My intention, my sole goal while writing this book, was to cook with my mom, to share the breakfast and lunch menus with her as I went along, and to become proficient enough in the kitchen so I could make the dinner of her dreams. My plan for that dinner was to invite the people who were most important to her, and to whom she was important, and we would all share a dazzling sequence of marvelous dishes that had emotional resonance for many at the table. We would finish with a glass or two of d’Yquem. The evening would be spent enjoying and critiquing the food, as well as reminiscing about great meals, groundbreaking restaurants, and eccentric characters, laughing, crying, and celebrating a unique person and her extraordinary life.
I didn’t quite make it.
On February 1, 2016, my mom died.
Her death, and the final several months of her life, could not have been much more perfect or inspiring. Strange to say, her final months were even great fun, for her and for those around her. I don’t know how she made that happen but she did.
Many people assumed that my mother’s post-stroke period, which lasted seven years, would be the ultimate testament to her strength and courage. But it wasn’t. In some ways, it wasn’t even close. Her final and most remarkable stage began on October 26, 2015.
That evening, I was invited to a screening of a documentary about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The theater was uptown, about sixty blocks from my apartment. After the movie, I went to dinner with friends, then took a taxi downtown. At 10:45, with the cab two blocks from my apartment, my cell phone rang. It was Carla, the woman who runs SelectCare. She told me that my mother had had some tests done earlier that day and that the lab just called; they thought the results of the tests warranted a call at this late hour. My mother’s INR (internal normalized ratio) count—it measures degrees of anticoagulation—was insanely high. Normal was one or two. Three was high. My mother’s count was fourteen. I asked Carla what this meant and she said that if the results were accurate, my mom was in serious danger of internal bleeding, which would be life threatening. She wanted my permission for the SelectCare aide to take my mom to the hospital immediately so the test could be re-administered. If the initial results were incorrect, then my mom would just come right home. If they were true, the hospital could treat it with medication and return the INR count to normal.
The cab pulled up in front of my apartment and I told Carla that I needed five minutes to think. I said I’d call her back.
I went upstairs and quickly fed my cats. Before I let Mitch gobble down his delicious bowl of Minced Turducken, however, I picked him up and hugged him tightly to my chest and cheek. Harper did not love being held and squeezed—she was much more of a cuddler, and then only at moments of her choosing. Mitchum was always happy to let me do whatever I wanted with him, so now I used him for fifteen seconds of much-needed comfort.
I needed those five minutes to think because, just as my father had done twenty-six years earlier, my mom had made one thing very clear to me: she did not want to die in the hospital.
About two years earlier, she’d fallen and broken her pelvis. She was rushed to the emergency room, where Dr. Lachs met us. He explained that my mother had suffered the most painful injury imaginable. But my mom refused to acknowledge the pain because she knew that if she did, she’d have to stay in the hospital. I had a choice: 1) force her to stay against her wishes; the surgeons weren’t going to operate on someone so fragile but she might get some form of treatment and would probably spend another night in the hallway of the ER, or 2) get her the hell out of there and hope that she could survive and recuperate at home. I decided my mom was going home. I told her what was happening, promised she’d be leaving as soon as I could get an ambulance, and then, knowing that her pain tolerance was at a superhuman level, I said, “Okay, you’re going home no matter what the real answer is, but let me put it to you this way. I know you keep saying that you’re not in pain, but if it was me, would I be in pain?” She managed a thin smile and said, “Oh yes.”
She went home, refused to even take her pain meds, and, once again, despite what the doctors told me would happen, she returned to normal in six weeks.
After that little episode, I knew that the only way she was ever going to the hospital at this stage of her life was if the choice was taken out of her hands.
That night in October, the choice was removed from both of our hands. As I paced in my apartment and wondered what the right thing to do was—get her to the hospital or let her stay at home and risk the likelihood that she would start bleeding and die—my cell rang again. It was Carla. My mother had started bleeding profusely from her anus. An ambulance was already rushing her to Lenox Hill Hospital.
I was back uptown by eleven thirty p.m. and stayed with my mom until four a.m. The first doctor who came by to see my mother was a young woman—she looked to be about fourteen to me—with tattoos and body piercings. I explained that I didn’t want any extreme measures performed that would keep my mother alive: no machines, no invasive treatment. Expecting an argument, I got none. The doctor said that she understood. I also said that if my mother was dying, I did not want her dying in Lenox Hill. I wanted her home. Again, the doctor said she understood. She calmly explained that all they were going to do was give my mom an intravenous injection to try to get her INR level down to normal. By that point, it was at eighteen.
I agreed to that treatment.
For the next few hours, my mom was in and out of consciousness. She seemed shriveled, small, and so weak, I imagined that a deep exhalation of breath blown in her direction would knock her out of bed. She was having excruciating abdominal pain—even my mom had acknowledged the severity—and she seemed resigned, as if she knew her time had come. Although I suspected she could hear me and was only feigning sleep when I tried to speak to her two or three times, she did not respond or acknowledge my presence in any way.
At three a.m., she opened her eyes and spoke to me for the first time. She said, “You look exhausted. You should go home.”
I laughed and said I was staying. Then she said, “I want to go home.”
I said I knew she did. Then I carefully explained exactly what was happening. I told her they had to lower her INR count, which would take a few hours. As soon as that was done, I’d get her out of there. I promised. No matter what. She nodded and went back to sleep.
At four in the morning, I went home, managed a fitful three hours of sleep, and went back to the hospital. Nothing had changed.
The head of palliative care came over and said that, in her opinion, my mother did not need curing, she needed relief from pain and suffering. I told her that it wasn’t just what my mom needed, it’s what she wanted. It’s what I wanted for her as well. I was amazed that doctors, who for years had been trained to keep patients alive at any cost, were now committed to such a humane and dignified approach to the end of life.
During the night, the hospital had done an MRI. A new doctor appeared and told me that they’d found a large mass in my mother’s stomach that was most likely cancer and that was most likely causing her intense pain.
After huddling with various doctors and surgeons, I made my decision: my mom was going home. The consensus was that she had just a short time to live, anywhere from a day or two to another week. She would go back to her beloved apartment, have home hospice care. Along with a decent supply of morphine and a hospice nurse, we would wait for the end. It was now about one in the afternoon on October 27.
My mother had not spoken or stirred since I’d returned to the hospital nearly five hours earlier. Now I went over to her, not sure if she could hear me or not, and said, “Mom, we’re getting you out of here. You’ll be home in about an hour.”
My mom opened her eyes, lifted her head up, smiled brightly, and said, “Really?”
I laughed. Even the doctor who was standing nearby laughed. “Really,” I told her.
She was home and in bed by two thirty. The hospice nurse arrived a short while later. My mother’s wonderful aides—Janet, Jennifer, and Karlene—were still going to be there to take care of my mom, too. Karlene had been on duty when my mom was rushed to the hospital; she spent the night in the ER, staying even when I went home at four in the morning. At six a.m. she was supposed to be replaced by Janet, but when I got back there at seven thirty or so, they were both there. Karlene wouldn’t leave. I knew my mom would want these women, whom she’d come to love and who had come to love her, to be nearby.
The hospice nurse, kindly but somewhat long-winded, explained to me what would happen: My mom didn’t have much time. Because of the huge mass in her stomach, she would not be able to eat anything but ice chips. She would slowly—or possibly not so slowly—fade away. It would be peaceful.
I said that I understood and went into my mom’s room. I wanted to talk to her but I also wanted to escape the nurse’s ongoing lecture that wasn’t comforting me quite as much as it was driving me crazy. My mom was awake, if a bit disoriented.
“Why am I here?” she asked.
At first I didn’t understand her question. Eventually I realized she meant: why was she at home instead of in the hospital.
I told her the truth. I said it was because she’d made me promise she wouldn’t die in the hospital. This was the endgame, I explained. And she would spend her remaining time, however long that would be, in her own room, in her own bed, in her own home. I said we were not going to do anything to try to revive her, if that situation came up. And I told her she was never, ever going back to the hospital, no matter what. She didn’t say anything at first, so I took her hand and said, “Is that okay? Did I make the right choice?”
And she said: “That’s wonderful.”
I went into my mom’s living room now to call Eric and tell him what had happened. He called Morgan to tell him the news. I also spoke to Morgan and said the same thing I’d explained to his father: I could not tell how long Mom/Grandma would last. It might be a day; it might be a week. But if they wanted to see her, they’d better come soon.
Morgan, now in his mid-twenties and recently married, flew to New York two days later. My mom was very weak, seemingly not aware of much that was going on, or at least not very responsive. But when Morgan and his wife, Stephanie, walked into her room, she certainly knew they were there and was extremely happy about it. Morgan and Stephanie stayed the weekend. On their last night in New York, they came to my apartment for dinner. It was the nicest few hours I’d ever spent with them. Morgan completely let down his guard—something that’s very difficult for him—and talked a lot about his grandmother, although tears kept interrupting his conversation. He said that my mom had been the one person who had always loved him unconditionally. He said that she was his rock. He said that he could always call her whenever he felt bad. Or just call her whenever he felt good. He said he loved sharing things with her. Stephanie said that Morgan wasn’t prepared for my mom to die. Morgan agreed—he didn’t know if he could deal with what was about to happen. I said that he could, that it’s what happens in life. I told him he was lucky because he was now happily married and that Stephanie would now become his rock. That’s the way it works. I told him that my mother’s biggest regret was that she hadn’t been well enough to go to their wedding in Hawaii, but she had loved watching the videos they’d sent her and looking at the photos. Every time I went to my mom’s apartment, she had their wedding photo in plain view, usually on her dinner table, so she could look at it when she ate. Now they both cried. And the next morning they went up to my mother’s apartment, said good-bye to her, and left for the airport.
Eric came the day Morgan and Stephanie flew back to L.A. and he stayed a week. Even though her responses were still weak and she was barely able to speak, my mom was clearly very happy he was there.
My relationship with my brother had changed so much over the years. We’d gone through periods of great closeness, experienced a lot of anger on both sides, and had settled into a kind of distant wariness. He and I had dinner one night, the first time we’d done that in quite a while; my cousin Beth came, too, but it was still the most intimate we’d been in recent memory. He told a few stories about our dad and our mom, tales from the past. I thought he had rewritten history to form the picture he wanted to keep in his mind. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really care if his memories were real or not. I cared only that they gave him whatever comfort he could take from them.
During my brother’s stay in New York, my mom was so frail, so weak. Neither of us thought she could last much longer. Then, on Eric’s last night before he was returning to France, I came up to my mom’s apartment with take-out Chinese food. It was for him and for my mom’s nurses; my mom was not eating much other than ice chips, to keep her hydrated, and an occasional spoonful of ice cream. Eric took the Chinese food into our mom’s room to eat it there. Within seconds, my mom lifted her head and said, “That smells good.”
A bit incredulous, I asked, “You want some?”
Without hesitation, she said yes.
I asked the hospice nurse if it was okay. Confused, she said, “They told me she wouldn’t eat.”
“Well, can it hurt her?” I said.
“I don’t see how, if she wants it,” was the answer.
So I prepared a plate of Chinese food, gave it to my mom, and watched her eat an egg roll, sesame noodles, and moo shoo pork.
“I thought she had this big blockage,” I said to Jennifer, one of my mother’s beloved aides, who came in to watch my mom eat.
“What can I say?” was Jennifer’s response. “Your mother’s not like regular people.”
Three or four days after Eric left, I called my mom’s apartment to talk to her aide—it was Janet that day—and I asked how my mom was. Janet said she’d gotten out of bed.
“What do you mean ‘out of bed’?”
“She spent a couple of hours in her wheelchair,” Janet told me. “She was getting restless.”
“They told me she wouldn’t move again.”
“It’s your mom,” Janet said. “Nobody knows what she’ll do.”
The next day, when I went to the apartment, my mom was back sitting in her wheelchair, in her bedroom. Janet had washed my mother’s hair and brushed it and she looked … well … like she always looked. She had on lipstick and was wearing her favorite earrings and necklace. She didn’t look sick.
I asked my mom if she’d been to the living room and she shook her head. Janet said no, she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. My mother glanced at her and frowned.
The next day she went to the living room in her wheelchair.
The day after that she ate breakfast at her dining table.
The third day, I called in the afternoon and Janet told me that she and my mom had gone for a walk.
“Where?” I said.
“Outside,” Janet told me. “Do you want to talk to her?”
“She can talk on the phone?”
“Oh yes.”
I heard Janet ask my mother if she wanted her to hold the phone while my mom spoke to me and I heard my mom say, clear as day, “No, I can do it myself.”
The next thing I knew, my mother was saying, “Hello.” I asked her how she was feeling and she said, “Fine,” as if she was surprised I’d even ask such a thing.
Over the next week, instead of fading, she seemed to grow stronger every day. Wolfgang came to New York and went up to see her. He brought her food and stayed for two hours. My mother was thrilled. Beyond thrilled.
“Do you know how busy he is? He was here for two hours!”
She said he had reminisced about Ma Maison and their trips with Maida Heatter and cooking together and, just like the old days, they had a personal, private talk. He filled her in on his life. She could not have been happier.
At first she didn’t want anyone else to see her. But as she started feeling better, she began to welcome company. My cousin Jon went up a couple of times. So did other cousins. Beth visited every day; dutifully and happily, she was there to provide anything my mom wanted or needed. Barbara Lazaroff, Wolf’s ex-wife, came to New York every few weeks and always made a point of spending time with my mother. She would bring gourmet chocolates and other goodies and my mom would invariably be a bit giddy after Barbara left. My old buddy Paul and his wife, Laurie, went to the apartment several times and so did their kids (their children, Ben and Sara, always called my mom “Grandma” and my mom thought of them as her own grandchildren, too). Laurie went up alone one day and showed my mom pictures of the wedding dress that Ben’s bride-to-be, Carolyn, had picked out. She said that my mom glowed. When I asked my mother about it, she said, “She’s going to be so beautiful.” When I said that she’d be able to judge for herself when September rolled around, my mom just said, “We’ll see.”
I went to see her almost every day. And I called at least once a day to either talk to my mom—whose speech actually seemed better than it had been in years—or to one of the aides. Janet, Jennifer, and Karlene were all overjoyed at the turn of events. But none of them seemed surprised.
The hospice nurse, however, was in a state of disbelief. She said to me, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Your mother is incredible.”
Janis’s group e-mails had been going out yet again, updating the throngs on my mom’s condition. After telling everyone that my mom was on the verge of death, the e-mails now seemed as if they had been made up.
• “Judy went out for a walk today. And she ate two bowls of ice cream.”
• “She has yet to take any morphine. She says she’s in no pain.”
• “Judy is eating full meals. Today she had pancakes and bacon for breakfast.”
Her appetite hadn’t just returned. It returned with a ferocity even I had trouble accepting. I called one day and when I asked to speak to her, Janet couldn’t stop laughing.
“What’s going on?” I said. “What’s so funny?”
“We just got back from lunch.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother insisted we go to a restaurant. The three of us went.” The third person was the hospice nurse.
“That’s impossible.”
“I have photos,” Janet said. “But that’s not the most amazing part.”
“It isn’t?”
“No,” she said. “Ask me what your mother ate.”
“Okay. What did she eat?”
“A pastrami sandwich. With mustard. And pickles.”
“How much did she eat?” I asked.
“Exactly what she usually eats: half a sandwich. And she insisted on bringing the other half home.”
I spoke to my mother’s doctor, Mark Lachs. He told me that the blockage had obviously disappeared.
“Does cancer just disappear?” I asked.
“It does not,” he said. And then he said, “You do understand that what your mother’s doing is actually impossible.”
When I went up to see my mom the next day, I said to her, “You know, you have to be the only person in history who ever went out with her hospice nurse to get a pastrami sandwich.”
She laughed.
And the next day she came to our traditional Thanksgiving Dinner. It was usually held at Kathleen and Dominick’s, but this year, thanks to a gas leak and extensive renovation to their building, we had to switch the venue to my apartment.
I had suggested the idea to my mother a few days earlier.
“You’re doing so well,” I said. “If you’re feeling strong on Thursday, I’ll send a car to pick you up and you should come for an hour or two. And we won’t tell anybody. You just show up—people will be shocked.”
Over the previous few weeks, many of my friends had gone over to my mom’s to say their good-byes. No one expected to see her at Thanksgiving. Hell, no one expected her to be alive for Thanksgiving. But even at her lowest ebb, my mom never lost her sense of humor. Kathleen and Dominick came over to see her one day. My mother was very weak and not particularly responsive. She was having great difficulty talking so Kathleen prattled on, taking the onus off my mom. She told my mom how much she loved my mother’s shirt: she’d always loved that type of shirt, she could never find one for herself, it looked so good on my mom. My mother just smiled weakly and none of us were sure she was really listening. But when Kathleen and Dominick got up to leave, my mom put her hand out to stop Kathleen. With her good left hand, she grabbed her own shirt and said, “Relax, it’s yours. I’ll leave it to you.”
Knowing that everyone thought she was done for, when I said she should make a guest appearance for the turkey dinner, she said, “I’m there.”
At three p.m. on November 26, 2015, she got wheeled into my living room, all dolled up and grinning like a madwoman. She got a standing ovation—whistles, cheers, the whole shebang.
Laurie Eagle, who was like a daughter to my mom, was especially surprised to see her. She had called my mother that morning to say how sad she was that she wouldn’t see her at dinner.
“I’m sad, too,” my mom had said.
When Laurie saw her arrive for the meal a few hours later, she said to my mom, “You stinker! How could you do that to me?”
My mother said, “It was easy.”
I had rarely seen her quite so proud of herself.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT four months, my mom and I had many long talks. All of them were sweet, interesting, inspiring, and truly funny—not a day went by that she didn’t make me laugh. We discussed my dad. And Eric and Morgan. Things that had happened in the past—she never got tired of telling me how she refused to forgive my father’s father for his slight when Eric was born. She finally told me why, when she moved back to New York after my dad died, she wouldn’t live downtown. It was because her family lived downtown and she didn’t want to be too close. Moving three thousand miles away from them was what had enabled her to find her confidence and her real identity. Even in her seventies, she still felt that, as the baby in the family, she would be overpowered by her siblings. You are what you start out as, I suppose. Or, more accurately, no matter your age, you too often run the risk of being what your family thinks you once were.
She talked about her many friendships—she reveled in all of them—but she saw everyone with a remarkably clear eye. At this point in her life, she saw everything with a clear eye. She was impossible to con or bullshit. Her brain was working 100 percent, even as her body was failing.
Sometimes we’d argue about something trivial. I’d say, “You told me that was happening on Tuesday” and she’d go, “I said Monday.” We’d go back and forth and then suddenly something would spark my memory and I’d go, “Umm … I think you’re right. I think you did tell me it was Monday.” And she’d go, “Of course I did. I don’t forget.”
Many of our conversations were about death and her feelings about what was happening to her. She wanted to be cremated. She wanted certain people to get specific possessions. She wanted me to stop spending so much time taking care of her problems. As always, she was more concerned with others than she was with herself. I have never felt closer to my mother than during these conversations.
“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 were 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. But 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.
CHÂTEAU 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.
She hobbled in on crutches—she had hurt her foot—and made her way to our table. In front of each place setting was a festive menu that listed the meal, course by course. As my mom perused the menu, her eyes lit up. The final item listed was Château d’Yquem.
Yquem is, without question, the greatest dessert wine on the planet. A Sauternes from the southern region of Bordeaux, in 1855 it was designated a Premier Cru Supérieur—Superior First Growth—acknowledging its superiority over all other wines of this type. It is the only Sauternes so honored. I am hardly an expert, but Yquem is far more complex than any sweet wine I have ever tasted. A sip seems to spread flavor from head to toe, filling the entire body with a combination of sweetness and depth that no other wine can achieve.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, not too many people were imbibing Yquem, but my dad loved it and had cases of the stuff, at a cost of ten dollars a bottle. Today, you can probably find a bottle for seven or eight hundred dollars, although top vintages go for way more than that. I’ve seen bottles on sale for $15,000 and more. That’s for one bottle. In 2011, at an auction, a bottle of 1811 Yquem was sold for $117,000! My mother, who was not a big drinker in those days, always went into raptures when sipping it. And her appreciation for Yquem never flagged, although she could no longer afford to buy it by the case.
When my mom saw that the Riggios were serving Yquem that epochal night, to say she got excited is a bit of an understatement. Somewhere around one a.m. the party was still going strong but Janis and I were exhausted. We told my mom we wanted to leave and that, since she was on crutches, we’d help get her home in a taxi. My mom said, “They haven’t served the Yquem yet.” I said, “I know, but we’re tired.” And she said, quite ferociously, “I’m not leaving until I get my Yquem!”
Bad foot and all, she made her way over to Louise Riggio to ask when the dessert wine might be coming. Louise, the perfect hostess, immediately went to check it out. On her way back, she passed our table, leaned in to me, and said, “Your mom really likes her Yquem.” All I could do was shrug and say, “She’s an animal.”
We stuck around another hour or so until my mother had a glass of her beloved sweet wine. Or, rather, three or four glasses. We finally poured her into a cab and she went home soused but satisfied.
This led to another yearly ritual.
My mother’s birthday and her sister Lil’s birthday fell a couple of weeks apart: my mom’s was on August 30 and Lil’s was in mid-September. When Lil was about to turn ninety-four, we decided it was time to have a dual celebration. The Riggios have a close friend, Starr Boggs, who runs a wonderful eponymously named restaurant in Westhampton. So after some back-and-forth, we divvied up the responsibilities: Toward the end of August, I’d rent a stretch limo and take fifteen people to Starr’s for my mom’s birthday. Starr would prepare a major feast, I’d pay for the car and the dinner, and Len and Louise would bring the wine. The first year we did this, I’m sure prodded by their remembrance of my mother’s obsession, Len and Louise brought two bottles of 1967 Yquem—one of the great vintages.
My mother was thrilled, of course, but my ninety-four-year-old auntie went berserk—she had never tasted this particular quaff before and couldn’t believe how good it was. Len noted that night that one bottle would generally suffice for fifteen people or so, since Yquem is usually sipped slowly and savored appropriately. But these two old dames guzzled it like there was no tomorrow, and between them they probably drank half a bottle. Standing in the parking lot after dinner, my aunt Lil took my arm and told me how much she loved the dessert wine. “Peter,” she said, “could I buy that on my own?” “You could,” I told her, “but the bottles that Len brought tonight, if you bought them today, they’d probably cost a few thousand dollars.”
For one brief moment, I thought I’d given my aunt a heart attack. But she recovered, staggered into the limo, and never again brought up the idea of buying a bottle on her own.
We repeated this ritual celebration for the next several years. It was always the same: the limo, the spectacular meal, the great wines, and the final presentation of two bottles of Yquem. Then, a few weeks before my aunt’s ninety-eighth birthday, she went into the hospital with heart problems and had a fairly serious operation. I called her when she was still in the hospital and asked how she was feeling.
“I was really scared,” she told me. “I thought this was it. But when I came out of the anesthesia, do you know the first thing I asked the doctor?”
“No,” I said.
“I asked him if I’d be able to drink dessert wine in a couple of weeks. He said yes, thank God, so everything’s okay.”
That year’s party, in August 2008, was as fun as always. The pastry chef at Starr’s made a strawberry shortcake at my mother’s request, and, as usual, Len and Louise brought the Yquem. Lil and my mom drank it happily, and they both even took a glassful with them to drink during the ride back to Sag Harbor. Lil died a few weeks later, not quite reaching the century mark but having lived long enough to, once again, have the pleasure of filling up on Yquem.
The annual birthday celebrations continued on. In August 2015, when my mom turned ninety-three, we once again got in the limo with our various guests, drove the forty-five minutes from Sag Harbor to Starr’s restaurant, and had a wonderful celebration. My mother recalled that after the previous year’s dinner she’d awakened the next morning with a major hangover, so she cut back on the red and white wine and saved most of her drinking for the Yquem.
While she sipped it, I did my best to make a toast. I tried to read from the opening pages of this book but it didn’t go too well. I’d read a sentence, get choked up, start again, burst into tears, maybe get through a whole paragraph, have to stop. People seemed to be moved by my display of emotion; I just felt like an idiot because, while I had no trouble writing about my mom, I was unable to read this to her aloud.
Almost all of this book was written while my mother was alive, which is why I kept most of it in the present tense. It never felt right to use the past tense when writing or talking or thinking about my mom. Sadly, she didn’t get to taste my salmon coulibiac or the truffle-covered filet mignons or the tarte tatin. She didn’t get to taste the challah, either, although she was around to take great pleasure in my detailed description of my dismal attempts at making it.
At my mom’s final birthday celebration, my emotions got the better of me and I didn’t make it through the passages I intended to read. But my mom got the gist of it—and when, at last, I gave up and retreated to my seat—she raised her glass of Yquem. Her eyes shone with happiness and I could tell she was reveling in the love that was radiating from all of us around the table. And I knew what she was thinking:
You’re lucky.