Please note: as the subtitle suggests, this letter is about death.
Dear bread fans,
I’ve been mending things as I tend to my youngest. Felix caught the flu and hasn’t gone back to college, so while I make gallons of soup and yards of bread, I’ve been putting buttons on a friend’s pants. Patching moth holes & cloth tears. Sewing new fleece feet on my fleece socks! And reflecting on life and death.
This is the time of year I revisit the end of my father’s life. I remember the days of the week when each change happened. The Tuesday that Mom & I called the neurologist. The Thursday, when he was really fading, just seeming wrong, and he and I talked about his maybe going to the hospital. This was the first COVID year, and if he left us, that could be it. I tried to tell him that he could die alone – did I use the word die? Refer to death? I’m not sure, but he assured me that he wanted to go to the hospital. “I need a miracle,” he said.
The Friday he went to the hospital, I got to kiss him before he left the house. Then there were days of limbo, until the Tuesday when Felix and I talked to him by Facetime. He was losing the ability to speak, but he pushed us three sounds that my son deciphered. “I love you too, Grandpa,” Felix said. I was ashamed I didn’t recognize the words. Of course love was what he needed to express.
I remember the Wednesday I was allowed to be with him in the hospital because he was on hospice. I got my siblings on the phone and we all sang to him, Beatles songs, more. My brother will remember what because he was playing guitar. The next day we brought him home and began the vigil.
Earlier this week, I stayed up late by the woodstove and recalled our vigil because father-in-law was in the hospital, and had a few days to live. My husband Jack went to see him before Thanksgiving, and got to spend time with his dad, until he got COVID himself. I lamented that Jack’s family wouldn’t have the experience we had.
What an amazing thing, to be together with my siblings and mom as our kind and wonderful father – he jokingly had us call him that when we were little – died. All of us in the house or down the street, the winter dark a black and blue blanket on the sky. I slept on a nest of comforters. In the night, I got up to tell him where he was, and where we were, in the family room he’d built, under the tiny white Christmas tree lights he’d wrapped with vines, around the beams of the cathedral ceiling. I told him where his kids and grandkids were. It was a gift to have this passage at home.
My husband’s family – our kids, his sibling and cousin, his mom and aunt – had a remote vigil, thinking of this kind and wonderful father, a lighting design engineer, and the end of his days. Today would have been his 94th birthday.
It’s remarkable that everywhere around the world, there is always someone dying. Every second of the day. Sometimes we are ready for it, and we get to make a vigil, and more often the end is a harrowing surprise, because life is full of war, accidents and epidemics.
December 1st is World AIDS Day and I remember people I lost. I worked for an AIDS service agency in Seattle, running a thrift store. It was a necessary processing place for the things people no longer living with AIDS left behind. The store had an outreach purpose as well, and was in an old supermarket in an African-American community.
I loved my job. Many volunteers were men who retired young, disabled by the virus. My baking was geared to the tastes of whoever was scheduled to come help – oatmeal cookies for James, pie for Ed. There were other treats and other people, but I really got along with these two guys. When each of them died, I felt them leave, as if a stiff breeze passed through my chest.
Ed’s mom asked me to make a scrapbook for his memorial service. I wrote the words THE FOOTPRINTS OF YOUR HEART ARE EVERYWHERE on the cover, and when his family and friends made a panel for the AIDS quilt, they sewed the phrase onto the cloth.
I imagine all this writing of loss feels heavy and somber. But I’m climbing the ladder of age, and the fact that life ends isn’t just sad. Life is everything. I hope you are loving yours.
Amy
Resources & notes:
The Names Project is an ongoing memorial for people who died from HIV/AIDS. Please take a look at it here, although looking at the whole thing is impossible, because there are, according to the website, “roughly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals in this epic 54-ton tapestry.”
I had the most beautiful dream about Ed a few months after he died. I went to visit him, and he was living at another house, a ranch house. In the carport, he was working on a truck engine. His smile was wide and his hands were dirty. “I’m feeling so much better now, Amy,” he said. “Are you?” I asked. “Yes, I really am.” That warm feeling still lives with me.
I’ll leave you with a recipe from a restaurant in Troy where I worked in the summer of 1985, Gloria’s. Gloria was a retired nurse who opened a lunch spot when her cancer went into remission. These are good to add to your holiday baking circuits.
Glo Bars
2 cups all-purpose flour (240 g), or rye, spelt or whole wheat (260g)
½ cup sugar (100 g)
¾ cup butter (170 g)
raspberry jam -- 1 cup, weight varies
3 eggs (150 g)
1 teaspoon vanilla (5 g)
3 Tablespoons all-purpose flour (22.5 g)
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 cup chopped walnuts (100 g)
Preheat oven to 350° Fahrenheit. Grease a 9 x 13 pan.
Cut together the flour, sugar & butter together in a food processor, with forks, or a pastry cutter. Press the mixture in the prepared pan.
Bake for 20 minutes. Cool slightly.
Spread jam over the shortbread base.
Whisk together eggs, vanilla, flour, salt, soda & walnuts, and pour over jam.
Bake 20-25 minutes until the topping is set.
Cool and cut into squares of desired size.
AIDS is still very present. Perhaps not the short death sentence it once was, but still has no cure.
❤️