White Cook

Song Changgui managed the cooking stove of Songying Village for thirty years, cooked the last meal for hundreds of dead people, and finally died on someone else's stove. My daughter Song Xiaoman rushed back from Zhengzhou to attend the funeral. The stove was cold and no one took over. She hated Bai Shizao the most and could only pick up the spoon by herself. In the account book left by my father, the first half records the recipes, and the second half records every funeral banquet: whose family it belongs to, who the deceased was, and which bites he liked to eat during his lifetime. Only the last page was empty, which contained the date of my mother's death. Going from one event to another, she saw the lonely grave of the left-behind old man, the filial piety and unfilial piety in front of the bedside of a long-term illness, and the birthday party where the white-haired person gave a black-haired person a gift. She gradually understood that funeral banquets were not for the dead, but for the living - only after this meal could grief have a place to settle. And her father owed her mother a lifetime meal, and she had to make up for it with her own hands.