Brady’s son Mack died suddenly of sepsis on New Year’s Eve 2012. Elizabeth teaches at Penn State University and her essays can be read on Motherwell, Modern Loss, Open to Hope, and Compassionate Friends. A collection of Elizabeth’s essays Oil for Your Lantern: Sharing Light After the Death of a Child was published by Sunbury Press in 2024 and recently won the Small Book category and was a finalist in the Grief category in the 19^th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards. To learn more, visit www.elizabethbrady.us.