Letter 29 – The Cooking One

 

Garrett, 

When you died, I stopped cooking. I didn’t plan to. I just stopped and haven’t yet started up again. I don’t even know what we ate when it first happened. Wendy’s. A lot of Wendy’s. Cans of things. Ramen. I couldn’t bring myself to cook. Maybe at first it was the shock of what had happened. I became completely disabled in every way. Just absorbing the fact that you died took up all my
time. And everything stopped.  

Kevin had to take over the details of our house renovation. I couldn’t communicate with anybody. In no way could I imagine how I could talk to our builder about house things. Who cared? But we were towards the end of it, and someone had to do it, and Kevin took that on, even though he, too, was in no shape to do it. It is what partners do. They do what they can.  

Our lives together with you were so wrapped up in food, which feels like a weird thing to say. I had no idea the extent of it until I couldn’t imagine cooking ever again. I will never make chicken tenders again, I thought to myself. Nope. No chili. No chicken noodle soup. No burgers. Pretty much everything I had ever cooked with any regularity was off the table. Because it was so tied up with you. And memories of sitting at the table.

You were so interested in food. You always wanted to know, what was for dinner? What was for breakfast? Would I pay to get you this food? Would I pay to get you that other food? 

At your gathering, so many kids had stories of you and food. I used to bring these cookies to school with me because I knew he’d want one, someone said. He’d ask me to buy him lunch and for some reason I always did, someone else said. It had to be just the right food. It had to be just what you had in mind.

I used to say, Garrett, sometimes food is just food. That was never the case with you. There were so many stories about you and food, mostly people saying how they fed you, that when I finally got up in front of everyone to speak the first thing I said was, I fed my son! And we laughed. You and food were so intrinsically tied together.  

Months went by, and I still didn’t cook. A big effort day was when I made hamburger helper. No emotional associations with that one. It was one of Genevieve’s favorite dishes, so that was perfect. A fried steak here or there.

Breakfast. The first time I made bacon after you died, I could hear you in my head saying, don’t make it too crispy. Forcing myself not to walk away from that bacon was really hard. Eggs over easy. Scrambled. Every time I made something that had some memory of you wrapped up in it I told myself, It’s okay. It’s just eggs. And it’s only bacon. Those first few breakfasts were hard.  

Dinners. Still not going there, pretty much. At some point I realized I had to come up with an alternate plan to feed my other child. She needed food, real food, and I wasn’t providing enough of it. In my email one day, an ad for some food delivery service popped up. And I thought to myself, fine. This will work. I will find the service plan that pretty much does everything for you and order that. The “almost no work or effort at all” tier of food service. Get the box, put the food in a tray. Bake it. And there it is. Real food that is pretty much ok, and sometimes, pretty good.  

One of the good things that’s happened from this is that Kevin does this with me, now. We open the delivery box, and we examine the cards. And we say to each other, What did we get today? When it’s time to make it, we do it together. And we say, What’s the next step? What does the card tell us to do next? And we share essentially meaningless small talk. I enjoy it, and it’s become a new thing, for our family. A new and different way to do something.