So Good, You’ll Cry

You speak to your father as if he needs care rather than caring for himself.

A highly and uncomfortably(?) perceptive guest at Thanksgiving.

Tom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease within a few months of my moving to Pittsburgh. As grim of a degenerative disease as it may be, it was a relief to name the decline we’d witnessed over the preceding years, and then set expectations for its escalation. Cognitive decline accompanies his Parkinson’s, stemming from chronic hearing loss^[1] and its resulting isolation.

Watching a parent’s cognitive and physical decline is a prolonged grief. The more you’re around them, the more steadily^[2] you see pieces of them slough away. Sometime’s they’re pebbles, and other times a rockslide. Then, the less you’re around, the more dramatically you see the difference.

The holidays offer the best of both. Whether you’re around regularly,^[3] you get a yearly checkpoint to compare to previous years.

Tom was a prolific and passionate home cook. One of the first signs of his decline was difficulty staging complex meals — at first he’d forget to prepare early enough for a series of involved dishes, then he’d occasionally forget to prepare food, then he’d wildly overestimate the amount of food to buy for a meal and for whom, and most recently he’d forget and then misremember foundational steps of once back-of-hand recipes. Where they concern shared meals, they’re now managed for him. Fortunately a reduced appetite accompanies his symptoms.

Excepting traumatic events, this kind of decline is a slow and steady loss, full of second-guessing and self-doubt. I haven’t ridden in his car since 2022, but he still drives. Am I wrong to not push the matter? He’s not oblivious, but can he remember when he last recently tried to force the issue, or the same conversation a couple of days beforehand?

In a period where I visited weekly, he’d forget that I’m a vegetarian, and feel personally hurt when I wouldn’t just try the tenderloin he’d cooked for four despite lacking another omnivore in his two-person household. Granted, he could never remember that two of my thirty-year-older siblings never ate fish, and well pre-decline would reliably offend them by insisting they loved seafood with dinner already prepared.

Such is self-doubt’s nagging, wheedling voice: is this him, or is this the mixed-up, puzzling yarn ball of disease and decline?

Forgetting one’s dietary preferences is benign, but you can easily imagine the same escalation overtop untreated anxiety, manifesting in “when will you be home?” and “why aren’t you here?” on the wrong day of the week, or “what are you doing, you’ll be late!” two hours before a twenty-minute drive.

This all amounts to the yearly reminder of how much less he can do, how diminished his presence is, and the degree to which we all poorly manage our own stress in compensating for the shift. We bring our own contributions to the void left by his, jostling elbows and seeking perfection when really we miss what we had and can’t bring ourselves to overtly mourn. These are the holidays.

Wednesday night, Darien and I drove to Georgetown to spend the following two days with my uncle, my parents, Simon, and Ariana. I made scratch apple and cherrie pies,^[4] and a scratch seitan roast.^[5] Darien made stuffing and two different cranberry sauces. Simon contributed a sweet potato dish and dry-fried green beans, while Ariana made a sourdough loaf. Tom made mashed potatoes, and we bought a ham, turkey, and its gravy from a local barbecue restaurant. Raphael contributed an incredible 2002 Châteauneuf du Pape while Lora provided a delicious buckwheat-pecan tart and an almond-cranberry tart. My dad’s diminished contributions don’t leave us materially wanting — instead, we’re left with nostalgia.

We drove back Friday evening, and after spending a luxurious Saturday without touching a burner,^[6] I got to work on a seitan braise. I wasn’t completely satisfied with what I’d made for Thanksgiving, and with a cold front rolling in — temperatures dropped to the low forties after eating outdoors in Thursday — I was looking for warm, winter comfort food. Whereas Thursday’s was a dense mushroom seitan roast boiled in saltwater, this roast was a looser dough hydrated with a mushroom kombu broth, soy sauce, vegemite,^[7] and red wine mixture. The seitan had thinly diced mushrooms, garlic, and mirepoix kneaded into the dough, and then small pieces of frozen refined coconut oil, creating pockets in the dough and yielding a varied, looser texture. Finally, the dough was wrapped and trussed, rested for three hours, coated in coarsely-ground black pepper and salt, seared, and then simmered for two hours in the same hydrating liquid alongside chopped carrots, onions, shallots, fingerling potatoes, and a diced rutabaga and parsnip. It was killer, and the apartment smelled amazing.

I first and last made this kind of meal while I still ate meat, after moving to Belgium eight years ago. The cold winter was shocking, and I craved cozy aromatics and leftovers. Tom would make beef braises when I was young, and I remember comfortable winter evenings — the few in Texas that were cold — as these aromatics would fill the house, and we’d sit down to a dinner or braised vegetables and meat.

I was struck today with the distance between the living man to the remembered man, but this isn’t new. I was shocked to feel the dissonance of mourning him privately, while being often frustrated by him when we’re together. The holiday was at points a stressful mix of family, their contributions, and their mutually-escalating reactions. Privately, after the holiday, I could mourn the lost pieces — rather, this lost version — of my father despite spending the much of the week with him and managing him.

Mourning a living parent feels shameful, and it feels like a betrayal to love their memory while harboring such complex feelings regarding their current state. I often feel like this pre-death grief is to the exclusion of enjoying what I can, but when I try to enjoy it, I’m met with at frustration at best. Now I’ve surprised myself with the intensity of my emotions when recreating something he’d do when I was a child.

I know there’s no right or wrong ways to grieve, but damn.