JANUARY–APRIL 2021
THE THING I KNOW about gray skies is that they eventually clear. I am sure this is why the nightly local TV news is built around the seven-day weather report and why I check my Dark Sky weather app in the morning and again before I go to bed. Though it is possible to get a reasonably accurate sense of the weather simply by looking out the window, a seven- or ten-day forecast is similar to therapy.
It centers me. It reminds me and everyone else addicted to AccuWeather forecasts and Mega Doppler maps that things change. Every day is new and different.
We get through the cold and the storms. The sun will shine again.
Patience.
I have been telling myself this for a couple of weeks now. It is January, and I have made it through the holidays. It has not been easy. My eyes were closed much of the time. Once New Year’s passed, I felt relief. This was true for most people: 2020 sucked. When I flipped my calendar, I thought about burning a bundle of sage.
I am supposed to be brainstorming ideas and recipes for the new season of Valerie’s Home Cooking, our twelfth. It is scheduled to begin shooting in February. Despite creating a beautiful workplace where I have set out my mom’s cookbooks and her recipe box for inspiration, I have been unable to concentrate. My brain is fogged in. Ideas are being told to circle until my head clears. It is always this way as we get close to production, but this time it’s worse.
I worry that I have forgotten how to stand in front of cameras and cook. Rather than address that anxiety, I stew in it. I read novels. I make a lot of tea. I post about Wolfie’s new music. I go on a knitting tear. I dye my hair blonde. Then I add a few streaks of pink. One day it rains, and I watch Henry and Luna sleep while researching the differences between two bottles of wine that have been sitting on my desk for a couple of months, one a Petite Sirah and the other a Syrah.
I don’t know why I put myself through this torture, but I do. Not even Chrissy Teigen’s Instagram can snap me out of this rut. The woman is a human energy drink; normally her posts provide the spark of inspiration I need to get started. But not this time, and I know the reasons. Losing Ed. Watching Wolfie grieve and not being able to fix it. The holidays. I slipped into the doldrums and can’t get out. My weight is up, and I have a pain just below my neck and behind my right shoulder blade that feels like Spock’s Vulcan nerve pinch.
One morning, as I sit in the library, I glance up and see Ed’s beat-up Dr. Martens still on the shelf. Yes, still there. I can’t believe myself sometimes. It’s despite my best intentions, despite my best efforts, you know?
I look skyward and sigh. “Okay, kick my ass. I need it.”
Later that afternoon, a friend comes over for a rare socially distanced visit. How long has it been since I sat across from someone who wasn’t a family member? I set out a tray of snacks—some charcuterie, cheese, pickled okra, crackers, and pretzels—and open the bottle of Syrah. During our catch-up, she senses my sluggishness and asks when I last saw my therapist.
“Not for a while,” I say. “Is it apparent?”
She takes a sip of wine and nods.
“What are you doing about your neck?” she asks.
“I need to find a chiropractor,” I say.
“I’ll give you the name of mine,” she said. “She doesn’t crack anything.”
“What does she do?”
“She adjusts whatever needs adjusting.”
“How?”
“Massage. And energy work.”
“Energy work?”
“She’s a little woo-woo.”
“I need some woo-woo,” I say.
* * *
An appointment with my therapist is first up. I haven’t seen her since before Ed passed—a mistake, no doubt—and we have a productive session. She helps me peel back the layers until our roles seem reversed and I am explaining the problem to her. I’m stuck, and I’m not doing the things to get myself unstuck. Then I articulate the steps I need to take to get unstuck. Don’t isolate. Cut out snacks. Have one glass of wine instead of three. Get outside. Move my butt. And align with the things I love. Joy won’t find me if I am locked in a dark room.
A few days later, I am in the chiropractor’s office. Since this is the first time I have seen her, I enter tentatively, wearing a mask, of course, and she takes my temperature and assures me that she is healthy and following protocols, too. Wearing the thick wooden clogs she put on my feet, I am soon lying facedown on her cushioned massage table and crying buckets of tears into my mask while she gently works on my legs and torso, muttering something to herself about my life force.
“Do most of your patients cry the first time they see you?” I ask.
She might have responded, but any memory of that is erased by what she tells me a few minutes later. While continuing to poke and press my back, legs, and neck, she mentions that my top rib is out of place and responsible for my neck and shoulder pain, which strikes me as weird but nowhere near as weird as when she says that we aren’t alone.
“Huh?” I say, speaking directly into the hole in the face rest where my chin and mouth fit.
“I feel your mom in the room,” she explains.
My first reaction is What? My mom is here? Then I feel a twinge of guilt because I haven’t thought about my mom that much lately. I did have a dream about her recently, a lovely dream in fact, but I keep that to myself, saving it for my next session with my therapist.
“Oh?” I say. “My mom?”
“Yes. I might feel your dad, too,” she says. “But he is nowhere near as strong as the female presence.”
“What does she want?” I ask. “Is she saying anything?”
“She wants you to know it’s all okay.”
“Okay,” I respond, but I am thinking—and refrain from asking—Why don’t you see Ed? Why isn’t he here?
After the session, I definitely feel better. The pain isn’t entirely gone but it is less severe and I have more mobility in my neck. I make another appointment. Actually, I make one more for this week and two for the following week. On my drive home, I feel dizzy and light-headed even though she never came close to cracking my neck, which would release a vertiginous flood of toxins, as other chiropractors have done in the past.
Hours later, I am still thinking about that session. I enjoyed the woo-woo but am wondering what it means that my mom was there. What did she mean by It’s all okay? Is she with me now? Is she always with me? I know that there is more to life than we are able to see. I know some people see more than others. When I look in the mirror, I see things in myself that are invisible to others. When they look at me, they see things I can’t see. Just because something is not visible to everyone does not mean it isn’t real.
Indeed, after I get into bed, I see Ed. My bedroom is dark, and I think, Oh there you are. I know the way that sounds. But this isn’t the first time he has paid me a visit. A few days after he died, I was lying in bed in that woozy state where I was half awake and almost asleep, and I felt a presence in the room and I knew it was him. I cried, and said, “I love you. I miss you. I hope you know how much you were loved.”
It would have been so much easier to tell myself that I was making this up, but I saw him clearly. I heard him, too. He looked at me, and said, “Oh,” in the cute, empathetic manner that was his way of reacting to sensitive moments. Then I felt pressure in the middle of my forehead, as if he were pressing on it with his finger. He had very distinctive hands, gorgeous hands, in fact, and I was sure he was telling me through this gesture that he was all right and that I shouldn’t be sad—not too sad, anyway.
It’s going to be okay.
The further I have gotten from that October night, the more I have asked myself, Did that really happen?
One day I even issued a challenge. I was at the beach, and I said, “Okay, Ed, if I ever see a green cat, you have to come visit me and tell me that everything is good.”
However, after my mom showed up earlier today and told me the same thing—It’s going to be okay—I have decided to quit asking. Things must be okay.
* * *
And they are. By the following week, the heaviness and anxiety that had rendered me immobile gradually lifts so I am able to get back on track, starting with the simplest of remedies—I move. Each morning after my coffee, I take a brisk walk through the neighborhood with Luna. I breathe in the crisp air and enjoy the blank slate of the day ahead. Birds chirp. Dew glistens on the leaves. The sun warms as it breaks through the clouds. The air is full of optimism and possibilities. It’s like a happy drug. Why don’t I do this more often?
I feel my heart pumping. My knees ache and my neck and back are reluctant participants, but they hurt a little less each day. I resist the urge to get on the scale. What’s it going to tell me that I can’t feel?
At home, I reward myself with a refreshing smoothie. I blend bananas, almond butter, almond milk, some rolled oats, honey, and the half a cup of coffee that more than anything else keeps the pep in my energy level. I pour it into a beautiful glass and top it off with a couple of sprigs of mint from my garden. Why not treat myself to a nice presentation? More to the point, why not treat myself nicely?
It makes a difference. Not only am I eager to work when I sit down at my desk, I am also filled with gratitude. I was so mired in woe-is-me before that I overlooked this key ingredient. Valerie’s Home Cooking is about home cooking at a time when everyone in the world is at home cooking and craving the comfort of delicious, simple meals. I can almost hear Norman Lear telling the fifteen-year-old me to “go get ’em, kid.” Except it’s my mom, my Nonnie, and my great-grandmother who are giving me the thumbs-up.
In so many ways, it really is a new season—for the show, for me, for everyone. Life is one big table where we are supposed to feed and nourish one another. “Pull up a chair,” the great food writer Ruth Reichl once wrote. “Take a taste.”
Ideas come to me. A new Bolognese for a simpler lasagna. Ham, apple, and cheddar sliders. A jar of marinara sauce on my kitchen counter inspires a fairly traditional baked ziti with a mix of sliced vegetables that I throw together in my slow cooker. I fish into my mom’s recipe box and pull out the well-worn card for her onion rings. I make them—and forget them in the oven, where they cook for way too long. Wolfie dubs them overdonion rings.
“But they’re delicious,” he says.
My first production meeting with Mary Beth Bray, now an executive producer, and culinary producer Sophie Clark is on Zoom and I am eager to share my ideas. Choosing the menus for each episode is my favorite part of the show. But before we dive into the recipes and organize them into individual episodes, we have so much catching up to do. We haven’t been together since March 2020 when we cut the previous season short by three episodes and bid one another a hasty goodbye because of the shutdown.
“How’s everyone doing?” I say. “It’s so good to see your faces. I’ve missed you.”
During the break, Mary Beth moved with her family to LA from New York. She shares some details about their cross-country drive, most of them involving little places they stopped to eat and her delicious discoveries along the way. Sophie and I take notes.
The episodes come together quickly. Recipes range from lemony cacio e pepe and homemade pretzel buns with butter and ham to salmon sliders and buffalo chicken burgers to a spring roll salad with peanut butter dressing and a quinoa, sweet potato, and black bean bowl with cilantro yogurt dressing. The sweets include orange vanilla bean angel food cake, no-bake chocolate peanut butter bars, no-churn lemon ice cream, and almond butter, oat, and cranberry cookies.
Even though the shows are supposed to be timeless, I want to address Covid and talk directly to viewers about being in the kitchen more this past year, and everyone agrees that this makes sense. So we schedule my friend, food writer Jo Stougaard, as my guest on the first episode. Her nephew is a firefighter and his wife is a nurse. I will put together a picnic basket for Jo to take to them. Smoked-turkey sandwiches with Calabrian chili aioli, homemade salt and vinegar potato chips, and s’mores that don’t need a campfire.
The show is shot at a house with a remodeled kitchen. I am buzzing with happiness and excitement from being back on the set. Almost everyone involved with the production has been part of the show since day one. Before starting, we gather in the backyard. All of us are masked; everyone has been tested. I thank everyone for their contributions. The show would be impossible to do otherwise. Mary Beth echoes those sentiments, expressing gratitude for the good health we have all enjoyed.
“It’s a new season,” she says. “Let’s have fun.”
* * *
By April, all the episodes have been shot and are being edited. The show has also been picked up for a thirteenth season. I know I won’t be as tortured this next time. In addition to keeping up my morning walks and concocting new flavors for my smoothies, I have added an afternoon workout—twenty to forty-five minutes on my Peloton bike. In a break from the past, the workout didn’t start as a punishment for being overweight, though I am not happy with my weight right now. The difference is that I don’t hate myself. I have been feeling good and I wanted to feel better. My body actually craved the exercise, and I was happy to oblige.
It has been six months since Ed passed, and every day I am learning that grief doesn’t go away as much as it evolves into something manageable. I will still burst into tears when Wolfie has a question or a problem and my first thought is Well, let’s call your dad—and, of course, we can’t. Other times, I am awash in happy memories that I wear like a piece of jewelry, knowing that they make me shine. Then there are those days when I forget and go about my business until I stumble over a reminder.
That’s what happened last night.
I got into bed and was scrolling through TikTok, as I sometimes do. Just before I put my phone on my nightstand, something on the screen caught my attention. It was a little green dump truck. Inside the truck were three little kitties. I remembered the challenge I had issued to Ed a few months ago. If I see a green cat, you have to visit me again. Did kittens in a green toy dump truck count? I was too sleepy to laugh, but I thought, How silly, then turned off my phone, pulled up the covers, settled into my pillows, and shut my eyes.
I don’t know how much time elapsed, whether it was seconds, minutes, or hours, but I was drifting in that half-asleep, half-awake place when I sensed a presence in the room. I opened my eyes and there, through the darkness, was Ed. Looking at me. With that Cheshire cat grin of his. Like you asked for it. Here I am.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you really here?”
Ed didn’t speak. But all of a sudden, I felt my body pulled down from my pillows into the bed, then, whoosh, I felt like I was being carried up through the roof into the night sky where I saw the stars twinkling and sparkling into infinity, a celestial light show that was beautiful, bright, thrilling, and endless. It was as if I were being asked, You wanted to experience joy. What do you think of this?
Then I found myself back in bed, still sleepy or perhaps fully asleep, I don’t know for sure. But I felt extremely calm, warm, comfortable, and curious.
“Is this you? Are you here?” I asked again.
No answer.
“Okay, if you’re here, play it for me. Only you will know what I’m talking about. So play it for me.”
Up in the corner of the room, by the ceiling, there was a flash of light. I turned my head and saw a tiny screen. It was followed by the sound of a guitar. By this time, I was half expecting to see Patrick Swayze hovering over Demi Moore at a potter’s wheel. But no, I heard only the sound of a guitar that was unmistakably Ed playing a hybrid of the intro to “Women in Love . . .” and Wolfie’s song “Think It Over.” It was a completely unique mash-up as only Ed could do, a little something that I loved combined with something he loved, and I knew that he was doing it especially for me.
When he finished, the tiny light disappeared and he picked me up again and floated me around the room one more time before setting me down in the bed. At this point, I didn’t need any more proof. Some things you can’t explain and don’t want or need them to be explained, and this was one of those things. I leaned forward to give him a kiss and felt not only the stubble on his face but also the pressure of someone hugging me.
“I love you,” I said, as I slipped into a deep sleep.
I never heard his voice, but I woke up with a clear sense that not only were things okay, good things were also going to come.
* * *
Listen, I hear how crazy this sounds. I do. And maybe it was all just a dream. But it felt real to me—and whatever gets us through these hard times. You know?
Now here’s the kicker. After spending the rest of today thinking about what happened and wondering how I could know all those details if it didn’t really happen, and also feeling really good about everything, I have sent word to Ed. Last night was amazing and special, and I definitely want to see you again but not tonight. I am sixty—almost sixty-one—and I am worn-out. I can’t go flying around the stars every night.