Grief and greens: a family finds comfort in collards - first person - Brief Article

A cool blast of air anointed the front of my body as I stood in the doorway of my mother's 7-foot-high auxiliary freezer. In it, she had packed bags of frozen shrimp, jars of fresh lemon juice, gourmet foods of all descriptions. What's this? Yikes. Frog legs.

Bingo. Pine nuts!

I knew they'd be there.

It is an unsettling experience to be picking through your mother's deep freeze, then her vast spice rack and brown crockery jar of garlic, surveying all she'd stockpiled for future dinners, when in a bedroom 15 yards away she's sleeping deeply, days from death.

My mother was an early devotee of Julia Child. She had only recently parted with her lifelong collection of culinary magazines by donating them to a cooking school in Charleston. But a massive stroke last November--in the kitchen--left her unable to swallow, a heartbreaking turn of events for someone, like Mother, who loved to cook and eat fine things. Here I was, back in South Carolina, on Christmas Eve, accepting casseroles from neighbors at the back door, helping my older sister give Mom her medication, chatting calmly with hospice workers about "God's plan."

We thought she would leave us in three days. Instead it was 10.

How did I cope? What did I do?

I called my husband, of course, and cried on the phone with friends.

But I also cooked greens, which became the nightly side dish for the whole family. I cooked them consistently and simply. Much more simply than Mother would have done them up. I chopped collards and bok choy, cooked them in a little oil and garlic, threw in soy sauce or Bragg's all-purpose seasoning and garnished with lemon and Mom's toasted pine nuts.

Then I served the greens, as a sacrament of sorts--alongside whatever entree we had--to my elderly father, to my younger brother and to my overworked sister. I did this every single night, which made me feel like I was helping someone, somehow, at a time when I felt almost unutterably helpless.

If you've ever taken care of a terminally ill person, you know how important eating well can be. To embrace health and take care of yourself is probably the wisest, most life-affirming thing you can do.

I didn't know this at the time, of course. But it became evident to me as I poked around in my mother's beloved kitchen. Night after night, I chopped the collards and bok choy and caught bits of the nightly news programs my mother would have watched on the white portable TV that kept her company as she cooked for us--and, when we were gone, for my father.

"Amy, these are fantastic," my sister said after first tasting my greens. On day three, my brother was expressing his enthusiasm, too, and reporting gratefully that his digestive track had never functioned more favorably.

Throughout this difficult period, we ate remarkably well, though there was one lapse, around New Year's Eve, when the three of us polished off four bags of candy.

But it was the greens that sustained us. I was doing something mysteriously meaningful every single night--something Mom would have appreciated--by cooking greens in Mom's kitchen, thinking about things she cooked and the way she cooked them, occasionally pausing over my work to stare beyond the trees outside her window above her sink.

Amy Cunningham has been a self-described "alternative health nut" since the late '60s, when her beloved Beatles went to India to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Before long the Chicago native had attended a Ravi Shankar concert and was practicing yoga, acupuncture, homeopathy and Chi Quong. A "New Age mom" with two sons, Cunningham lives with her husband, author and journalist Steven Waldman, in Brooklyn, New York, where they are members of the Park Slope Food Co-Op. In "Grief and Greens" (page 84), Cunningham describes how she helped her family cope with her mother's death.

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