Katie Mulkowsky: 'Casserole People'
We knew that dad was dying when Louis brought over the orzo — a big, heaping tub of lemon, parm and cream, wrapped up in tin foil and marched down in the cold. I watched from the couch as he uncovered his bowl and placed it over the pot that was already on our stove. In the moment, this registered as relieving evidence that one of us could still think straight (he had, I said to myself, put the bowl on top of the pot instead of pouring the orzo inside of it so as to reheat the dish without it curdling). I did not register what it indicated: that I was belabouring every detail, that anything to which I could rationally direct attention was a hanging-on, another inhale. For example: there he was, my good friend, someone I had danced and drank with in moments far more raucous, moments that — however incongruous with this one they felt — had actually happened before. And that person was here, in front of me, in a house without a hospital bed, simply “adding water to thin.” Finding a spoon to “stir gently.”
There’s a particular comfort in a friend who treats your kitchen as their own. This intensifies when life as you know it changes. There was no solution, nothing left to fix, so he made orzo. I found something ceremonial in his decision to cook a meal so rich and indulgent— something a bit old-timey, something that teetered on nostalgic. Like how, when I picture grief in my mother’s era, I picture casseroles, albeit the kind that are congealed and derived from Sara Lee meatloaf, baked terribly by well-meaning, religious people. The sense I get from her childhood stories is that somebody would die and the entire block would scream casserole — a base, primal reflex of ‘60s America. It brings to mind Joan Didion’s piercing chronicle of her husband’s sudden death: “When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham. You drop it by the house.”
Whether for casseroles or ham bakes, every suburban widow must have had a long, wooden table leaf stowed away somewhere for years, anticipating the need to accommodate, one day, all the pyrex trays. I assume the logic has always been that, when words fail, food does not. And yet, even as a city-dweller far from family and remote from most senses of tradition, I don’t think anything merits cliché more than death does.
~
There were other signs of the surreal that week, and they were all somehow marked by eating. Mom’s first call came in a few days before the orzo. It was a Friday night in London and my friends were awaiting our Indian takeaway (Lavang Spice, off a paper menu, like the TV dinners we’d order growing up).
For a while, we had the Lavang routine down like clockwork. If all of us shared a hoard of veggie sides and piled on the bhaji, the bill came to less than five pounds each. Somebody would shout their bank details over speakerphone because nobody ever had cash, and while we were all at risk of a good scamming, somebody else would make the rice in bulk. We’d then polish off our entire arsenal of alcohol and snacks, and nearly forget the whole affair until a few hours later when the phone finally rang. We’d run down to meet the man who had driven — driven! — our haul over in a Camry, armed with another paper menu for next time. We’d sit on the floor, spill things and laugh.
We hardly ever talked about Lavang unless we were eating it, but for a while it was one of the pillars of our young lives together. And so the point is: food is ritual, even in its most unpretentious form. It gathers acquaintances and in turning them to friends it builds community, which centres those of us who live far from home.
Home felt much further than usual that night, after mom phoned from California. My father had battled cancer for over two decades, just four years short of my lifespan with him. He did this bravely, determinedly, with humour and without complaint. His fight stunned even those closest to him because he was such a kind and gentle person. Few people other than us and his doctors ever really understood that a huge part of him was bare grit.
He had a sweet tooth and his comforts were humble. He went for walks at our local beach and listened to music in the backyard sun. He enjoyed diner coffee, breakfast burritos, anything mom made. He loved us and so desperately wanted to live for us. So it was clear that this phone call was The Phone Call, the happening, that we had been putting off for years. Because the tumour had spread to his brain, and he didn’t know who we were.
I cut mom off when the food came. Told her I’d call back later.
I actually went down, phone in hand, to greet the guy in the Camry.
I arranged things on my plate. I sat with the others on the floor.
I remember saying “he’s mistaking my mom for his mom and he thinks that I’m still twelve.”
I don’t remember if I ate.
He spent the next week in the hospital. I made the arrangements: booking flights, informing work, begging my doctor for the missing documents that you needed, at the time, to prove you’d either been vaccinated against Covid-19 or recovered from it. I sent nonsensical emails and resorted to subject lines in all caps. I registered for a different GP and inexplicably paid £50 for a “letter of recovery” from them. The most gutting experience of my life was happening 6,000 miles away, and I felt like I was floating above myself, watching it all happen to someone else.
There was a distinctly spiritual quality about that week. A suspension. As if some kind of twisted theatre production was unfolding before me, starring uncanny versions of everybody I knew.
On day one they bought a loaf of bread. Day three they assembled a meal.
Louis came by again and dropped rice pudding and rhubarb before work, wrapped up to reheat later.
A boy I was seeing booked a next-day flight and a boy I had seen before brought over a drill bit to fix my shelves. They gave love in the ways they knew best.
They dusted off their aprons and they cleared out their liquor cabinets. They were my casserole people.
All of this is notable to me because, on paper, they did not sign up to be my casserole people. We were not related. We did not live in Small Town, America. We’d only known each other for a few years. The majority of my friends in London are foreigners who moved to the UK for a degree and never left. The genuine bond that we’ve since formed has felt equally surprising and effortless. It is wildly easy to share joy in new relationships, especially when your values and interests match up. But it is harder, at least for me, to share the tough stuff. My mother was raised outside of Detroit on the mantra that “blood is thicker than water”— friends are nice, but when life happens, it’s the relatives you really call. This is an obviously outdated idea, but one it feels naïve to call irrelevant. We need people, and in times of deep celebration and deep sadness alike, it is difficult to shake the question of who “should” be there. So many of us are instilled with a nagging sense that life’s landmark moments are meant to be accompanied by some kind of grandiose, storied custom.
~
Our last lucid conversation happened over FaceTime. This FaceTime happened on my computer, because I had smashed my phone while cycling home to pack for the airport the next morning. Louis gave me an old iPhone to borrow for the early days of my trip. En route to Heathrow, I shifted documents between bags, dropped Louis’ phone on the train floor and smashed his screen too.
I have blocked much of the FaceTime conversation out of my memory, but I do have a screenshot of it. What a ridiculous thing to have to say: that I have a screenshot of the last time my father and I properly spoke before he died. For nearly four years now I have been angry at myself for not flying back sooner, for the fact that a screen had to separate us at all. Over the course of my father’s illness, I often shut him out in order to arm myself against this inevitable loss, the idea being that I wouldn’t then be totally rocked or devastated by it, that I wouldn’t be fundamentally veered off course by it, that I could ultimately still take care of myself as a young, professional adult with an entire life left to live in a world without him. So far only one of those things has been true, and it probably would have been anyway. I wish that I had been softer.
~
By the time I did make it back he was in a care home by the beach. The lights were dim and there was a framed painting on the wall. I stared at it for the next three days but have no idea what it looked like. All I’ve got is a faint tint of blue.
Him, mom and me. For the first time in our lives, we called a rabbi, despite the fact that mom was Catholic, dad was Jewish only in the secular, bagels-and-lox New York way and I was a devout atheist. As outsiders to the community, we frantically texted family members we hadn’t spoken to in years, receiving a crash course in Procedure. My discomfort with this then, at what felt like an outsized emphasis on religion in the whole process of dying (dad hadn’t, to my knowledge, been to synagogue in at least 20 years), is compounded by my outrage at America’s Jewish institutions now, at least the ones who blindly support a genocidal state halfway across the world. The value of tradition must really be in the eye of the beholder – it can be a balm, it can be a weapon, it can be a white cloth, it can be a war proxy. For us, then, it was a few songs in a language we couldn’t understand. Not everyone gets a memorial, so we did what we thought was right. In a strange reversal, I talked to friends sparingly. But I could play his favourite Linda Rondstadt. I could play a six-song Love Apple album. I could leave a few times to drive down the Coast Highway and stop at Juanita’s, our tried and true taco stand. As if it were any other day. As if the issue at hand was a matter of red or green salsa.
In my grief it’s now difficult to fathom this, but at the time, I felt fairly peaceful. He had been sick for so long. At points in our relationship it was all that we could talk about, and at others we had to just go on living — an inconsolable state of normal. My father died at the end of January. My last trip home had been the summer before, which I can at least say that I spent at home. He was declining considerably, but still having good days. On a particularly energetic one, when there were no treatments or infusions or family meetings, I took us to Encinitas Café, an old-school diner with all the fixings. Individual packets of creamer, pancakes the size of his face.
In days since, I have kicked myself for not saying or doing or calling more, for not making grand proclamations of gratitude all the time. But this is not how you live when you are constantly experiencing the impossible. His sickness was tedious and brutal, scary and sad to witness. We were too involved in the day-to-day caring to always step back and sing. We were stressed. We were imperfect. He signed the DNR in front of me over cereal at the breakfast table. Another morning he asked for an omelette and I laughed in his face — well wouldn’t that be nice! — and told him to make one himself. Briskness was easier than honesty.
I could not say:
What will we do without you or
You are the most stabilising force in my life or
I am terrified to lose one half of the only assurance I have of unconditional kindness and love.
He was dying, and it was obvious, but I couldn’t say any of it. Instead we ordered diner coffee, hash browns and a cinnamon roll to share.
~
Maybe what’s needed is to expand our conception of “ceremony.” To include, into the canon, things like the Pending-Bereavement Lemon-Parmesan Orzo. To include Lavang at 11pm on the cold, dirty and glass-shard-spotted kitchen floor. To giving love while we can, messily, to whoever we are lucky enough to choose, in ways not steeped in tradition for the sake of it but in rituals that actually speak to us.
Before proselytising any more, I should note that the funeral was not one such ceremony. It was a beautiful, if hilariously unbalanced, attempt at Tradition Major. We have a small, sprawled family not always in contact. A “livestream” was unfortunately involved. I wore a black blazer borrowed from my childhood friend’s mom. The undertaker looked identical to Jamie Lee Curtis and was shockingly wearing all white. In fact, nobody over the age of 65 seemed to be wearing black at all. I was dumbfounded. I was floored. Aren’t you the generation who created these standards? I wanted to yell, probably inaccurately. And you can’t even offer that basic decorum? His dearest lifelong friend, who has since developed the most heartwarming relationship with my mother — they talk on the phone at least once a day, her calling from Long Island, mom from San Diego — rolled up in liquid leggings, a tie dye t-shirt and Uggs. She is at least in her mid-70s.
Other people I had never met before brandished old photo albums at me, brightly and without consequence. One wondered whether dad had named our family dog after her (seemed like a stretch). At the shiva they kept kosher. Deli meats, coleslaw and rugelach from down the street. They talked about their grandkids’ college acceptances. They asked me who I was.
In the end, it was Eliza, my best friend from university — not any of mom’s siblings or extended cousins — who shut us up, piled us into her dad’s Audi and drove us, emergency flashers on, behind the hearse to the cemetery. When I couldn’t take the shiva anymore, that same getaway car brought us straight to the closest, kitschiest suburban diner, for a grilled cheese, plate of fries and two wines, all in our best black clothes. Her mom later mailed us one of the sweetest packages of Grief Food that we received that season – a gift basket from an iconic New York bakery. Babka and smoked salmon, sent on ice all the way to Del Mar from the Upper West Side. If that isn’t family, I don’t know what is.
~
A year later I hosted a “second shiva” in my apartment. I didn’t actually call it this, but the friends who came around knew what the evening signified to me. Still, I was allowed to set the tone, and I wanted it to be light. When I called my mom, I was at the local Turkish supermarket, shopping with no particular meal in mind, but with the acute awareness that I had told nearly everyone I knew to be at my house in the next hour because I was cooking for them.
During this hour my mom said some of the most heartbreaking things possible. That she still keeps looking at her phone, waiting for the hospital to ring and tell her he’s ready for pick-up. That, when she pulls into the driveway and sees his car, she still, for a moment, thinks it’s the sign that he’s home. That years of instinct can’t just be wiped in one — she still waits for him to walk through the bedroom door. She still sees clearly in her mind the minute hospice took him out of the bedroom door. And, even in that horrible moment, she didn’t think it would be the last time.
As she sobbed, I compared prices of tahini jars. I bought fig jam. Olives and medjoul dates. I don’t know if the English language has a version of synesthesia that describes the experience of responding to emotion with ingredients, but if it does, that’s the word for what I was doing. I wasn’t crying, I was buying cucumber, tomatoes, aubergine and bell pepper. Potatoes for roasting. Falafel. Soft cheese and honey. Lemon. I came home and threw everything on the table. I lit a bunch of tea lights and changed into a dress, not necessarily because it was black but also not necessarily not because it was black. I accidentally cooked proportionately to the extent of my feelings and not to the number of people in the room. There were enough potato wedges left over after this meal to feed me for three days. I was coming into my own style of grief. Friends came in earnest. Someone brought whisky and baklava. In a nod to dad, we ate challah from the bakery next door. We drank bubbles and red wine. We laughed. My process is different from my mother’s. Sometimes it veers toward deflection, but that night I wasn’t deflecting. Before we ate I made a toast that was simple. It went something like: “I don’t really know what to say, but this evening we are celebrating life, so thank you for being here.”
Katie Mulkowsky is a London-based urban planner, writer and researcher interested in the meanings people attach to places. Her work generally engages with topics of environmental health and has appeared in Aeon / Longreads, Next City, Vittles and a range of industry publications. She is working on a narrative non-fiction book project about the social history of a majorly polluting highway in New York City. “Casserole People” is the titular essay in a more personal, exploratory essay collection about community and chosen family.
