The Dinner Party

Sanette Tanaka Sloan

The acceptance email arrives in my inbox just days after I apply.

I’m taken aback. When I first applied to the Dinner Party, I received an automated response warning me that it might take weeks or even months for a spot to open up. I wasn’t expecting an update, let alone a positive one, so quickly.

“I got in,” I say to Alex, my husband. He’s in the kitchen making dinner. I’m in the living room, cradling my laptop on the couch.

Alex looks up from chopping vegetables. Surprise crosses his face. “That’s great.”

I nod. I know this is good news.

The Dinner Party is a nonprofit that organizes grief groups. I learned about it only recently, when my friend, who heard about it from her friend, texted me a link. Tapping it revealed a brightly colored website bathed in millennial pastels, sporting punchy illustrations and quippy lines (welcome to “the club nobody wants to join”). The group’s mission statement: build community and support for people who have lost a loved one. 

I read that the Dinner Party focuses on young adults aged twenty-one to forty-five, an age range that is “underserved” by the traditional grief community. Too old for youth grief support, too young for many grief groups that tend to attract older adults. The Dinner Party wants to fill that gap by bringing these people together into in-person “dinner parties.” (At publication, all dinner parties are held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.) The hope is that the guests find comfort simply by being with others who share a similar experience.

Alex joins me on the couch. Together we scan the email.

Dear Sanette, first of all, I'm so sorry about the loss of your friend, as wholly inadequate as that is to say.

I wince. It has been over a year since my friend Meghana died in a freak accident six days after her wedding. But it still hurts to see that fact written so plainly on the screen.

The sender then introduces my host, Tracy, and lists my entire group (“table”). Twelve women total, first names only. Tracy is the only one whose loss is articulated—a sister, who died of an overdose a few years ago.

Really hope that you, Tracy, and the rest of your table are able to connect and provide each other with solace, community, and strength in the coming months.

There are a few more comforting lines, followed by a link to their “How to Be a Dinner Partier” guide and a reminder to pay the thirty-five dollar membership fee.

I think of acceptance letters I’ve gotten in the past, from my top-choice college, my scholarship program for graduate school in Ireland, my reporting internship at The Wall Street Journal. All of them littered with congratulations. Punctuated with exclamations. All exuding and inviting joy. But though the tone of this email is certainly positive, I feel hollow.

I google Tracy. Her LinkedIn profile shows her smiling in her headshot, curly black hair framing her round cheeks.

“She looks”—Alex searches for the right word—“friendly.”

I know he wanted to say “happy.” But pictures can be misleading. Maybe she’s just having a good day. Or maybe she’s smiling because it’s the easiest way to avoid unwanted pity or conversations. Or maybe, the worst hasn’t happened yet, and her smile is a relic of the person she used to be.

For some of us who have lost someone abruptly, there’s the before, when the world makes sense, and the after, when our reality has split in two. A record scratch. Our lives become a minefield of triggers, a constant reminder that we’re in the new track. Often, the same things that used to bring us comfort—familiar places, other loved ones, memories—spark pain. Worse still, no one else seems to notice that the music has changed; they just keep moving and moving to this new, perverse beat. 

No death is expected, not really, but Meghana’s especially so. A freak car accident on her “minimoon” in Iceland, not even her actual honeymoon. I had stood with her just six days prior when she married the love of her life. Danced with her to Backstreet Boys and Coldplay for hours. The whole four-day wedding weekend was in Technicolor. It screamed life. 

After her funeral and a short bereavement leave, I returned to my work at a large tech company, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I became obsessed with learning about Icelandic road conditions and driving accidents. At work, I would schedule fake meetings just to cry in conference rooms.

Even as the initial shock dulled, every time I hit a milestone, I was thrown back into a deeper level of grief. Thousands of triggers emerged, even in the mundane—the mention of a wedding made me recall her own. Pumpkin spice lattes reminded me of huddling in Starbucks together when we were both visiting home. Even calendars reminded me of her penchant for seasons and holidays.

In the year following her death, I cobbled together a precarious but working support system consisting of Alex and Meghana’s spouse and friends, who since became my own. I tried therapy but quit after two sessions when the therapist mentioned several times how she always wanted to attend an Indian wedding. I believe her exact words were, “they seem fun.”

I spoke with my own friends, too. They were loving, kind, and tried to empathize. Some mentioned the pain they felt when a grandparent had died.

The Dinner Party, notably, only caters to people with certain types of losses: of parents, partners, siblings, children, other family members, and close friends. They say they want to focus on supporting people who may be the first in their peer group to experience significant loss. I suspect they are targeting some aspect of unexpected loss, too. Though I grieved deeply for my grandparents, on some level I had always assumed they would pass on before me. I never expected Meghana to.

Much of my emotional weight fell on Alex. I would talk about Meghana incessantly, rehash conversations, revisit old photos, pore over old texts. Grief became the third party in our marriage. It dragged itself into routine conversation. Crawled into bed with us at night.

For the most part, Alex just listened to me. He asked questions from time to time, but almost never offered advice. If he grew frustrated or impatient, he rarely let it show. Even in the middle of the night, he would flip the light on and let me talk. He may not have understood exactly what I was going through, but at the time, it was enough.

Eventually, I started to have more good days than bad. I joined a new team in my company, and we moved from Colorado to New York. We even started trying for a baby.

I got pregnant quickly. I bought a pair of baby shoes and left them on the counter for Alex to find. He was thrilled, we both were.

Less than two weeks later, I had a miscarriage.

This new hurt lingered well after the physical expulsion of my loved one from my body. And Alex wasn’t enough anymore. He didn’t know what to say, what to ask, and besides, he was grieving himself. All the acute pain from when I lost Meghana bubbled up again; I didn’t know how to separate the two.

And so, I decided to apply to the Dinner Party. In the application, I focused solely on Meghana. I didn’t have the mental space to overthink it. All I knew was that I needed other living bodies to talk to so I could finally breathe. 

* * *

Tracy sends out an online poll, and soon our group settles on a date for our first dinner party, a week from Sunday. Tracy will host in her Brooklyn apartment. She offers to make the main dish, and we each sign up for a side.

Over the next week, I anxiously await the party. The “How to Be a Dinner Partier” guide simply instructs us to gather at the host’s home and talk over a potluck meal. Other than that, there’s little explanation about the structure of the evening. What will we talk about? I glean from the website that hosts get some training, but we have no actual facilitator, no expert trained in grief. We’ll just be twelve bereaved women in a room.

The day of the dinner party, I make a seven-layered taco dip and stream HGTV until the sun heaves its last rays and slips below the skyline. I kiss Alex goodbye and take an Uber across the Pulaski to Brooklyn, clutching the dip as I watch the buildings grow squatter and more residential. 

I buzz the doorbell when I arrive. A few seconds later, a woman who I assume is Tracy flings the door open. She looks as cherublike as in her headshot. She must have looked up my picture as well, because she greets me by name and throws her arms around me in a big hug.

“Come in, come in,” she chirps. “Some of the others are already here.” 

She leads me down a narrow hallway. We pass a small dining room and reach the living room, where four guests stand around the coffee table. 

I immediately feel claustrophobic. While I later learn her apartment is actually quite large, the initial effect is suffocating, like drowning in your childhood bedroom. The ceiling is barely two feet above my head, and dozens of photos are tacked onto the pale pink walls. On the coffee table, appetizers battle with tchotchkes for space.

I wedge my dip between bowls of popcorn and pretzels and give a little wave. The women introduce themselves as Jessica, Caitlin, Stephanie, and Victoria. They all seem to be around my age. Their faces don’t betray any distress they may be feeling.

I’m beginning to understand how we were grouped together. The Dinner Party says they consider a number of factors when putting the tables together—personal identities, where people live, and the type and recency of loss, for instance. I seem to have stumbled into the “young-mostly-white-women-around-thirty” group.

Over the next fifteen minutes, more people trickle in. We ask each other polite questions about work and where we live. I don’t ask about their people, and they don’t ask about mine. Tracy, ever the hostess, serves wine and juice. One of the women (Caitlin?) compliments my lactose-free dip (the secret: Cabot cheese and Lactaid sour cream). 

I actually feel myself beginning to relax. I can almost pretend we are just a group of friends gathering for dinner.

Once the twelfth person arrives, the energy in the room shifts. The conversation quiets.

We all look at Tracy expectantly. She looks the least comfortable she has all evening. “I guess we should start,” she says, and gestures to the couch. “Shall we sit?”

I take a seat on the floor between Caitlin and Jessica. The twelve of us circle the coffee table like a proper grief group. I almost expect us to break into a chant or prayer. 

Tracy takes a sip of wine and smiles. “Thank you for coming. I thought we could start by going around and each sharing why we have the displeasure of being here.” I offer a chuckle.

Tracy goes first. She tells us she is from Arizona, but she has been living in the city for four years. She’s a lawyer, and two years ago, her sister overdosed and died. They had a bitter fight just the day before, and that was the last contact Tracy had with her. She thinks of that fight often. 

After she speaks, I glance at the photos on the walls. Many show Tracy and her sister—at the beach, on a mountain, laughing in a corner booth.

I, too, have dozens of photos with Meghana—dressed up for Halloween in high school, lounging in her parents’ basement, and more recently, dolled up at her bachelorette party in Scottsdale, and clasping her hands at her wedding. Some nights I spend hours scrolling through them on my phone before I am able to fall asleep. I like activating the live photo feature, where I can see her move a little. 

We go around the circle, sharing our stories. While most speak quickly, rattling off details in thirty seconds or less, others take their time. I admire the women who linger, comfortable enough to reach into the recesses of their hearts and stay there awhile.

Every story is heartbreaking.

Gia is sitting across from me on the floor. She has dark eyes and jet-black hair; shiny wide-legged pants pool around her like seaweed. She unspools her story slowly, taking up as much time as the previous three women combined. 

She grew up, as she air-quotes, working class. Her mother served the postal office for thirty years, and her dad, though he meant well, was as restless as a toddler. In his best years, he found work as a security guard. But her parents loved each other, and got along alright, and so had three kids—two boys and then Gia. 

The younger of the two brothers “thought differently” from other people, she says. He was easily overwhelmed and prone to outbursts but had a good heart and fierce hugs. He struggled to hold a job and so, eventually, the older brother invited him to live in his rental house where at least he’d have a steady place to live.

One morning in June, just a few months after the move, neighbors noticed a man behaving strangely on the front lawn. He wasn’t “acting normal,” though Gia didn’t say exactly what he was doing. Was he pushing a lawnmower around in circles? Wearing a down jacket in the heat of summer? Gia doesn’t specify, but in any case, the neighbors called the police. When the police arrived, the brother, startled, began running toward them. “Probably to explain,” she adds.

An officer shot him in the chest. Six bullets. He fell to the ground while the neighbors looked on. 

Now, Gia’s family is embroiled in a lawsuit, and she’s discouraged from speaking about the incident publicly. Her manager found her story so disturbing he asked her not to speak about it at work. Gia met with a NYC-based activist group and expressed a desire to get involved, but they told her they felt uncomfortable aligning with her brother’s case because he was white, and they needed to focus on the systemic racism and police violence against Black people. She told them she understood and backed off. 

When you lose someone, your circle widens for a while as people lend an ear and support. But as the months pass, people move on and your circle once again narrows. Suddenly Gia—unable to turn to her grieving family, her colleagues, the public, other people in mourning—felt very alone.

“Which is how I wound up here,” she says to all of us now, “talking to a bunch of randos at a dinner party.”

* * *

A boyfriend lost to lung cancer.  A brother who died during a hike. Another brother. A sister. No one else names a friend. Too quickly, it’s my turn. I’m one of the last to share. Heads swivel toward me. I stroke the rug beneath my fingers. I wish Meghana had been my sister or lover.

I begin simply. Say where I live and where I work. I tell them one of my best friends died. 

I try to describe her, reaching for tired adjectives like “joyful” and “driven” and “sincere.” The women are nodding as I speak, but I feel offended on Meghana’s behalf. My words flatten her. It sounds like I am describing a protagonist in a novel, not the living, breathing, complicated human that is Meghana. How can “driven” convey her passion and fire? How can “joyful” describe her full-bodied chortle, so strong that it would shake her entire body? I even miss her maddeningly healthy food choices (she unapologetically calls “salad” her favorite food). And I don’t know how to even begin describing our friendship, which has spanned schools and states and old loves. How to compress all the years and complexities and experiences that go into making a person your person. 

Flustered, I move onto how she died. I try to sound detached. Channeling my former reporting days, I tell them about the river in Iceland that raged a bit too high and the SUV that lost its traction. She drowned. He’s fine. At least, physically he’s fine. 

So much I don’t say. Like how I found out. Alex and I were driving through the mountains of western Colorado so the initial call went to voicemail. I called back close to midnight. Heard her family friend telling me there had been an accident that morning. I don’t tell the dinner party guests about flying back to Chicago for the funeral just two weeks after her wedding. Seeing the portrait of my friend next to the podium, beaming in her pink-and-green wedding sari. How surreal it felt to see Meghana’s friends and family dressed once again in formal wear. Again I watched a ceremony play out in her honor, only this time, without her in it.

“It was an accident,” is all I say, “no one’s fault.”

I’m used to people averting their eyes when I tell them what happened. Here though, most meet my gaze.

“When did this happen?” Tracy asks.

“August last year.”

No one says anything. Then suddenly an ugly thought occurs to me. Most of the other women lost their person far more recently. Gia, with a story every bit as horrific as mine, lost her brother just a few months back. The one-year mark is a big milestone for those who lose someone. There is pressure to show, if not healing, at least “progress.” Are they wondering why I am still in grief? 

I feel waves of panic deep in my abdomen. Logically, I know I owe them nothing, but I feel compelled to say something, to explain. The words tumble out of my mouth before I can stop them.

“I had a miscarriage last month,” I blurt out. “It made me think about losing Meghana. I know it isn’t the same.”

Everyone close to me knows about Meghana. I am not quiet about our friendship or her passing, because I need people to know that she lived. But besides Alex, this is the first time I’ve said these particular words aloud.

Not because I feel guilty or ashamed. I believe our discourse has evolved to the point where we understand that most miscarriages are out of a woman’s control. Chromosomal or genetic abnormalities, mostly. It’s not the flight I took, or the Tylenol I consumed, or the redfish I dined on, or the secondhand cigar smoke I inhaled on Bourbon Street on vacation. 

I chose not to share because frankly, I didn’t know who to tell or how to tell it. I am thirty when it happens, certainly old enough to have a child, but I live in the Neverland of New York City. Many of my friends are still single. Even the ones who aren’t seem to be far more preoccupied with career and leisure—their most recent promotion or the fun travel they have planned. To them, kids are a concept at best. To confess about this miscarriage is to admit that I am moving onto another stage of life, but without having successfully entered it. 

And now I’m in a place where people will supposedly, finally, understand. But while I mean to secure my place at the table, prove that I deserve to be there by revealing the poor cards I have been dealt, I worry now that sharing the two deaths at once somehow cheapens them both. 

What am I hoping for? Maybe for someone to say they understand because they experienced one, too. One in four pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. By my count, I should be in good company. But somehow, I managed to find a space where everyone is suffering from extreme loss, yet neither of the two losses that I endured. 

“I’m sorry,” Tracy says finally. The other women murmur in sympathy. Caitlin leans over to squeeze my arm. I turn to the next person, signaling that I am done.

After we have all shared, we float into the dining room to eat, emotionally spent and ravenous. Tracy brings out lasagna and I help make the plates. In between bites and sips, we cover a wide swath of grief-related ground. How other people react to our grief. Getting used to the past tense to describe our loved ones. How people refer to our grief like it is separate from us (“How are you? And the grief?”) Those who lost boyfriends talk about the deep, crippling longing they feel at night and the raw dread of the morning. Those who lost siblings despair over seeing their parents in pain. I don’t mention my miscarriage again, and no one asks.

* * *

You know, when it began, when I bled on the toilet, hinged over my knees like a cracked Barbie doll, the nurse I spoke with corrected me when I called it a miscarriage? “Medically, it’s not considered a miscarriage until six weeks,” she said over the phone. “It’s only chemical.”

I was a day shy of six weeks but that was hardly the point. I believe she meant to be comforting, but how is explaining my pain away an act of kindness? My body was literally expelling the remnants of what could have been a human; I had nothing left but my label; and she was telling me I didn’t have the right to claim even that.

Grief implies a loss. The loss of Meghana is a tragedy in every sense of the word. But my pregnancy of five weeks created nothing but a heap of cells that took five days for my body to rid. How can I justify mourning an existence that had barely begun? How can that ever compare to a life that was cut short at its prime? While one is multifaceted and vibrant—a daughter, a sister, a friend, a wife—the other is a mere pinch of potential. 

Still, for both, I ached to know what might have been. 

* * *

I rest my hand lightly on my stomach, feeling warm and full from the meal. I gaze around the table and imagine each of the women as Meghana. Meghana with curly black hair, Meghana in seaweed pants, Meghana who squeezed my arm. I think of the real Meghana as well, who would have called herself “auntie” the moment she heard about my pregnancy and mourned beside me when she heard about its end.

Maybe I didn’t cheapen my loss. Maybe I democratized it. Through confession, I stripped it of its power. I might not be fully understood in this company, but I did get to be heard.

And the grip I had on the pain, which I had coddled in my heart until hot and bruised, loosened just a little bit, now shared among those willing to listen. 

Some names and identifying details have been changed

Sanette Tanaka Sloan is a writer and user-experience designer living in New York. She started her career as a real-estate reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and has also been published in The Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer. After switching into design, she worked as a senior product designer at Vox Media and is now designing news products at Google.

Sanette holds degrees from Duke University and the Technological University Dublin. She has given multiple conference presentations and interviews on storytelling and design. “The Dinner Party” is Sanette’s first published personal essay. Follow Sanette on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.