55 Degrees

I opened my home to friends last night. It felt good to cook again. It felt even better to set the table.

She left her earth suit on the rented hospital bed in the side bedroom four months ago today, shedding it for something new and more fitting and suitable to her true nature.  I lost a life partner and the mother of our children that day. But there is one thing I did not lose, and each day I am discovering more of what I stand to gain.

I didn’t lose my identity.

She was my companion and meant to be that.  But she was not to be my identity. She was never to be my reason for getting out of bed, going to work and raising a family.

About a month ago, I listened to my heart tell me how much it wanted to start setting the table again.  As I allowed myself permission to engage this inner exchange, I noticed something occurring. I started feeling really happy.  I got lost in the reverie of past memories of setting the table. I remembered many of the people I served. I remembered many of the friends that served alongside me.  And the other recollection…  

The food was secondary.

I’ve always had this hierarchy, that food serves people, not vice versa. I wrote about it in my book on page 87 in an entry titled The Soul of a Chef. Wrapped up in my identity as a chef is the desire to nurture and edify.  Cooking is about comfort. And providing comfort is a reflexive response when I see a need. I want to help and one of the most fulfilling ways is to cook for people.

Last night was a step in that direction. It was my first solo flight in my house in many years. It reaffirmed the part of me that is uniquely mine, not because of who I was once married to. It was an opportunity to let that part of me be seen again.

I may never own a restaurant again. I’m getting too old for that grind.  But I most certainly will always be cooking as a means of taking care of people.  I plan to always keep setting the table.

One of my many cherished memories with my family when my kids were young is traveling together.  We visited England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales on two different occasions. In dad form, I forced everyone to simplify and reduce all possessions to three items; Coat. Backpack. Suitcase.  Any time we left a hotel or train, the checklist was called out. The response was to be, “Check.” Then off we went.

I also came up with a phrase on our journey that sticks with me today.  Before we would move on from a city or destination, I would ask the kids, “Did we do what we came to do?”  This means, we came all this way, speak up now or regret it later. In the words of Hamish from Braveheart, “I didn’t get dressed up for nothin.”

As I reflect back on my nearly 30 years of marriage, it’s hard to not focus on the things I wish I would have done or said differently.  But those are the small things compared to what I accomplished. There are more important things that I can grasp as I walk forward into my days ahead.

I watched a woman die.

And it wasn’t a quick death either.  It was a long, slow process. A caregiver understands that one of the biggest burdens to carry is the weight of waiting.  It’s not called a Waiting Room for nothing. Sitting and waiting. Waiting for the nurse to call her name, saying the doctor will see you now.  Waiting for test results. Waiting for surgery to be finished. Waiting for her to wake up, Waiting for chemo to finish the slow drip, And the worst of all, waiting for her to die.

Watching someone die is like being voted into a fellowship in which no one seeks to hold office.  It was forced upon me. I couldn’t respectfully decline. I didn’t get to have a say. I just had to wait and be sworn in.

But I did what I came to do.

I signed up for it. For better or for worse, for sickness or in health. Thankfully I didn’t understand the fine print at the time. I didn’t know that it would include watching a woman die. I didn’t know it meant having a ringside seat, feeling the fight right alongside her. I felt the reverberation of each punch. I now know the smell of the fight, the scent that lingers long after the bell rings and the body goes down on the mat.

Death Cab has a song that touches on this feeling, titled What Sarah Said. It expresses my experience of sitting at the bedside quite well:

As each descending peak on the LCD 
Took you a little farther away from me 
Away from me…

The waiting room is a difficult environment because…

Cause there's no comfort in the waiting room 
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad new

As a young man in my 20’s, courting my girl, I never included this sentence in my love letters to her…

But I'm thinking of what Sarah said 
Love is watching someone die…

Love doesn’t always feel good. But Love is always Good.

About a year ago, when I was seriously considering writing the history about my restaurant, a fellow author gave me this advice.  She said, “If you’re gonna write a memoir, write it all. People can tell if you’re holding back.” I took that counsel and wrote the story as best I could recall.  I’m glad I took the risk. I ended up with a better book, one that I am more proud of had I not been honest and just told the nice stories.

The book was written before she passed. And now that I am continuing to write, I have the same opportunity to be open.  A good brother told me over lunch recently that he hears a new tone to my written voice. “You’re more kind,” he said. I told him thank you for pointing that out, because it’s not accidental.  I have a new sense of intentionality now.

The biggest commitment I ever made in my short life was to make a vow to one woman, to love her as best I possibly could, regardless of sickness or health, for better or for worse, until death brought that responsibility to an end. I assumed that it would have been my death that completed that bond, and certainly I didn’t picture it being over somewhere in the middle of my third quarter.

As I reflect on this loyalty, I have nothing else that comes close to a vow like this.  My children, of whom I am most proud and happy, are now delightful, independent, and responsible adults.  That goal of child-rearing is fulfilled. After these two responsibilities, nothing else comes close to that level of weightiness.

With this actualization comes new liberty.  I now can ponder what is next? It’s my belief that the Kingdom of Heaven is never in retreat.  It never reverts backward. It always advances. It is always moving forward. My best days are not behind me.  Instead, the best is yet to come.

By this I don’t mean I’ll have a better next marriage or raise new and better children.  Faith sees what the eyes can’t. I see new assignments in my future and I am choosing to start today, amid my grief.  I will hold both firmly, letting go of neither Hope or Loss.

I think this is what my friend sees in my writing now. I’m more free. And freedom is hard to hide, and impossible to fake.

I’m free to be more open, more hopeful, and more kind because of this new place in which I find myself.  I can be more honest and can take more risks to love others. I am unreserved to be hurt by the process. 

The Warrior and I always remind ourselves, “This is the way the day got started, and it only got better from here.”

Make today count.

Grief is such an illogical expression.  Thoughts, feelings and experiences don’t always make sense, but that doesn’t make them any less important to understand. That’s why I’ve chosen not to approach my grief from a rational mindset.  The heart knows reasons that reason doesn’t know.

A contrarian thought that I’m currently exploring is to not be afraid to want something I can’t have.  My faith tradition taught me to fear my Desires. They were not to be trusted because it was assumed that Desire would lead me astray everytime.  The underlying assumption of this position is that I only want bad things, that I am incapable of wanting anything good.

I lived under this yoke for many years, until I learned to trust my heart again.  Faith saved me from this barren wilderness. Somewhere along the way, my childhood innocence to dream was taken away.  As I grew up, I lost an important part of what it means to be human, not just a child.

My logical mind as an adult examined the pain of grief and came to the conclusion that Desire was my biggest problem.  If I didn’t want so much, I wouldn’t hurt so much. The solution to the emotional math was to remove Desire from the equation. Less desire = less pain.

I now see for me, this is a terrible answer.

Desire is the reason I get up in the morning.  It’s why I write. It’s why I love to cook. It’s why I collect friends. It’s why I got married and raised children.  Desire got me through the hard times of heartache over 30 years.

And at the same time, Desire is why my loss hurts so bad.  I didn’t Desire being a widower at 56. I desired a long life together.

But if I didn’t want anything, I would have gotten just that.

The reason I am willing to want what I can’t have is that Desire knows no boundaries.  The end game of my Desire is not fulfillment. Instead, it is to constantly keep reaching, knowing full well that I may never grasp it.  

When Desire gets seduced by Demand is where it goes astray. If more men understood this, less women would be mistreated. 

It’s crucial to want. It’s a travesty to demand.

There was no greater source of anticipation for me as a child than the days leading up to Christmas.  I eagerly awaited the arrival of the Sears Wish Book and JC Penney Christmas catalogs that were delivered in the mail.  These publications provided hours of daydreaming to me as a young lad. But one year, something came along that changed my anticipation and took it to a new level.

The F.A.O. Schwartz catalog. 

For the uninitiated, F.A.O. Schwartz is a massive toy store in New York City.  It’s the stuff of dreams for a little boy. And for whatever reason, their Christmas catalog made it to our mailbox one year. It was a game-changer.

There were toys I had never even imagined. Motorized toy cars that you could ride in along giant race tracks that wouldn’t fit in my little room.  There were magic sets where you could pull a real, live rabbit out of a hat. Not to mention the play forts the size of my house and rocket kits that would reach to the moon.  Or so it seemed to the mind of a 9 year old.

That year, I ditched the Wish Book.  This new catalog was the good stuff. I was ready to start dreaming big.

Sure enough, Christmas came and went that year.  I never got the race car and track. Never shot the moon rocket into outer space. And there was another “never.”

I never blamed my mom and dad for not getting those things for me.

There was a quality about my ability to want something I couldn’t have. I didn’t demand those things, but I didn’t shy away from yearning for them either.  I would dog-ear the pages of my favorite toys and sit in dad’s lap for a nightly review.

When I was about 19, and there were no little kids around on Christmas Day, I understand now why dad said, “we need a nine-year old around here.”

Children bring a perspective on life that grownups need.  Kids see life in simplicity. So what changed?

Today, I’m taking a lesson from my 9 year old self.  In my grief, how can I be like that little boy? How can I return to wanting something I can’t have?

What changed in my heart that caused me to resent my longings? When did I decide it was a good idea to stop wanting things I can’t have?

The little boy didn’t turn angry.  Never once did I fall into depression because I wasn’t going to get what I wanted for Christmas.  Instead, I recall his sense of wonder. The boy understood that dreaming was a natural part of the experience.  He didn’t have think about it. He did it instinctively.

I can’t get her back. But I can choose the focus of my mind.  Will I fixate on what I can no longer have and submit to its detention, or will I go to a higher place where Desire is my guide that leads me into a spacious realm of liberty, joy and imagination?

Last night I got to step in to avert a near fistfight between two women in front of me after the Tanya Tucker show I attended. They were literally nose to nose and the stare-down quickly escalated into a shoving match. I’ve seen that look before. It’s not pretty.

I saw what had happened to cause the confrontation. As the house lights came up, the guests, who were already crowded in tightly in front of the stage began to leave quickly. There was a lot of bumping into one another. One of the ladies in the scuffle had accidentally tripped into the other woman’s mom.  I watched as her mama bear instinct kicked in. The reaction was swift and decisive. That’s when I got involved.

I got between them and told the one I was facing, “Whatever is going on, what you’re about to do isn’t worth it.”

To which she defended, “I was just trying to protect my mother from that b****!”

But I stayed on her eyes, “I saw that, but still, what you’re about to do isn’t worth it, and you might regret it. You’re better than that.”

She heard my words, looked down, then stepped away.

She just needed to be seen, and heard.

These are two fundamental human needs.  No one wants to be invisible and no one wants to be ignored. I relate to people out of this understanding now, especially toward women.  

Since childhood, each of us have craved to be noticed.  Twirling that new skirt in front of daddy. Putting on the impromptu play for all to see at the family reunion.  Showing off to mom how fast you are. Flexing arms in front of that new girl in 2nd grade. It’s always been there.

And it never goes away.

Yesterday felt like a scene with Inspector Clouseau and Cato lifted right out of a Pink Panther movie. I got blindsided. Grief leaped out of the closet and we went round and round all day.

The set up was Turbo Tax.

It wasn’t the process of doing my taxes that did it.  My finances are much simpler now that I don’t have other businesses to account for.  It was the memories that it revealed.

Doing taxes is a mandatory review of the previous year.  Most of mine was not very congenial. There were all the medical expenses to track down.  Checks were issued to 31 different healthcare providers for their services, and I recall writing each one of them over those 12 months. Questions were asked about her employment and when she stopped working and why. But this wasn’t the real trigger.

It was that damn Kenny Loggins song.

She sings to me now and then.
Always these memories will stay with me 
And I'll think of her now and then

She loved Kenny Loggins.  In the early years, his CD was always in the car on a road trip.  And a song that I thought I had ignored popped up like Cato swinging a pole at Clouseau’s head.  It wasn’t the bad memories induced by the preparing my taxes. It was the good ones coaxed out by the music that caused me the most pain.

And isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?

Grief feels awful because the memory wasn’t.  It’s the beauty of the memory that makes it hurt so bad.  If there was nothing endearing, life would go on because there was nothing to recollect, nothing to cash in.

It’s supposed to hurt. I hope it will continue. I can’t make new memories with her, but I can honor the ones I have by revisiting them, giving my heart permission to feel every emotion summoned up by the memories and staying seated while they give me instruction.

And I can ensure this by being willing to make new memories in the future.  I don’t want to live a dull life, in some desolate safe place stuck in the middle between being numb and fully present.  I’ll push toward the latter. Every time.

Nobody drifts to the top of the mountain. It takes a concerted effort to get there.  Living a prosperous life full of substantial memories won’t just happen. I’ve got to keep reaching.

I’m a rich man, wealthy beyond dollars.

For years, I felt stuck, wondering if change was ever really possible.

I’m unstuck now.  And surprisingly, it wasn’t that difficult.  It just took a severe change of mental direction.

I used to think that life was hard.  The reason I came to that conclusion was because that’s what my eyes were trained on.  All the challenges I’ve faced were front and center in my mind every day. If it wasn’t dealing with some new threatening aspect of cancer, it was the weight of owning a small business, or it was a personal health challenge, or it was the feeling of age creeping into my bones and joints.  All this was ample evidence that held up in the court of my brain to render a final verdict that, yes, life indeed was hard.

Court adjourned.

I’m happy to say I’m on the lam from that court, and running as a free man.

The tone of my life isn’t based on my negative circumstances any longer.  It isn’t derived from what’s happening to me from the outside. 

Instead, it now emanates in the opposite direction.  It moves from within me out to the world around me. I get to influence my world now, not vice versa.

Hope defines me.  It counters my fears.  It’s a refusal to be defined by external matters. The more this happens, the easier it is to extend a hand to you and say, “Here, take some of this. I’ve got plenty.

This mindset doesn’t change or remove my negative circumstances.  I’m still going to grow old and feel the betrayal of an aging body.  Friends and family will continue to get sick and die. The need to grieve will still exist. Life will still be hard, but it will not be what I set my eyes upon.

I fix my eyes now on what is unseen, not what is seen.  What is seen is temporal. What is unseen is eternal.

One aspect of being a chef that I secretly enjoyed was changing the mind of a guest.  I relished the chance to go to a table and explain why they should order the beets despite the protest that they hate beets.  Excuses usually involve a previous experience with beets that made them gag, but occasionally the guest would admit honestly, “I’ve never had them.”

Some folks make up their minds about what they don’t like through lack of trying.

I use beets as an example because I personally love them, and have a fond memory of my grandmother’s pickled beets that she would put by every summer.  I recall fishing them out of a quart canning jar with my little fingers and biting into the taste of red dirt mixed with sweet and sour brine. It’s a pretty unusual and complicated flavor for a little boy to acquire. Today, that sensation takes me back there immediately. I guess I was destined to be a chef from an early age.

Another rejection of my proselytising of beets was this argument. “I know what I like and what I don’t like. Why would I want to learn how to like beets?”  To which I would reply, “for the same reason you want to learn anything.”

Curiosity.

I was 17 when I discovered that beef could be enjoyed at any other temperature besides well done.  My only early experience with squash was in boiled form. No wonder I didn’t like it. Liver was on my banned list until 12 years ago when I had a farmer give me some and I determined to expand my mind and move past my aversion that formed at my childhood dinner table. Since then I’ve used it to create braunschweiger, blood pudding and even a Midwestern version of haggis.

I want to discover more of what I don’t know.

Anything worth possessing is worth the effort to obtain it.  The surgeon doesn’t come by the knowledge to replace a knee just because she had a knack for it and cutting on bones comes naturally. If you’re under that knife, you are deeply grateful for the training and education that is presiding over your operation.

To be a Chef is to nurture, which is why I love stepping into that role.  I get to turn my curiosity into a chance to nourish, not just your belly, but your mind too.

This was a question I started asking a long time ago after I began to wonder why it seemed that my better conversations with people happened in a bar than in a church-related setting. Was it just the booze that loosened people up or was there something more, something deeper?

I came to this conclusion. I think there is less judgment in a bar. 

Judgment is not to be confused with discernment. Both are ruling decisions that influence or govern behavior. 

Judgment is a verdict. It is static and intended to be restrictive. Once it is handed down, it must be served out.

The beauty of Discernment is that it can prevent judgment from ever being necessary. Discernment listens and pays attention. It is dynamic and fluid, discovering a new answer for a new situation, every time.

Judgment has its place, but it is only a last straw, not a starting point. Judgment comes after all other discerning options have been exhausted.

I believe this is why my conversations in bars feel more free. I can’t really speak for your church.  But I don’t have to enter either place with a judgmental spirit. Instead I can watch, listen and converse with discernment without making final decisions that limit and restrain.