“Are you afraid?” I asked her once.
“No,” she said.
“Really? Really and truly?”
“No,” she said again. “I’m really not. I’m tired. I’m ready. I’ve had a good life.”
In mid-January she began to fade. She was getting out of bed less frequently, no longer eager to go outside. And she was barely eating. She was back to milk shakes and root beer floats. I asked if she remembered how much my dad loved root beer; she just smiled and nodded.
On the morning of January 30, I rushed up to her apartment because Janet had phoned to tell me that my mom was up and having a full breakfast. Sure enough, when I got uptown, she was dressed to the nines, including her favorite earrings, sitting at the breakfast table eating eggs and toast. And happy about it.
When I said to her, “Mom, you are unbelievable,” she glanced at me as if she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Of course she was dressed and having breakfast. What else was she supposed to be doing?
By the time I left, though, an hour later, she was back in bed, exhausted. And I think the reality of her exhaustion hit her head-on.
“It’s too hard now,” she said.
“You’ve told me that before, you know, but it wasn’t.”
“It is now,” she said. “It’s very hard.”
When I left a few minutes later, she was asleep.
On January 31 she didn’t wake up when I went to see her. I sat by her bedside for a while, then took her hand. It was bony and weighed almost nothing; her fingers and palm had remarkably little flesh. She didn’t react to my presence. I couldn’t tell if she knew I was touching her.
“Mom,” I said, “you don’t have to keep fighting. You’re unbelievably strong but it’s okay to relax. You don’t have to keep fighting for anyone’s sake. It’s okay if you let go. It’s okay if it’s too hard. I won’t mind. No one’s going to mind.”
I don’t know if she heard me. I don’t think she did. But I was glad I’d said it.
The next morning, my phone rang at seven thirty. It woke me up although I was not in a deep sleep. It was Jennifer, the aide who’d been with my mom the longest and who is one of the gentlest souls I’ve ever encountered.
“I gave your mom a hot chocolate,” she began. “That’s her favorite and I knew that’s what she wanted. She took three sips, then she let me know she’d had enough. I took the cup; she closed her eyes and died.”
I took a few minutes to shower and dress and let the news sink in—to memorialize the moment, in a way—then called Janis to tell her what had happened and went uptown to my mom’s apartment. I called Eric from the taxi. We both cried, separated by several thousand miles and a complicated past but connected by loss and grief. I also called Morgan. I did my best to be stoic but his sobs got my tears flowing again.
Janet, even though she was not scheduled to work, arrived at the apartment a few minutes after I did. I watched while she and Jennifer went into my mother’s room and spoke to her. They both said they loved her and told her they knew she was in a better place. The words were lovely, but I did not think she was in a better place. I thought she’d just left a pretty great place. It was a place she cherished and that place now had a huge void.
The craziest thing happened that morning. My mother had many beautiful plants that flourished on the windowsills of her living room and dining room. The plants brought her a lot of pleasure and she and her aides tended to them with great care. Her favorite plant was a beautiful cactus that she kept in the living room, near the spot where she usually sat. The cactus had thrived for years, healthy and strong. Minutes after my mom died, Jennifer walked into the living room and saw that half of the cactus had suddenly drooped. One half was defiantly erect but the other had collapsed as if in mortal sadness.
* * *
DYING ON FEBRUARY 1 was the final considerate act of my mother’s life. I had made a pledge to myself to have a dry January. I hadn’t had a drink the entire month. But the night she died, Paul and Laurie and Kathleen and Dominick and Abby and Micheline and Janis convinced me that we should go out to dinner and get really drunk. Which I did.
Condolences began to pour in. People knew how close my mother and I had been and everyone was concerned that I would be overwhelmed by grief. The odd thing was, it was impossible to really grieve for my mom. Or be devastated by her death. She was ninety-three years old and she lived a life that was filled with all the things a life should be filled with. The only grief comes from the fact that the world is now a lesser place than it was when she was here.
What I was unprepared for, in some ways, was the amount of work that came in the aftermath of her death. Over the next few weeks and months, I made the arrangements for her cremation, canceled credit cards and store accounts and magazine subscriptions, began the process of selling her apartment—after spending many weeks with Janis, Beth, and others doing our best to clean it up and figure out what to do with the six food processors and four coffeemakers and the hundreds of pots and pans and the fishing rod in the hall closet. As part of this workload, I had possibly the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had with my mother’s mobile phone service provider. I called to pay her final bill and to cancel the account—and learned that I didn’t have the authority to cancel the account. I asked who did have that authority and was told: the account holder. I explained that the account holder was dead but that didn’t seem to solve the problem—if my dead mother didn’t call them to say that she was dead, and thus didn’t need phone service anymore, they’d keep her service active and they’d keep on sending monthly bills. I’m not kidding when I say that it took several conversations with various levels of management people before we worked out a deal: I would send them a copy of my mother’s official death certificate along with my power of attorney document and they would let me cancel my mom’s cell phone.
That was one more detail: I had to get fifteen copies of the death certificate because other companies and organizations also made it extremely difficult to use death as an excuse to cancel their services.
I waited a few months after her death to plan my mother’s memorial. I needed a bit of emotional separation. Also, I knew that people would come from far and wide and I wanted to make sure everyone had enough preparation time.
The memorial became the special dinner I had been planning to prepare for her.
Her fantasy dinner with all her friends and loved ones.
We had the memorial feast at Jean-Paul and Bill’s apartment, the site of her surprise parties and ninetieth birthday bash. It seemed only fitting.
Sixty people came. The youngest was thirteen, the oldest was eighty-six. Family, friends, people from the food world—everyone who came had loved my mom and everyone had, in some profound way, been affected by her.
I brought over several hundred photographs of my mother—with my dad, on exotic trips, eating and drinking with friends and family members, young and at camp, elderly in her wheelchair. I told everyone to take any photo that struck an emotional chord with them.
The menu for the memorial meal was all the food that my mother had selected for her perfect dinner. I made tournedos of beef with truffle cream sauce for the throngs. I also cooked a massive amount of the Gangivecchio cauliflower pasta. Cooking pasta sauce for sixty took almost all day—not being a professional chef, I don’t own “Land of the Giant”–size pots and pans so I had to prepare the identical sauce three separate times. JP offered to make individual salmon coulibiacs but asked if he could use his own recipe (which substituted puff pastry for brioche crust and also used a tomato sauce) instead of Wolf’s. I agreed and it was delicious. He also made the fava bean puree and, even using pre-shelled beans, became almost as frustrated by the dish as I had been nearly thirty years earlier. A couple of hours before the celebration began, he said these exact words: “I am never making this fucking thing again!” Happily, JP’s third culinary contribution came off without a hitch: individual tartes tatin that wer
e as delicious as they were beautiful.
Expedience required that I purchase the boule and challah rather than bake them myself (or bribe Abby to bake them). But I did hold up one of the two challahs that Abby and I had made a few nights prior to the memorial, allowing everyone to admire its beauty before setting it aside, since there wasn’t enough for everyone.
We served white and red Burgundies and vodka martinis. During my toast—I can’t quite bring myself to call it a eulogy—I did my best not to burst out sobbing. Whenever I got too choked up to continue speaking, I reached down for my glass and took a sip to wet my whistle and steady my nerves. The next day, talking to Janis, I congratulated myself on my composure. She said, “Well, you did have to stop and take a drink every three or four sentences. You must have gone through six big glasses of water.”
“Water?” I said. “That wasn’t water. Those were martinis.”
I needed every sip, too.
Many people spoke that night. They didn’t just talk about how much they liked or loved my mom. They talked about how extraordinary she was, about how strong she was, about what they learned from her. Jennifer, her aide, wrote a lovely speech that she delivered beautifully, bringing the entire group to tears. Janet, the other aide closest to my mom, then spoke extemporaneously for several minutes. Her toast was eloquent and precise and perfectly captured my mother’s remarkable dignity.
The evening ended with fifteen or so people sitting around Bill and JP’s dining table, surrounded by the remaining photos I’d brought, sipping Château d’Yquem, my mother’s favorite libation. We were still laughing and crying, but everyone felt a bit exhausted by the emotion that had been expended over the course of the night. And then, around ten fifteen, something extraordinary happened.
JP and Bill’s apartment is on Central Park West and it features a glorious view of the park. Apparently, there was a free concert in the park that night. And when the concert ended, fireworks went off. Not just one or two fireworks: this was the Fourth of July times ten. For half an hour the sky was filled with explosions of color. After a few minutes, someone turned to me and said, “Oh my God, did you arrange this?” I would have liked to take credit but I couldn’t. Nor did I take the fireworks as any kind of spiritual sign. I took them for exactly what they were: a happy coincidence and proof that the world outside the apartment had a reason to celebrate. The fireworks were not celebrating a life, as we were within the apartment; they were celebrating life itself.
* * *
THIS IS WHAT I spoke about, in between gulps of martinis, in the toast I made at my mother’s memorial:
I learned a lot about my mom, while cooking for her and learning to prepare the foods she loved, and talking to her about her life. I learned a lot about her after she died, too.
At her ninety-second birthday party, she told me that she’d saved all of the love letters my dad had written to her when he was in college, in the army during World War II, and after the army, when he was touring the country as a member of a theater company. She told me I should burn them without reading them. I nodded politely and said, “That isn’t happening, Mom.” She said, “I’m serious.” And I said, “So am I. If you don’t burn them yourself, I’m reading them.” Not long before she died, she brought the subject up again. “Burn them and don’t read them,” she told me. “There is zero chance of that happening,” I said. “It’s my past, too.” She sighed and reluctantly acquiesced.
She didn’t destroy those letters. She said that she couldn’t. At her memorial, I spoke a bit about the insights I’d gotten from them, insights into both of my parents, things I’d learned after my mom died:
My dad only went to one year of college at the University of Iowa (I knew he’d gone there but I never knew it was only for one year).
My mother graduated summa cum laude from NYU. My entire life I knew two things about my mom’s education: that she’d spent some time at Beaver College in Pennsylvania (and as a thirteen-year-old boy, oh my God, did I love saying that my mom went to Beaver College) and that she spent some time at NYU after that. My mom never discussed her academic superiority because she never wanted to overshadow my dad. Wow.
My parents were … um … having sex before they were married. This is in the early 1940s. Kind of a big deal back then.
My dad’s letters to her were extremely bawdy. Sometimes flat-out dirty. A lot of sexual references. When he knew he was coming home from the army, after three years away, he told her that their reunion might be difficult. He said they’d need a period of readjustment, which he was certain would be brief, and that their relationship would be better than ever. Then he referred to a “marriage manual” that he’d sent to her. He said that in their years apart he’d come to realize just how important a physical relationship was between husband and wife and he hoped she’d read the manual. He promised her that they’d study it together when he got home. By “study,” it was very clear that what he really meant was: “We’ll put it to good use.”
My dad had a gambling problem when he was young. He lost way too much money playing poker in the army and my mother was constantly getting angry at him.
Some members of my mother’s family put pressure on my mom not to get married. They thought she was too young and my dad’s career as an actor might not be a stable one. My dad bulled right over them, told my mom that she was strong enough to pull away from their restraints. Clearly he was correct.
He called her “Cook” as in “Dear Cook.” At first I thought that she had begun cooking even then, but no, after pouring through many more letters, I realized it was short for his term of endearment, “Cookie.” He also called her Darling, Sugarbunch, Sugarpie, and Honeybabe. The only other person I ever heard use the word “honeybabe” was Bob Dylan.
When he was broke, he dreamed of buying her diamonds and fancy clothes. He demanded that she want those for herself because he wanted to provide them for her.
They loved each other for their entire lives, almost from the moment they met. My mom saved every Valentine’s Day card he had given her, up until the last one he gave her before he died. All of them were funny and sweet and affectionate and, most of all, wildly romantic.
After my mother’s death, I learned things from sources other than my dad’s letters as well as from my own observations.
My mom was a hoarder. She didn’t just keep everything husband-related, she kept every Mother’s Day card Eric and I had sent her since we were young, and every letter I’d written to her from college and beyond. She saved plastic bags and empty jars and gallons of Purell antiseptic hand cream.
She had an insane amount of grandson-related things: report cards, hundreds of photos of Morgan in all stages of his life, even poems he wrote when he was five.
My mother kept all of her press clippings about her books and her cooking school and various interviews she’d given over the years. She also kept track of Wolf’s career via dozens of press clippings. She had hundreds of recipes, many scribbled in her own hand, some saved in books, some just cut out from newspapers and magazines.
She had more kitchen equipment than any restaurant imaginable. I had always said that when I finished writing this book I’d buy myself a perfect set of knives. I didn’t have to. The professional set of knives from my mother’s kitchen are now proudly displayed and gleaming in my kitchen.
My mother showed her love for food by the things she left behind. But more than that, she proved her love for her family.
* * *
HERE’S WHAT I learned from cooking with my mother and talking to her and absorbing her wisdom. Here is what I learned in my search to find meaning in my mother’s kitchen:
Food is not a be-all and end-all. It does not provide meaning, though it does provide pleasure. Nothing that provides pleasure can do so in a vacuum. It is sharing our pleasure that provides real pleasure.
The patience I learned from cooking all the recipes in this book will stand me in good stead for the rest of my life. Bu
t so will the ability to say “fuck it” to and about anyone or anything that demands too much patience. Plunging forward has its value, too. Instinctive behavior may not be neat and it may not always end happily, but it can lead to a delicious result.
Fear has no place in or out of the kitchen.
Neither does anger. You cannot get angry when something fails to bake, broil, or coalesce properly. Anger does not ever work when putting things together. It only works as motivation to try to put something together. Once anger has done its job, you have to let it go.
Love can fade. Families can break apart. Nothing you do in the kitchen can really alter that.
But love can also last. Friends and families and lovers can stay tied forever. When they do, they provide strength and comfort. And food can be used to celebrate and cement love and family, strength and comfort. It did for my mother. It does now for me.
The most wondrous thing I learned is that cooking can give us hope. Hope that by combining different ingredients we can somehow create something newer and better. Something magical. It gives us hope that if we try again, maybe we’ll get it right.
I am definitely going to prepare Nancy Silverton’s bread starter again. And I will make that perfect challah. I really will.
No one lives forever, of course. But I had almost come to believe that my mother might.
I have said this to many people since she died: There is a huge void and I am terribly sad. But her death was not tragic. It wasn’t even depressing.
My mother died knowing who she was and she was comfortable with that knowledge. She went out on her own terms. In her own bed. Steps away from her own kitchen.
Drinking a hot chocolate.
I’ll take it right now.
We all should.
CHTEAU D’YQUEM
Two of my closest friends, Len and Louise Riggio, decided they wanted to start the new millennium with an unforgettable night, so for New Year’s Eve 1999 they rented the entire Four Seasons restaurant, at the time perhaps the most famous restaurant in New York. And they didn’t just invite their own friends. They realized this was a day and a night—and a new century—when people should be with their loved ones. So they told each of their close friends that they would have their own table and could invite whoever they wanted to sit with them. Janis and I were lucky enough to qualify, and we invited those nearest and dearest to our hearts to celebrate with us. My mom, of course, made the cut.
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