It's been awhile, I know. I'm not even ready to say "I'm baaaaack!!" because what if I'm not. I can't really account for the past six months' absence except to offer up this essay, which I wrote when I was first diagnosed, but then cleaned up for a contest "How Breast Cancer Changed my Life" sponsored by Redbook magazine. The first prize was $5,000 which I spent all over the shopping channel in my head before receiving the rejection email last month. I cried. No kitchen remodel. No Rancho La Puerta. No long trip to Greece and Spain. No cashing in on hardship.So fuck 'em. Here's the first prize winner of the "Cancer Sucks and Life's Good" contest. Whoohooo!! I can't believe I won!!! Wait until my friends find out!!!
Flavors of Life
The week I was diagnosed, at age 46, with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, I did not sleep. Through long numb nights, I sat up with my computer, clicking from breastcancer.org to amazon.com., from research to shopping. I quickly spent $135.00 on cookbooks, and almost bought a slightly used Kitchen Aid, which I didn't have room for in my tiny apartment kitchen. I didn't spend much money on food during those early days of digesting difficult news. My appetite was only for the shiny colored pictures in my new cookbooks.
As days passed, I escaped the onslaught of test results, phone calls and fear, with fantasies of dinner parties, potlucks and casual gatherings with my now-desperately-treasured friends. In my mind, I gathered them around me and fed them triple layer coconut cakes, cream puffs, pies made of the freshest fruits of the season, platters of pasta, grilled rock fish, and fresh cheese. There at those imaginary tables I found immeasurable comfort. There I briefly forgot the new reality of a besieged digestive system: nausea, gas, constipation, heartburn, and pressure from friends and doctors to keep my weight up.
Food has always been the chewy center of my world. Some people, when faced with trauma, think about god or sex or shopping. I remember reading once that the root of the word “God” was the same as the root of the word “good.” Food is not my god, but it is most often through food-- cooking it, eating it, serving it, looking at it, writing about it, reading about it-- that I find divine comfort. Food is life, and faced with death, my response has been to have a dinner party.
In my lifetime, I’ve been anorexic, bulimic, skinny, ashamed-to-be-fat, proud-to-be-fat, vegetarian, vegan (for about two weeks, during which I dreamt every night about cheese) and omnivorous. I started cooking when I was ten. With the help of a Betty Crocker cookbook, I made family meals of meatloaf, tuna biscuit braid, stuffed zucchini. At 16, I started reading my way through the cookbook shelf in my local library.
By the time I was 20, I was married, with a subscription to Gourmet magazine, a Kitchenaide, a deep fat fryer,yogurt maker, and a raging case of bulimia.. I was a miserable little wife who couldn't keep my food down. I escaped into the otherworlds of James Beard, Julia Child and MFK Fisher. I was so weak, I couldn't imagine making any of the foods I was reading about: french puff pastry, standing rib roasts, curried lamb. For the first (and only) year of that marriage, I spent long, lonely afternoons on the couch reading recipes and fantasizing myself into satiation. The meals I cooked alone were eaten, ultimately, by one person: my equally miserable husband.
Almost thirty years later, on the eve of my isolation-shattering diagnosis, my relationship with food had already begun to change. As a staff writer for the local newspaper, my favorite thing to write about was food: new cookbooks, farmers markets, local cooks and eaters. I was building up the confidence to branch out, gathering email addresses of food editors at other publications. I could imagine making a life writing about food.
And then life as I imagined it turned upside down, and with it, my stomach.
I could no longer ignore the piercing breast pain that had been intensifying for several months. One June afternoon I got up from my typewriter and walked two blocks to my doctor's office. A week later, a cascade of shocking revelations washed everything away. It was in one breast. Then it was in both. Then, a PET scan revealed a network of cancer threading through my bones, my lungs, and liver. I started chemo right away. I lost my hair and my appetite.
The ranks of friends and family quickly gathered around me. There was so much they couldn't do, but what they could do was feed me. First, they created a calendar of meals where people could sign up to bring me food. It was a complex work of organization and it bore witness to the generosity of friends, co-workers and a few strangers. But there was a problem. Every time an eager enlistee called about bringing food, I didn’t want it. Some days it was because I was feeling okay and wanted to do my own cooking. Other days I was feeling so bad I didn't want anything to eat. I lived alone. Who else was going to eat it. Then there were the days when someone who wasn't even on the list had already dropped off a pot of chicken soup.
It wasn't the first time I resisted food, especially food that someone had lovingly cooked for me. What a close friend noticed before I did was that nobody could get it right. And I didn't really even know what right would look like. I knew I wasn't the only sick person to go stubborn about food. I remembered a few who had gone before me.
They were the residents of the first hospice for people with AIDS in Washington State. I worked there for four years in the 80s, taking care of sick people – mostly gay men - with end-stage disease: Kaposi sarcoma, pneumonia, dementia, brain tumors, high fevers, and wasting. One of my many jobs was cooking. Their job, it seemed, was to reject my cooking. It wasn't hot enough, not salty enough, too salty, not what they'd imagined, not what their mother made. It was not unusual for a resident to take one bite and refuse the rest, spit it out, tell me exactly what I had done wrong and how it should properly be prepared, or dump it in the trash can. It was not what they wanted. Nobody could get it right.
These days, the cancer is semi-stable and I have a great appetite. Everything sounds good to me. But when I sit down to eat, I quickly lose momentum. A few bites and I'm done. But I stay at the table, absorbing the pleasure I see on the faces of those eating around me. I rarely eat alone anymore. Lately, I've been enjoying food cooked by people who love me, savoring their generosity. I've discovered that, for me, food is just one way that life concentrates itself. It is the way I have found to give my life to those I love.
I suspect that when the time comes that I can no longer eat anything, I will find a way to food. I can imagine my death bed surrounded by baskets of nectarines, blackberries, freshly baked sourdough bread. My friends are there with their big appetites. They are perched on chairs, floors, bed and cushions, holding plates overflowing with the flavors of life.
