Sandy Silverman

Word Count 1216

When my mother was first married, she watched the show, “Creative Cookery,” on Chicago Public Television every day. She talked about Francois Pope as if she knew him, had been under his personal tutelage for years, and was now informing her children of the man who taught her everything she knew about cooking. It was 1951, and she was new to Chicago, having met my father when they were both on vacation in Miami. They were married just a few months later. My mother was thrilled to escape Brooklyn, her home since coming to this country from eastern Europe.   

Of course, she also made an array of Jewish dishes, including matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, carrot tzimmes, and her famous turkey stuffing. One of the first signs that my mother was developing dementia was when, at 87, she couldn’t remember her stuffing recipe. She never wrote it down, and any time I asked her how to make it, she listed off ingredients without telling me how much to add.

“How much ginger (or orange zest or chicken livers) do I add?”

“You’ll know,” she said.

When my mother called me from Chicago on that Thanksgiving morning and said, she didn’t know when to add the eggs to the recipe, I remember standing in my own kitchen, preparing my own Thanksgiving dinner, and experiencing what would become the familiar feeling of reversed roles. 

“You mix the eggs in after you’ve added the onions,” I said to her.

“Is that how I always do it?” she asked. 

“Yes,” I said. She sounded timid and gentle, traits I hadn’t known in my mother.

It was less than a year after that Thanksgiving that I moved both my parents to an assisted living residence five miles from my house in New Jersey. My mother’s memory didn’t vanish. Instead, it became some sort of stew. It was as if each conversation started with the dip of a ladle into my mother’s mind, and what came up might be something that happened in 1968 or 1981 or perhaps something that happened just this week. 

Dementia changed my mother. It was as if someone popped the top off a vacuum-packed jar, and out came Belle Silverman, the loving mother who had been locked away since her children were born. The dementia ate away the distance and swallowed up the mother who could only say “I love you” while avoiding eye contact.

On one of my regular visits, about six years after they had moved to New Jersey, I stopped into my father’s assisted living apartment. We chatted for a bit, and then I asked, “Should we go and see Mom?” 

“How do we do that?” 

“You know. I’ll wheel you over to the greenhouse,” I said. 

I wasn’t sure what was happening. Had he already forgotten that my mother is in the nursing unit across the yard from his assisted living unit? He knew that a week ago. 

“Yes, let’s do that!”

We wheeled into the Greenhouse, a ranch house that provided the “higher level of care” the director insisted that my mother needed. The separation was not easy on them. 

My mother’s room at the Greenhouse was painted a deep coral color and had flowered curtains and an oak dresser to make it feel more like home, as if my mother would have painted her walls that color and purchased flowered curtains to match, not to mention a hospital bed and an emergency call system. 

“Who is that?” my mother asked.

“It’s Sandy and Dad,” I said. 

I wheeled my father to the side of her bed, and he reached his hand to hers. 

“Marty, honey,” she said.

My parents held each other’s hands, my father stroking my mother’s forearm.  

“I’ve been cooking lately,” my mother said, sitting up and sounding perky.  “Dad doesn’t like the food here.”

“Really?” I said. 

The thought of my mother with a knife and cutting board was frightening. Her vision was minimal, and she couldn’t get out of bed on her own, let alone chop vegetables and turn on a burner.

“He wouldn’t eat. What else was I going to do?” She rolled her eyes as if I was her secret confidante. 

“What have you been making?” I asked.

“Oh, small things,” she said. “Hamburgers, hot dogs, meatloaf.”

My father looked confused, his eyes were darting from side to side. I wanted to tell him she was elsewhere, that we were just going with it, but I couldn’t do that when my mother was there. 

“When I made my turkey, it didn’t come out right,” she said. She shook her head, wrinkled her nose. “Too dry.” 

I wondered how her brain worked these days.  Did she imagine this and then think it happened, or was she pulling a memory from some time in the past, remembering a real turkey she cooked decades ago?  Did she remember me helping her in the kitchen, eating the meals she made?

“Where did this take place?”  he asked her. 

“Here!” she said. “It started because of you!” She was disgusted that he didn’t realize she had been cooking just for him. 

He gripped the arms of his wheelchair and looked bewildered. Perhaps he was trying to remember a recent bowl of my mother’s chicken soup, a bite of dry turkey, a slice of meatloaf the way she used to make it, with a hardboiled egg in the middle. 

“I made corned beef and cabbage,” she said. “From Francois Pope’s cookbook.”

“Francois Pope made corned beef and cabbage?” I asked. “Wasn’t he a French cook?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “But on holidays, he made other things.” 

She paused and said, with utter confidence, “It was a holiday.” She nodded as if that made everything clear, that not only was she cooking, but she had whipped up corned beef and cabbage while living in a nursing home. 

I started to feel irritated. Corned beef and cabbage was not something I remembered my mother cooking. I didn’t want my memory, my childhood, tampered with.

“What holiday?” I asked. She didn’t answer. 

I couldn’t help myself or my aggravation and said to my mother, “Why would Francois Pope make corned beef and cabbage when he was a French chef?” 

I needed one of my parents to be able to have a conversation that went both ways, a conversation that made sense.  I could hear myself.  I sounded like some sort of know-it-all bitch.

I walked into the hallway to collect myself and then walked back into my mother’s room. My parents were leaning their heads down, eyes closed, dozing, their hands touching. I felt so sad that they couldn’t be together, couldn’t sleep in the same bed as they always had, tangled in each other’s arms. No matter how much they fought during the day, when I was a child and walked into their bedroom in the middle of the night because I had a bad dream, they were always in some kind of embrace.

 The next morning, I opened my computer and began a search. I found a recipe for corned beef and cabbage in a Francois Pope cookbook from 1960. My eyes welled up. I felt bad for my impatience and anger. And then I cried.

Sandy is a writer and a psychotherapist. She is currently writing a memoir about the connections between her work as a psychotherapist, her family history of loss and her experiences as a queer parent. She lives with her partner in the Hudson Valley and has a psychotherapy practice based in New York City.