Why I Held a Dinner Party With the Dead
Sometimes the people who aren't there are as important than those who are.
Posted May 20, 2026 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
The other night I invited several dead people to my home for dinner. I realize of course that this might sound preposterous or a tad delusional, but I assure you it’s neither. These weren’t just any people mind you, they were some of the people I love most in the world – the family members I’ve lost, including my parents, my sisters, and my teenage daughter.
The seeds for the dinner were planted in the soup aisle of the supermarket, when I stumbled on an onion soup mix that had a picture of apricot chicken on the box. I looked at the photo and could have sworn I actually smelled the sweet, tangy chicken I grew up calling “sloppy chicken.” It was my mother’s specialty, and she made it at least once a week when I was a child. I wanted to taste my mother’s chicken again, to fill my kitchen with that particular smell that felt like home. So I threw the mix in my cart, gathered the rest of the ingredients listed in the recipe, and went home to re-create my mother’s meal.
For many of us, food represents so much more than the sum of its parts, becoming one of the most powerful ways back to a specific person, time, or place – not simply through calling memories to mind, but through engaging our senses.
Smell is particularly powerful because it’s one of our most primitive senses and has direct connections to the limbic system, a part of the brain involved in emotion and memory . Which is also why anytime I smell Paco Rabanne cologne I feel like I’m back in the dorm with my first college boyfriend (but I digress).
Food is so embedded in our culture, the essence of our rituals and traditions. We use food to celebrate and console, to woo and wallow. Over time, foods become inextricably connected to specific people. No matter who cooks it, for example, the apricot chicken will always be “my mother’s sloppy chicken.”
But there’s even more to it than the lifetime of memories a simple bite of chicken can evoke.
Food can feel like it’s turning the time-space continuum on its head.
You smell your grandmother’s blueberry coffee cake or your sister’s pot roast and suddenly you're transported back to their kitchen, their table, their embrace.
Food doesn’t just connect us to memories, it connects us to one another, too. And because grief can be so profoundly isolating, authentic connection – however we can find it – is particularly important. With that in mind, I decided to host a potluck meal where each guest would bring a dish that reminded them of someone they love and lost, which I called a Dinner with the Dead. I envisioned it as a time to grieve out loud – to share stories and taste memories together with other people who “get it.”
Now it was time to figure out what foods I was going to make. My mother’s chicken was a given, but I’ve lost a lot of family members, and wanted to make sure each person was represented. My father was a decent cook, but more than any of his specialties, the food that reminds me of him is sardines – a staple in his refrigerator. He’d eat them straight out of the can, never elevating them to “real meal” status. For my sister, I served a bowl of black olives, which would often be her entire dinner when she was in graduate school. I made my other sister’s salad, which I always insisted she bring to holiday meals for the simple reason that making salad dressing is inexplicably beyond me, even though it only has four ingredients. And my husband made the chocolate chip cookies he and our daughter regularly baked together, her in her flowered chef’s hat conducting the preparation with a pink spatula and mixing spoon. It turned out that choosing what to make was just as meaningful as the food preparation itself.
The specific foods didn’t matter, what meant something were the memories they evoked.
The food at the dinner was merely the gateway to talking about the people we miss. I gave the guests notecards to put by the dish they brought so they could share something about the person they were remembering – why they loved that particular recipe and the history behind it.
So what happened during the meal? We said our people’s names and laughed at our memories and made fun of the fact that a can of sardines or a jar of olives counted as dinner. The evening felt like an intermission from real life, where talking about dead people so often makes others uncomfortable. I felt my parents’, sisters’, and daughter’s energy in the room with me and knew if they were somewhere in another world eating dinner together, they were raising a glass to toast me and laughing at the face I made when I tasted those sardines. The room felt full in the best possible way – crowded with those who were physically there and bursting with love for those who weren’t.
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Jessica Fein writes about the mingling of joy and sorrow, mothering a child with a rare disease, and staying rooted when life tries to blow you down.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.