Shove This In Your Pie Hole...
Food is love: delicious, overcooked, badly seasoned, or pureed. Still love.
Take a moment and hit the heart, turn it red like ❤️ this. It costs nothing and helps me feel good. If you’re not enjoying my writing, just stop reading now. Life is short. Find something you do like, and tell the world.
I have the recipes, stained with the food she cooked, the residue and evidence of years of love. Bronx Jews, food is the love language of my people.
Dementia has slowly stolen any connection she had to taste, desire, or hunger.
Literal weeks were spent planning, cooking and freezing for special dinners—Passover, Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah, a birthday, any reason at all to have people over for a big meal with lots of courses, borrowing neighbors freezers, washing the good plates, polishing the good silver.
I say that as if we had some not so good silver to use alternatively—it was stainless steel during the year and silver plated for holidays. I use that same good silver plated silver at home now, along with cloth napkins, because I’m my own special occasion.
Cooking Goes South ≠ Southern Cooking
Her cooking started going south; it was like an early warning system.
There was the shrimp and oregano debacle. In the split second between reading ¼ tsp in the recipe, to measuring ¼ CUP, the difference between a teaspoon and a cup evaporated, and she dumped 48 times more dried oregano than called for into the scampi.
She’d started using apple cider in her dry breakfast cereal when she’d run out of milk, like it was a the most natural thing in the world. I’ve used Coffee Mate in lieu of milk, but at least that pretends to be dairy.
The oven caught on fire, more than once, less than half a dozen times. She’d forgotten that pizza drips cheese when you cook it on the wire racks. Couldn’t be expected to remember to clean what she didn’t even realize was there. Not recognizing the sound of the smoke alarm as anything more than maybe an annoying a car alarm outside she had no control of or responsibility for, or noticing the smoke (she’d lost her sense of smell years ago), she’d retreat to her bedroom, happily playing solitaire on the computer—to keep her mind sharp—until a neighbor came to investigate the smell, the smoke, the alarm. To make sure the nice woman in 5T was still alive. She’d accept their help in turning the alarm off, then charm them into sitting for something to nosh.
We scoured Trader Joes for prepared or frozen meals, to make life easier. Keeping the labels of the foods she liked in a small pile on the kitchen counter—to bring along next time we shopped; keeping the labels of the food she’d tried and didn’t want to repeat in another small pile on the kitchen counter—to also bring along—and forgetting which pile was which.
Prepared food delivery services. Epic fail, even prepared foods come with instructions. And “eat by” dates.
On Moving to Assisted Living
Cleaning out the freezer in preparation for the move to assisted living, I found three unopened one-pound bags of Trader Joes Korean Style Beef Short Ribs. In the refrigerator, multiple unopened packages of grilled chicken strips, in varying states of “that doesn’t look safe to eat” she had no idea what to do with.
Not only didn’t she cook anymore; she was no longer able to assemble a meal from pre-cooked foods.
She moved to assisted living and there were dining companions, and good meals someone else thought about, cooked, served, cleared away, and cleaned up after. She brought who she was, introducing her table to bagels, lox and cream cheese. They had her at Bunny Tracks.
Hand Fed Food is Love
My father’d fed her M&Ms, one at a time, to keep her from falling asleep in the movies or the theater. Since forever.
Later, the boyfriend, Sal, wooed her with mini Milky Ways he kept in his pocket, slipping them to her when no one was looking, the way an old man does for his grandchildren. He came bearing day-old doughnuts, both Depression babies, day-old was just as good as fresh, but better because—cheaper.
There’s Always Room For Jello Any Dessert Except Jello.
Her homemade frozen Ambrosia, basically sour cream, canned fruit salad, sugar and lemon juice, frozen in metal ice trays, because she was that kind of fancy in the 60s and 70s and that was the only kind of ice tray there was…
She was living proof of bet you can’t eat just one when it came to potato chips. Cookies. Brookies from Trader Joes. Aides bribed her with Entemann’s eclairs. I snuck in mini eclair pies. Mint chocolate chip ice cream, easier to find than Bunny Tracks. Dark chocolate covered ginger. Valentine’s Day assortments. All snacks. Any snacks. It all went, and fast.
For the first couple of years, her night table was piled with various treats, like an alcoholic who never wants to be far from a bottle, who keeps a spare bottle of vodka (or chocolate covered caramels in this case) just in case, there were at least two different options for sugar cravings. At least two.
Then one day, she leaned in, whispered, “You know, all they ever give you to eat here is crap.”
I struggled to make the meals she’d enjoy and turned to her recipes, which, like Martha Stewart’s, were not to be taken at face value. It became obvious there was an underlying assumption of knowledge around meats and other edible, non-crap things that I didn’t have. Her brisket recipe called for a well-trimmed cut. I trimmed off all the fat. The assumption here was that of course I knew to leave some fat if you want something edible, rather than a beef doorstop, a meat brick, or what I like to think of as my personal invention: a three-pound Brisket Jerky.
She started pushing food around on the plate with a fork, the way an anorexic who wants you to think they’re eating. But, she’d still devour chocolate, cookies and candy.
Her gums receded, dentures no longer comfortable. I found a dentist that made house calls! Who knew?
She stopped wearing her teeth.
Captain Nutribullet to the Rescue
aka The Hardest Working Appliance in the Kitchen
Pureed canned fruits: Tropical fruit, mango, papaya.
Apple sauce, already pulverized for your convenience.
Pureed soups, with a can of chicken pureed and added: Butternut Squash soup, Cashew Carrot Ginger soup, a half dozen versions of Progresso chicken soups: Italian Wedding Soup, Chicken with Lemon & Orzo, with Herb Dumplings, Rice & Vegetables, Barley, Vegetables and Pearl Pasta.
I’ve learned to recognize a ripe papaya instead of buying canned. Scooping the fragrant flesh and throwing it in the blender with a generous amount of honey. Upping the game with added fresh ginger.
Sweet potatoes, once she’d scrape the skins with her teeth to get every last bit of goodness, now boiled within an inch of their life, mixed with cinnamon, honey and a generous splash of Very Vanilla High Calorie Boost until I feel justified in telling her it’s “Sweet Potato Pudding.”
The original recipe (that I made up) for “homemade chocolate pudding” aka homemade Ex-Lax made: Stewed prunes (until they’re almost mush), honey and Boost in a blender. Next iteration: add dried dates for flavor and sweetness. Tweak it by adding instant coffee because coffee with help move poop along, as will prunes. You’re wondering where the chocolate in this chocolate pudding is? The latest addition to the recipe, Hershey’s chocolate powder, and I am no longer a liar when I tell her we were having chocolate pudding for breakfast.
Healthy Harvest Coconut Water, the only water she would drink, until she wouldn’t. Pedialyte, used to sneak in Miralax daily, and keep her hydrated because see previous sentence —the only water she’s drink until she wouldn’t.
Boost Very High Calorie Nutritional Drink, in Very Vanilla and Chocolate throughout the day, keeping her calorie and nutritional intake up was “oh, this is delicious” after every sip, until it wasn’t.
Until there is no response.
There is no response to any of it anymore.
How’s Her Appetite, They Ask
She has no appetite.
She has no sense of taste—which makes it easier to give her Milk of Magnesia or Liquid Tylenol or any kind of liquid medicine. Previously, you ran the risk of having it spit out in your face, now it went down relatively easy, although she does still have the ability to hold a pill in the center of her tongue through an entire cup of soup and two small bowls of fruit, then hand it back to you—or hide it in the sheets—half-dissolved.
Food was once such a source of pride and pleasure. Weeks of cooking and freezing and experimenting and going vegetarian and coming back to meats and elaborate meals and traditional meals and meals with friends and families and neighbors because food is love.
Food is a love language.
Food was our love language.
Bronx Jews, food is the love language of our people.
She still occasionally eats invisible finger food, but I’m betting she’s acting out an old memory more than it is hunger.
It’s habit.
She can’t tell me if she’s hungry, any more than she can tell me what it is she wakes up holding every single time she wakes up, clutching some invisible thing.
I’ll still make the things she used to like.
She’ll still eat out of obedience.
Until the day comes that she won’t.
Please take a moment to click the heart to like this ❤️, share it, restack or leave me a comment. It helps with the algo, it helps with the ego, and it helps me get to know you.
Who was I before I was her caregiver? ⬇️ ⬇️
Episodes 5 & 6 : A funeral, naked Polaroids, and what happens when truth and fact don’t line up all nice and pretty?
Oh dear. I've never met your mom, but I fall in love with her and feel like I've known her forever. every time I read one of your essays about her. Give her a hug for me, please.
This made me roar: "Keeping the labels of the foods she liked in a small pile on the kitchen counter—to bring along next time we shopped; keeping the labels of the food she’d tried and didn’t want to repeat in another small pile on the kitchen counter—to also bring along—and forgetting which pile was which."
I've never included ginger in my charoset. Sometimes I'll cut up dates.