My mom died on June 22. It happened at home, which was a blessing, except now I picture her body on a gurney in our family room — where she used to hold court on the phone, read the Globe (paper copy, none of this iPad nonsense), and eat dinner. Not exactly conducive to watching my kids wrestle on the floor or gazing at the bird feeder just beyond the sliding door.
Even when she was bound to a chair, and later a bed, home was her domain. Two days before she died, she was shouting to my dad about not ordering enough hamburgers and sides from Roche Brothers for Father’s Day. If she still got worked up over burgers, I rationalized, she was still firmly planted in the realm of the living. How could someone who cared about pasta salad be dying? Except she didn’t eat much of it. She tried, and I praised every bite like you would a child. But when I took away the paper plate, still quaking under the weight of soggy ziti and a mangled burger bun, I knew she was almost gone.
I haven’t been to the new, Mom-less version of my parents’ house yet. Too empty, like walking through a fading kingdom without its monarch. Will it look like a retiree frat house? Is my father keeping up with the laundry? The lawn? Did he put up mom’s summer wreath? Now, I wonder what’s in his fridge (and what isn’t). I worry if his salad dressing expired the same year as Gerald Ford. I cringe when he says he ate Cheerios for dinner, or soft-serve at Dairy Joy. He comes over a lot, and my husband feeds him.
I know I should probably cook in bulk and send him home with copious frozen meals. That would be the beneficent, Grown-Up Child thing to do. I tell myself that it’s pointless, that he wants the experience of eating dinner with us, and that the food itself is secondary. Which is true. But I also can’t bring myself to send him home with food because I can’t bring myself to assume the role of contented matriarch. The very act of packaging food for the road will make me feel like I’ve accepted my mom’s death as something fair, reasonable, and real. I still want to be taken care of. I want to be told to take a little extra something for the road. I’m not the one in charge here.
Which is why going to Rye, N.H., this weekend to see my mom’s cousin was such a relief. It was my grandfather’s birthday — “D” would have been 101 — and he loved it up there. My mom’s family would spend summers at Hampton with them, where they owned a massive trailer park off the main drag. (Still do!) She and my mom grew up together, and I call her my aunt. Now she has a house a few towns over, not far from Jenness State Beach. My whole family went up, and my dad, too.
For once, I wasn’t worried about what my dad was eating, because she texted me well in advance that she’d pack lobster rolls. We got onto her boat, and there was a cooler filled to the brim — cheese, crackers, cherries, pretzels, mini water bottles, seltzer, hummus, one of those plastic trays for chips and dip. We got back to her yard, and she began asking the boys what they wanted, if not lobster: Peanut butter and jelly? Turkey? Mustard? Mayo? Cupcakes? Which color? More and more food seemed to appear from her kitchen, miraculously, just like from my mom’s when she was alive. Cole slaw. Lobster meat. Buns. Market Basket chips. (It’s in the blood.)
Now, my mother was not a gourmet cook, but she stocked food the boys wanted. She always had snacks in her Vera Bradley bag and supermarket cupcakes on the counter with frosting colors not found in nature.
Last but not least: “I got a cake,” my cousin said.
This was a surprise to me. The inscription was wrong, so she scraped it to make it right: “Happy Birthday, D.”
There wasn’t time to eat it. She had to be somewhere in Portsmouth at 7. We all had to get back on the road. So she cut it up and put it on paper plates for us, the kind my mom used, too, with a big shiny tent of tinfoil on top. Did the boys want more cupcakes? Of course they did. They picked their color, two of each.
We got back onto 1A. We drove past Jenness, where my mom went every summer. We looked at the huge houses I once grew up ogling from the backseat of my parents’ car in a sticky bathing suit. We headed down toward Hampton, past the big beach wall my mom used to lounge on as a teenager — where my grandfather once caught her sneaking cigarettes and summoned her home with a wag of his finger. And then we drove home with his birthday cake on my lap, and it felt like someone was taking care of me again.
Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.baskin@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @kcbaskin.
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August 10, 2021 at 07:00PM
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This summer, my paper plate is full and heavy, much like my heart - The Boston Globe
"heavy" - Google News
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