Grandma and Food

It was a cold December day and my grandma was dying. In truth she’d been dying for nearly a year. Her stomach cancer was finally freeing her of her body. The surgery she’d endured the year before had taken such a large part of her digestive system that she’d never really recovered. She’d been stoic when they’d treated her with radiation and forced her to lie in one position until she could hardly bear the pain. Now her body was wasted and exhausted and she was dying.

Although she was tough as nails, my grandmother had never been especially healthy. She’d had various complaints throughout the years. Much of these could probably be attributed to her appalling diet as a child. Her father, my great grandfather was the kind of man who chased a dream from time to time. He never really caught the brass ring but he continued over-reaching for it his whole life. He never had any qualms about dragging his family with him. There were times they only had soda crackers and hot water to eat. They called it “wind soup”. Her digestive problems and osteoporosis were probably the result of poverty and bad nutrition. How tragic that her illness began in her stomach, an organ with which she had a strange relationship.

When my grandfather married her, he was a little embarrassed that she didn’t know to cook. His mother, the old farm wife, knew how to cook; hearty meals that could carry her men folk through the fields all day. My grandmother may have been a bit ashamed of herself for she set out to learn to cook. Wonderful meals of fresh and cured meats from the animals they raised on the farm. Interesting concoctions of vegetables that she prepared the old-fashioned way, boiled with a little pat of butter and a dash of salt. Heavy, whole-grained breads that she would mix on the dining table, the only surface that could hold the multi-loaf batches she prepared several times a week. Fruits made into pies, cakes, jams, preserves and sauces. Foods were her muse, made without elaborate herbs or spices. Cooked with a pat of butter or a dollop of lard and seasoned with salt and pepper and truth be told, a lot of love.

That last year, as the doctors had left her with just enough stomach to survive, she’d lived on Ensure and other liquids. It kept her alive but she could not thrive. Picture a 5’4” 120 pound woman in the clutches of cancer. What did she do the last summer and fall of her life? She canned! She slaved over a hot stove in the scalding kitchen and preserved food for her beloved husband. She wanted him to have enough. She wanted him to have something of her after she was gone. She canned. She canned her life away. She preserved food that she could not eat and would not survive to enjoy.