Nourishment and Sorrow: A Scots-Irish Heritage

I don’t know why food, and the cooking of food, is so closely tied to death and sorrow in the Scots-Irish heritage that I come from. I just know that it is.

This fact was made clear to me again on the recent Sunday when we got the phone call, early in the morning, that my grandmother had died in the night. Her passing didn’t surprise us. She would have been 99 on her next birthday, and her health had been steadily going downhill for the past couple of years.

After we gathered with our family and set into motion the plans for the funeral, the day was still fairly young. I wasn’t hungry, but for some reason I felt a strong need to come home and start cooking.

I tried a new potato salad recipe I’d been meaning to use for a while, one with green onions and tarragon and a vinaigrette dressing with a touch of brown mustard. There was broccoli and baby carrots in the bottom of the refrigerator, and with some grated fresh ginger they made a decent stir-fry. I found half a head each of green and red cabbage that was still fairly fresh, and whipped up a bowl of coleslaw.

We weren’t having friends over, so there was nothing for us to do with all the food but eat part of it for lunch and put the leftovers in the fridge for another day.

It occurred to me that if this had been a weekend only a few years ago, the potato salad would have been a good recipe to try out on my grandmother on the day each week I went to eat lunch with her, at her apartment in the retirement complex just across town. Until she was well into her nineties she insisted on doing all the cooking for those lunches herself. But when her strength and balance started to decline, she agreed to let me cook for her instead. We joked that it was finally time for me to start paying her back, for teaching me how, when I was just a kid.

One of the many aggravations of growing old, she said, was that her taste buds were fading, and many of her once-favorite foods had all started tasting the same. I took this on as a challenge, and stayed on the lookout for new recipes that were a good bit more tangy or spicy than she would have enjoyed, when she was in her prime. I branched out into Mexican cookbooks, then Thai and Indian and Chinese, then Cuban and Ethiopian.

Most weekends, my experiments worked. She approached each new dish like a puzzle to be figured out. Before she tasted it, she had me tell her the ingredients and how they were fixed. Then, when she chewed a bite, she would stare into the distance with the look of concentration people get when they’re listening to music, or dreaming up a floor plan for a new house.

Finally she would render her judgment, which was nearly always the word “Good.” Followed shortly by, “What if you...” and suggestions for minor variations in seasoning or toppings or texture. Impaired taste buds notwithstanding, she still knew food the way an increasingly deaf Beethoven knew when a piece of music worked and when it didn’t.

In retrospect, looking back on those long weekend afternoons in the late 1990s before the whole world went haywire, I realize that it’s a good thing we can’t predict the future. If either of us had known then, while she sat at her new computer learning the fine points of scanning photos and sending them to her relatives by e-mail, and finding news headlines and weather forecasts on the Internet, that Alzheimer’s would soon make me a familiar stranger to her, some days, we couldn’t have enjoyed those hours as much as we did.

By late afternoon of the Sunday she died, I had depleted our kitchen of things to cook and had to make a run to the grocery store to restock. I didn’t feel nervousness or compulsion about this fact, just a level of calmness and rightness that at times almost verged on pleasure. Almost.

As I went into the supermarket, the skies looked as dangerously dark as if a tornado was coming, but there were no winds. When I came out of the store pushing a grocery cart, a rainstorm slammed down. The biggest, loudest drops I ever remember seeing, and in the middle of the downpour the sun popped out, as blinding as in a dream.

A young man riding a bicycle, who had sought shelter under the concrete eave of the store, said to me, “The sun makes the drops look like diamonds, doesn’t it?” I agreed with him that it did.

On the way home, with dusk very near, the rain clouds blew away to reveal a spectacular double-ended rainbow, a perfect mirror of itself, over the drab gray shopping center.

And that was the end of our first day without her.