Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Knock
My friend’s mother was dying in her living room. I knew that but I didn’t.
She’d told me her mother was terminally ill but it never really sank in. Oh, that’s why you brought her across the country and set up a hospital bed in your living room. I get it now.
My friend told me this on a long walk with our dogs. No one asks how I am doing, she said. No one visits. No one ever brings food for us.
So that night I made a pot roast with potatoes and carrots and onions and I took it to my friend’s door. You’re the only person who brought us dinner, she said A few days later, her mother died.
At work, a colleague’s wife faced a new wave of cancer. He sat in my office and complained that every night they went out to dinner. It was expensive and exhausting, he said. So I made roast chicken and potatoes and brought it to their house, the roasting pan covered in layers of tin foil. I had to wear oven mitts to bring it from my car.
He brought the pan back to me a few days later, scrubbed clean. In the intervening days, I’d worried that my roast chicken and potatoes had been found wanting. I imagined that they’d tossed it in the garbage and gone out to dinner. What I offered seemed so ‘rustic’ compared to what one could get in a fine restaurant. I flooded myself with embarrassment.
Years later, after his wife died, my colleague mentioned that I was the only person who had ever brought them dinner when she was ill. I wanted him to say, it was delicious! but he just noted that I’d done it, that was the feat, just showing up.
It is not nothing, showing up. It takes some nerve. I speak from experience having to, first, believe in my pot roast, and, second, believe in my roast chicken. I am not a great cook so this belief doesn’t come easy.
I brought dinner to sick people wearing my red oven mitts. And I thought to myself, please just take this and put it on the counter in your kitchen and remember that I showed up. With all my shortcomings and wrong things, the too tough pot roast, the overdone chicken. I showed up. Love me for that.
_________
Photo: Martins Zemlickis
5 Comments on “Knock”
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
 | Ellice on Surrender |
 | Nancy Bauer-King on Surrender |
 | Becky Ross Michael on Prison Town: Part Two |
 | GD on Ah. The Hard-Boiled Truth |
 | Jan Wilberg on Ah. The Hard-Boiled Truth |
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Bet it was delicious.
an incredibly beautiful kind of caring and thoughtfulness. it’s all about showing up
Jan, Ive showed up, with food, went in and cleaned, and cooked, cleaned and did my best, dragging my daughter who was writing late matric with me. Two dear Aunts loved and lost, a waspish relative and a cousin both unappreciative, the waspish relative herself now late and the cousin non-communicative.
We created memories and instilled values in my children. It’s been a journey but we always showed up. We sleep well at night, and our minds and hearts at ease…
I’m sure they did appreciate it. When my husband was dying, one couple brought a complete meal to us. As it turned out, my husband died the day they brought it and they remained with his kids and me and shared the meal with us. We reminisced and laughed and it was a tremendous boost to us all–our hearing the stories his adult kids had to tell and their hearing the stories my friends and I shared about their dad. A few years later, that friend passed away herself. I was living in Mexico by then and had only seen her one more time between the day of my husband’s death and her own, but I have a beautiful vase that she made and that my husband had purchased for me for valentine’s day a year before he passed away. It was one of the few things I brought with me to Mexico, and every time I see it, I think of Julie and Joe and that delicious gourmet meal that they not only brought but also shared with us. Doing something is the best gift of all, Jan. You are right.
I was surprised at how few people showed up and how many of the few that did show up what not good friends, but near strangers. These days, no one shows up. It’s pretty strange if you think about it.