This Sunday Kitchen Letter was going to be about avocados and what I learned about watering trees that bear fruit on a series of long summer days at the orchard. But a pīwakawaka arrived at the kitchen door while I was writing this and I knew what the message it was bringing, even as I tweeted ‘What does it mean?’.
The pīwakawaka is a messenger of life and death. Hovering at the kitchen door, I knew that death was coming close again. If the fantail had come inside directly, I would have believed it to be imminent. Her stare gave me pause to wonder if new life was also on the way.
My father is dying and with him, part of me. The difference is in the death. As humans, we do an excellent job of making meaning and finding patterns in the smallest signs. How many of the earth’s serendipities do we choose to read as signs? Signs and meaning that become narrative by which we write our days.
My father is now a man I know more by narrative than experience, despite the years we have spent together. For nearly fifteen years he has wandered the doorstep of death. He was young when he had bypass surgery, the kind where they give you a ten year warranty. But ten years passed and then eleven, twelve, thirteen. He has long passed the expiry date they gave, much to everyone’s surprise. But while that internal watch hasn’t stopped ticking there have been heart attacks, H1N1, near amputation, adult diabetes, non-cancerous growths and cancerous ones. There have been many moments where death was imminent and yet still, he remains alive. Miracles and mercies they have been until now, when I wonder if crossing the threshold earlier would have been true mercy.
One of the narratives I can tell is my father’s love of food and wine. I can construct a story of his French Onion soup simmering slowly on the coal range in the kitchen of the house we grew up in, ‘Hau Moana’. The house still stands overlooking the ‘windy sea’ that is the Manukau but the kitchen no longer overlooks the garden and the coal range is no more.
I remember grey and damp Saturday mornings in winter and the kitchen filling with the unmistakeable smell of coal fire, onions and stock. I make three versions of a pumpkin soup and one belongs to him, a dose of curry powder, cinnamon and red wine in the pot. I remember him in a bright Pasifika print shirt beside the barbeque on a Christmas Day teaching me how to cook steak perfectly. I learned from him the wine aroma and flavour wheel. Full-bodied is how you would describe my father, full of tannins and fruit. Is it memory or story? I’m not sure that it matters now.
My relationship with my father is complex — and simple. Which is to say I have forgiven everything and found the good, the light and the beautiful amidst the pain. He was not a father who provided necessities for most of my growing years, casting a burden on my mother from whom he was divorced. But in accepting who he is, there is simplicity in finding some good to make something new from.
In the long years that I have made his soup recipes, my father has often been a silent presence in my kitchen stories. I might describe the character of my kitchen as consistent, always open and plentiful. My father’s kitchen has been indulgent and out of reach. I have listened to him describe slow-cooked short rib they had feasted on, but never tasted it. His wine cellar was rarely empty but our Sunday suppers were frequently baked beans on toast, occasionally we ordered drive-through McDonalds. On those Sundays I felt a knot of anxiety in my stomach, praying my sisters wouldn’t order something too extravagant or expensive. Dad was in or out of work too often to know whether it was safe to order what we really wanted.
There is a narrative in which I find myself stuck in the disparity of these moments but I have learned there is no accounting that makes a sensible bottom line of what parenting and love looks like. Perhaps parenting is amoral and simply the outcome you get when you do the best you can with what you have. In those small moments of extravagance and poverty, my father did the best he could and parental love cannot be reduced to mere provision. What I know now is how frequently my kitchen is full of simple, three-ingredient meals and equally how I enjoy indulgence on behalf of those I love. I’ve learned the role they both play in a kitchen that knows how to make food taste like love.
After all this time, I am surprised at the paradox of his cancer. My father has been an enthusiastic and gregarious epicurean for my entire life. This cancer is starving him of all he used to indulge in joyfully. Oesophageal cancer is a bitter curse and should be avoided, if any of us knew how to do such a thing. He has lost his ability to savour and swallowing has moved beyond difficulty to near impossibility — at least, that is what we are told, as Covid restrictions mean we are not able to visit the hospital in which he lies currently. He is dying but not right away. The full-bodied nature of his physical form is wasting away, recognisable to those of us who have seen cancer do it’s work close up. Cancer is like that, consuming you from the inside out, voracious and yet glacial. Suffering is drawn out in slow suffocation and starvation. It is not hard to ponder mercy.
In adulthood, I have learned to see where he has been generous with utterances of belief and philosophies that shaped my humanity and my work.
“You have more creativity in your little finger than the rest of them. You can figure it out.”
”If you have to do something tough and you feel bad about it, it’s probably because it’s the right thing to do and you care about the person. So do the tough thing but in a way that they know you care about them.”
I often think about these lessons in parallel, they are a reference point for my humanity. Have I become too tough or bitter or lacking compassion? Have I forgotten what second, third and fourth chances meant to my father? I litmus test myself often, in silence.
Seven years ago I wrote down the lessons from my father. I had spent another short season circling at the foot of his potential deathbed and I realised I needed to make notes as his narrative turned towards one of sickness and hospital visits. I found myself hoping again for the relief of pain ending for him. Over the years, I have sometimes become so numb to the urgent calls and medical reports that I wondered if I had simply run out of love for him. Is it possible to love someone you are striving to be so other from? Still, for him I think coming close to death has been a way of staying alive, it’s become part of how he lives and because he is my father, I have lived there too. There is a narrative I could tell you about how I practise being calm and rational and fear being dramatic, because I have already grown up being told I am ‘just like my father’.
Although it is selfish, I will be happy to bury that narrative in the ground with him when the time comes. The part of me that felt forever tied to him, carrying the burden of his unfinished, imperfect story can find some new freedom. That is where our dying is different - the child in me tied to the image of him will make way for more of my own identity. His life has been a shadow of failure, rejection and what not to be. Yet what I love of him — in eternal, profound ways — his optimism, his love of people, his brave confidence to make any story ring absolutely true for those listening — these are good and brave things to be in the world. I have turned that love into action and conscripted the best of what he gave me into myself; lessons and soup recipes. While we are dying together - the part of me tethered to him and him, wholly, I can sense the new parts of me being born — unbound to that shadow. For this I feel gratitude and hope, in a way that I might once have been afraid to describe out loud.
It’s grief I’ve run out of, not love. In grieving him alive and close to death for more years than I was counting — who he was and wasn’t, his failures and shortcomings a long, litigious list of proclamations and accusations — I’ve come to the end of what can be mourned. I’ve observed even those lists are uncertain now, so many stories left to the fuzzy grey edges of memory. I haven’t known my father in the mostly good or mostly bad way some daughters do; I have known a character as equally flawed as full of potential. Unrealised potential sometimes stings the most. No one memory stands uncoloured by the rest but I have his meaning to hold on to.
The story he has left me grows more true each day because I am the caretaker of it.
I wish I had realised while adapting his soup recipes, I had permission to create new meaning from the ingredients he handed to me. Now my kitchen has married the indulgence of my father to the consistency I longed for and an open table, the kind I wanted him to invite us to. I make my ways of living suit the hospitality of my own character. I serve baked beans for Sunday supper but made from scratch — who knew you could make beans taste like love? Through him I learned that meaning is the sometimes most important, more true thing.
In this he lives and lives again without fear of dying — even if the French onion soup recipe was my mother’s and what I remember as nurture was in fact, cooking under duress. Meaning is sometimes more important: once upon a time, my father cared to feed us with slow-cooked love and to teach me a recipe. I could try to write a better story than redemption baked beans but I do not need to — my peace in silence on the subject of redemption is how you know my forgiveness is complete, nothing else needs to be said.
Instead there are only small redemptive actions that come as we are waiting for the final goodbye and that last, withheld course of grief. I hope to find some space beside him to tell him again what I am grateful for, that all is forgiven and he will not be forgotten.
It was always going to be my job to make redemption out of what comes next. So I stage a quiet little rebellion of feeding people I love; making meaning and memories out of everyday meals. I plan to learn to sail and to fish, the things I wish my father taught me and then turn that fresh catch into another memorable meal. I want to turn my meaning-making into memory, into the narrative people tell of me, knowing that in part it will become his story too. Whether he is with us or departed, in winter I will make soup and you might even eat it at my table, with sourdough from Stanley the starter. We’ll pour wine and laugh til tears roll down our faces and it will be meaningful because the recipe, though now mine, came from my father.
It is good soup. It tastes like life, the sweet and savoury nature of it. The complexity of it. And you will know you are loved and I will know that you know it. And the redemptive work will be done.
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A little something else.
Not all my essays are about kitchens, food or rituals at the table. So, if you’d like to taste something slightly different you can try my essays about what is Lost and Found. Here’s a taster about facing my fears, vulnerability and trying to learn how to crack open my own heart.