How to Survive Your Colonoscopy Without Really Trying

 Do Not 'Go Lightly' into that Good Night

How to Survive a Colonoscopy without drinking liquid chalk 

 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, actor Ryan Reynolds and I both went in for colonoscopies on the same

day (different facilities). Deadpool had one polyp removed, and although I don’t like to brag, I had two. He scheduled his after losing a bet with Wrexham co-owner Rob McElhenney. I go in every five years thanks to losing the genetic lottery when it comes to colon cancer (it’s killed two grandmothers and a first cousin, so far). Reynolds’s adventure is on film, and mine (as far as I know), is not. 

Because of my stubborn inability to drink anything that's not remotely to my liking, this test has always been unnecessarily difficult.

 (Everyone my age remembers the gallons of sludge poor Katie Couric had to chug down in her kitchen to prep for her on-air colonoscopy on the Today Show in 2000. Her on-camera-colon stunt was for a good cause in memory of her late husband, but her [reported] $60 million dollar contract might've also helped her choke down that chalky residue of misery and degradation cut with liquid cherry-flavored Pez.) 

Pill Prep for many years used to come with a Black Box Warning acknowledging you were taking your life into your own hands and you'd hold harmless and release anyone who dispensed it to you from lifetime imprisonment. Very few docs would prescribe it, and you more or less had to step into a dark alley, whisper a password, and someone would usher you onto what loosely appeared to be the set of Tim Robbins' 1990 movie, Jacob's Ladder,  for your "procedure." (Keep up; we're gonna go fast now.)

This year was my first time at-bat with a relatively new FDA-approved entry called SuTabs. I didn't have to cross any northern or southern borders to buy it, I just picked it up at the usual drive-thru window. No one asked me for a password (I had just watched the premiere of this season's Handmaid's Tale, so I felt ready).  

Now that the whole ordeal is behind me (so to speak), I hesitate to say, Ask for It By Name (mostly because no one's paying me to say that), but sure, go ahead, Ask For It By Name. I strongly suspect it will improve people's willingness to take the test, and maybe save a few lives along the way. (It's the least I can do.) Because while no one in their right mind wants to hold their nose and choke down gallons of rapidly ossifying liquid chalk, almost no one minds taking a few handfuls of pills these days; in some circles, it's probably encouraged. This should in no way be confused with medical advice, obviously. Consult your health care professional. They'll probably say it's fine. If they don't, it's probably better to listen to them instead of me.

Even with the tablets, you'll still have to prep, but instead of drinking several gallons of the devil's own concoction of salty lime efflent, you'll just swallow a few dozen pills, and a positively unwholesome waterboarding amount of water. 

I am not one to ever engage in (or be amused by) Farrelly Brothers scatological humor, so I'll do my best to skirt the periphery of this whole process with the delicate decorum my mother raised me to display, while still giving you all the necessary information that your doctor, nurse, and pharmacist won't bother with.

ACT I: Shop

First, you're going to need to go shopping. You'll need supplies for a week or less to get you through the home stretch, to include: 

• Lemon Sorbet (get Jeni's, or Graeter's, or any comparable "luxury" brand; anything that costs over $10 should be acceptable. If it costs less than that, odds are 50/50 it will taste like Lysol, and that's what you get for not listening; God knows we're all living on a budget these days, but THIS is not the time to economize). 
• Watermelon Jolly Ranchers (green or yellow are acceptable; reds, purples, and oranges are not. I don't make the rules.)
• Lemonhead candies
• Instant cups of Grits (if you're in the south) or maybe Cream of Wheat if you live in the... (I'm not sure where you people live? Minnesota?)
  
• Could you just buy the instant packets? you ask. Yeah. Sure. You could. But why do you want to make your life hard? Who hurt you? 
  
• Outshine Lime Frozen Fruit Bars (no, you may not have the tangerine; well, you can, but later. Right now stick to lemon and lime.
• Assorted Noodles (Ramen etc)
• JellO, Green or Yellow (do NOT get the sugar-free kind; you've had sugar-free gummy bears?)
  
• Kids' Snack Packs of diced peaches 
• Avocados
  
• Bananas
• Eggs
  
• Assorted broths (clear only) 
• Assorted citrus for your noodles and broth: lemons, limes, ginger to grate, etc. 
• Assorted hot teas (no red, purple, or orange)
  
• Assorted cold drinks (ginger ale, sprite, and if you can stomach them, sports drinks — greens and yellows only, no purples or reds or oranges)
• Powdered lemonades if you like them (I do not). 
• Clear juices if you like them, like apple or white grape (I do not). 
  
• A sizeable supply of your preferred bottled water (trust me: your Brita is never gonna keep up with this level of volume). I recommend Voss or Evian, both in glass bottles (obviously). If you're going to drink out of plastic, you might as well just lap it up out of your dog's dish.  

And, in the baby aisle:

• fancy hypoallergenic aloe baby wipes with vitamin E (take them home, and put them straight in the fridge in a bottom drawer nobody ever uses. Don't ask questions, just do it.)
  

Now, under normal circumstances, no medical professional would ever advise you to live on white foods, but for a few days or so prior to your test, you'll do exactly that: chicken, turkey, fish, rice, pasta, potatoes, bananas, light soups (chicken noodle, egg drop, etc). Hopefully you're not diabetic. If you weren't before, you might be after this. (Don't ever eat a white-diet without first consulting a doctor, or at least your crossfit guy or yoga instructor.) If you don't want to cook or don't like to cook: DoorDash accordingly. (Although I had one rough evening with Dasher Mutraza who forgot my dinner, but DID deliver the sorbet. So you should allow extra time for errors.)

ACT II: Five Days Out

Begin your white-diet a few days out — I managed about five days. That's a week without my daily brussels sprouts, my broccolini, my steel-cut oats, my nightly bedtime honeycrisp apple ritual with  Ambien Walrus, my special cannelini and radish salad — all the food routines I hold dear. It's counter-intuitive, but you're getting all the fiber OUT of your system during this horrible perversion of a cleanse. 

I mostly subsisted on fish, sushi, soups, potatoes, bananas, and avocados.

This phase was hard for me because I eat a LOT of plants on any given day; your mileage may vary. 

ACT III: 48 Hours Out 

Stretch your restriction muscles a little.  Instead of chicken, for example, just have noodle soup. Have eggs maybe, but skip your usual whole grain toast. Sub in a nice low-residue English muffin. 

Have a banana. Do not have a salad... or a steak... or a porkchop. 

When the men in my family go for any prescribed medical procedure, they eat steadily until precisely one minute before the prescribed midnight deadline. At 11 pm, they’re firing up the grill. I accompanied my uncle to his last procedure, and the nurse was trying to determine when he had finished his last meal. He’s hard of hearing and couldn’t quite make out all the questions through the masks. “THEY WANT TO KNOW WHEN YOU STOPPED EATING,” I helpfully shouted into his left ear. He looked at me like he was embarrassed to be genetically related to someone so simple-minded, and clipped out loudly and slowly as if to accommodate my dimwittedness, “I SAID… WHEN… I … WAS…FULL.”

ACT IV: Prep Day

You're coming into the Home Stretch.

Granted, you're going to spend the entire day strung out on clear liquids and pills, and no one's even going to offer you a record deal or a new cautionary Hulu series at the end of it, so it's not going to be great.

You're going to be happy you shopped though. You can make a lot of courses out of clear liquids if you're desperate: broth for lunch, jello for your salad, and sorbet for dessert. See? Later you can have a PediaLyte popsicle or a Lime Outshine Bar for a snack. 

Delicately speaking, sure, you will be making a few extra trips to the bathroom over the course of the evening. But because you've observed the white-food cleanse, you shouldn't need to set up camp. It'll be just you and your aforementioned impeccably chilled aloe wipes.

ACT V: The Last 100 yards (literally)

A word of advice: even if you're not a morning person, always try to be the first procedure of the day. From the first procedure on, they will be running behind, and it gets worse with every single case as the day progresses. Worse, you don't want medical professionals at their most tired and cranky when they get to you.

Get in.

Get out. 

For the same reason: try not to schedule Monday procedures. What are the odds that everyone on that team has fully recovered from the weekend and is happy, clear-eyed, and delighted to be shoulder-deep in guts? 

Don't schedule on Fridays either. If there's going to be a complication (God forbid), it's going to happen in the first 24 hours — after everyone has gone home. Your regular doctor has gone home. Everyone in the scope center has gone home. And the ERs are filled with drunks and GSWs on the weekend. Your little complication may seem significant to you, but it's no match for a gunshot wound when it comes to triage.

Get in and out on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and go early. 

You'll go in, you'll get undressed, toss on a robe, do a semi-thorough history with a nurse who'll pop in an IV and then somebody will wheel you back to "the Suite." (If you are not early, you will sit on the gurney, lightly gowned, for two to three hours.)

The GI guy or gal and the anesthesiologist will introduce themselves, and then you'll go on a little "trip” you won’t remember, to a place you never wanted to go.

Scope results will be provided to the responsible driver you brought with you. 

You will be too high to know or care what the medical professionals are saying. 

You should choose a Driver who’s a Luddite with a flip phone, who’s both unable and disinclined to film you. 

ACT VI: Speaking of Recovery 

A word about propofol.

Many patients rave about it — "so light," "so refreshing." 

I was not a fan, and do not see the recreational appeal.

I haven't ever been roofied (as far as I know), but I think it feels a little like this. 

All I know is I woke up with a dull, throbbing headache that lasted all night, and a vague sense of unease that something bad had happened....but that I should remember it wasn't my fault. That I did nothing wrong.

Bottoms up!

 

How My Childhood Nemesis Turned Out

It was inevitable that one day I would look up my childhood nemesis on facebook to see how she'd turned out.
The last time I had really thought of her was the last time I'd written about her, which was 1998 (according to google) — long before facebook, twitter, or instagram.
Today, I was reflecting on how our friendship might have turned out if social media had existed back when her family left our town behind in the 70s — if we hadn't had to rely on actual letters to exchange our adolescent barbs — with days and weeks stretching out excruciatingly between every  assault.
The first volley was about their new house.
It turned out to be a modest three bedroom ranch in a solid middle class suburb on the outskirts of the large southern city they'd said they were moving to. (It would be as if someone told you they were moving to Atlanta, and then their return address said Alpharetta.) I know it turned out to be a modest ranch because my family spent many holidays at her family's house subsequent to the move.
An entire page of her pale blue monogrammed stationery was devoted, in carefully cramped but bubbly penmanship,  to describing their "sunken living room," an architectural marvel I could scarcely imagine. It's where, she wrote, they had decided to put the piano. What I envisioned was something like the layout of a racquetball court, with an observation deck up top where people could stroll and exchange bon mots, before descending to the conversation pit below. (That's not, in fact, how a sunken living room works, but how was I to know?)
HGTV did not exist at the time, nor did Martha Stewart (at least not in her eventual incarnation), and even if they had, that would not explain why 12-year-old girls were exchanging letters with crudely sketched floor plans of subtle one-upmanship, but we were.
I was insane with jealousy.
I had spent many years of slumber parties and sleepovers at their last house, and nothing about it had suggested to me that they were the kind of people capable of the level of sophistication you'd need to possess a sunken living room.
In fact, their last house had been remarkable only for the occasional big-city affectation they had imported when they relocated to our town from Ohio.
For example, they had only one TV. It was located in the "family room," and it was placed inside an "entertainment center."  It did not sit on top of another, non-functioning TV that had been draped with towels to keep from scarring the burled wood surface of the non-functioning TV (as a succession of TVs had done at our house).
As they lived in the heart of town, they had cable TV. We lived in what they jovially derided as "the boondocks," and had an exterior antenna that, on a good day, could tune in WBIR, which was CBS out of Knoxville. (ABC and NBC were for fancier households than ours. No Schoolhouse Rock for me unless one of my city friends had a sleepover. PBS? Other than The Electric Company at school, no. Although I knew what they were, I did not grow up with Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers or any of the other touchstones of my generation.)
They did not have HBO (that would arrive much later, at the homes of my high school friends, like the Andersons), but their TV did blare an array of "super stations," that would air late-night, sanitized versions of movies from theatrical release, like The Poseidon Adventure.
Their dad was an engineer (which I thought meant that he drove a train, a notion I stubbornly maintained for quite some time, despite their eventual explanations to the contrary). 
Their kitchen boasted "a snack bar," which delineated the kitchen from the family room. They also had a "formal" living room, which was (as was true of the later house apparently), where they kept the piano.
In addition to my best friend/slash/nemesis, their family had a developmentally disabled daughter. We thought of her as what was politely referred to as "slow," at the time, though she cheerfully clarified for everyone she met, "I'm brain-damaged, not retarded."
Later, she would sometimes explain to other kids, in private, "I didn't get enough oxygen when I was being born. And that's why my mom hates me."
Possibly oversimplified, but very probably true.
Their mom suffered from what would probably now be characterized as auto-immune disorders.
What it looked like to us, as children, was what we guessed from the bible could only be leprosy, as her skin was an uninterrupted mass of suppurating sores. In public, she always wore long sleeves and long pants. But at home and at their camper on the lake, she wore t-shirts and shorts and skirts, to the dismay of both of her daughters.
Their dog once pooped on our sofa while they were on vacation and my Dad threatened to have her put to sleep. They always introduced her as a "Heinz 57," and paused as if that description had typically drawn such peals of laughter that they needed to wait for the chuckling to subside before continuing the conversation. 
Despite their location in the middle of town, they had ponies. Literal show ponies.
Their backyard had a gate to a pasture they rented from The Catholics who owned the property on which our small private school sat.
(We had horses, but only in the offhanded, agrarian way that all people had horses at the time.) 
That's how we met.
Catholic school.
Roughly grades 4 thru 7, which is when they moved away.
We attended the only school in town capable of "accommodating" their eldest daughter's academic challenges, which meant she mostly sat by herself and filled in kindergarten style workbooks while a nun peered over her shoulder and told her she could do better.
Their family was insistent on "mainstreaming" and the girls' parents often fretted aloud to my parents that once they were old, it would be up to the younger, popular daughter to take over their caregiving role. To which my Mom would say, bluntly, "don't kid yourself," or sometimes, "dream on."
It's a long way of saying, in hindsight, I suspect their family had some insecurities. And they manifested those insecurities with manners and behaviors that suggested they thought they were better than everyone else.
(I didn't necessarily disagree, but a grand piano in a sunken living room? Who'd they think they were kidding?)

So, today, I looked her up.
Despite our mutually advancing years, she has barely aged a day. Instantly recognizable, even if she hadn't hyphenated her maiden name with her married name, rendering her easily searchable.
Still sweetly pretty in the cornfed midwestern way she was when I last knew her, and wearing her thick chesnut brown hair the exact same way she wore it in grades four through seven. It was the exact same color as her pony's back then, and it's the same color now.  I'm sure the pony is long since dead.
Most of her profile isn't public, but a few photos are. In one, she's belting out a tune in what appears to be community theatre. In another, she's cuddling in a quilted brown recliner with her soft, bald, bespectacled husband who has kind eyes.
In 2013, there's a photo of her mom, in long sleeves and long pants, with a banner attesting to her prowess as a grandmother.
 In 2011, she appears to have found Jesus in some vaguely non-denominational way (as a child she was Presbyterian but that was only because our town wasn't large enough to have any Lutherans). She favors bold floral prints in her church attire, and has "checked in" at some point as listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Her few visible posts are articulate, and everything is spelled correctly.
She got married in 1989, around the time I would've been finishing grad school.
If she has, or has ever had, a job, there's no mention of it on facebook — no mention of where she works or if she works and what she did.
She has two beautiful daughters. 
She and her husband appear to make an annual trip to a Big City (one year New York, another Chicago), augmented by an every-other-year vacation at a Florida beach.
 She has 569 friends. Number of friends we have in common: zero.
She doesn't acknowledge being from Ohio, and, in fact, lists the town where she went to college as where she's from.
She seems to have remodeled her kitchen in 2016.
Her father posts blizzard photos on her wall and jokes, "where's the global warming?"
They all appear to live deep in the midwest now. 
She favors wine-flavored organic gummy bears, and self-identifies as a foodie.
She watches Fox News, and in 2013 briefly flirted with Weight Watchers.
Sometimes she sits on an exercise ball.
There's no mention that she has now, or ever had, a sister.

Close the Drawer

"Honey, could you close that drawer back?" Mom asks, gesturing to the nightstand, which I'd left open after taking out that night's round of insulin and pills for her for bedtime dosages.
"Sure, just one second," I said, positioning her knees across the grooved wedge pillow I had ordered on Amazon to elevate her feet and reduce the edema in her legs that was getting worse every day.
"Ed's friends had this daughter," she continues.
"Uh huh," I say absent-mindedly, unspooling the compression bandages I was using to wrap her legs with before she went to sleep.
"47 years old."
"ok," I said. 
"She left her dresser drawer open one night?" she adds, almost as if it's a question I'm supposed to know the answer to.
"Uh huh," I respond.
"Tripped over it in the dark."
"Oh yeah?" I ask, my voice muffled from my position speaking into her mattress from the floor, halfway under the bed, looking for one of the bandages I've evidently misplaced.
"Killed her dead," she says, without a trace of drama.
"Uh huh," I grunt in response, crawling back out, so I can reach the hot pink aluminum flashlight she keeps on the dresser.
"Brain bleed," she concludes matter-of-factly.
"Ah!" I say, locating the now illuminated missing bandage. I retrieve it, dust myself off, and take the two steps  back to her nightstand, where I close the drawer."
"Thank you honey," she says.

Everything that was wrong with my 50th birthday

I would never be able to count all the ways in which my 50th birthday was made entirely of suck, and was the worst birthday that I (or anyone, really) has ever had. But I can explain why, and it's all about my superstitious (though wildly accurate) belief that however you spend a monumental milestone (a birthday, a holiday, etc), that is what you'll spend the rest of the year (or decade) doing. The time other people spend planning weddings and baby showers or even Christmas is the time and energy I allocate to days I consider special (whether or not anyone else buys in).

It's the reason I host a New Year's Day brunch with my favorite friends and favorite food, because I know that however you spend New Year's Day is the way you'll spend the rest of the year. 

My 30s were my favorite decade to date, and even if I couldn't pinpoint the exact how and the why, in my mind, the next ten years were inextricably linked with the handful of perfect moments from the 30th birthday party that kicked everything off (my favorite band playing "Pamela Brown" on my deck — for example — their amps plugged into a random and endless succession of orange extension cords that threaded through the window and into the shag-carpeted "Rumpus Room" that I never, ever got around to remodeling the entire time I lived there).

I had something more modest in mind for 50 — no band, no amps, just a couple dozen of my favorite friends and my favorite food (from a venue I'd decided on this time last year) — and that isn't the way it played out. No friends. No food.


I stumbled across this dead bird lying on the welcome mat outside my office door first thing this morning — the poor little guy appeared to have bashed his brains out on the glass — which seemed like the perfect metaphor for this whole miserable day, until....

Until, that is, I ran across this random post from a random stranger on Facebook, dated January 1.  I don't know this person, and none of my friends know this person. I was searching for a specific article by my favorite TV critic (who just happens to have the same, very common, first name), and this is what popped up.

As one New Year's Day indignity stacks on top of the next, and then the next, for him, what I am accidentally thinking as I read it is how impossible it is for me to see his post as anything other than a tone poem that completely summarizes the utter despair and disappointment that characterized my birthday.

None of the the things he wrote are specific to me... and yet, everything he wrote somehow speaks to the universal in all of us, doesn't it? Religions and political parties have been founded on less:

• ...I was nowhere near drunk.

• ...I'm wondering if I have a small ulcer.

• ...I put up a new shower rod. It looks nice. I was glad that it wasn't hard to put up.

• ...the tarp came loose from where I stapled it up the last time.

• ...I have to re-do the Advent wreath, but I'll worry about that tomorrow.

• ...I don't get paid until Saturday. 

• ...the electric bill and Christmas wiped me out.  

• ... you all take care and may God bless. 

I'm trying not to take the whole episode — the worst Birthday anyone's ever had, in the history of time —  too hard (and by that, I mean I will never forgive or forget one single second of it).

Certainly, it's not like I won't get another milestone —a do-over — in no time at all, when I turn 100.

All I can hope is that my favorite band will still be around to write a new song to commemorate the occasion, and they will call it, "The electric bill and Christmas wiped me out."

Mom's review of the new Rick Springsteen Movie

The best part of the new Meryl Streep movie is Mom explaining to Linda who Rick Springfield is, "you know, from the E Street Band?"
Mom, that's Bruce Springsteen. 
"Whatever." 
And he isn't FROM the E Street Band. That's HIS band. 
"Who cares." 
She pauses before finishing her review, "Poor old Rick Springsteen is the BEST thing about that movie." 
I don't disagree.

Paying Respects

Today I went to a funeral for my cousin.

Her 90th birthday was last month ("celebrated" would've been too strong a word for it, as she spent this birthday, like the past three, in a nursing home, with very little awareness of her surroundings or the comings and goings around her). At 90 (forty-plus years my senior), she always seemed more like a beloved aunt than a cousin. Her mother was my (great) Aunt Mary, my grandfather's sister. I am not sure if that made us second cousins... second cousins once removed? She was my mother's first cousin, so that would make her...I'm still not sure.

She wasn't sick. She didn't die after "a long illness." The home had given us a few days notice that she wouldn't be with us much longer. It gave my Mom and one other cousin time to go and hold her hand and say their goodbyes. I asked several times, out of some morbidly unhealthy curiosity,  "but what's wrong with her?" People don't just...die... to my way of thinking. Not even at 90. But of course I'm mistaken. Nothing was wrong with her. She'd stopped eating. Her body was shutting itself down -- worn out. It was the end of a very long process.

A decade or so ago, she sat down, and stopped getting up. Eventually she was "confined" to a wheelchair, and then eventually, more recently, to her bed. She wasn't paralyzed. She hadn't broken anything. She just sat down. Her mind went shortly after she gave up on her body. Chicken, or egg? I have no idea.

She and her husband had sold their rambling ranch house years ago and downsized to a very modest cottage. When he died, she downsized again to a small apartment on the seedy side of town. I was only there twice, accompanying my Mom who regularly did her grocery shopping and dropped off home-cooked meals.

The upstairs neighbors in her complex preyed on her, at first stealing small things from her apartment, and eventually graduating to medication, and then thousands of dollars via stolen checks. Law enforcement wasn't remotely interested. She had no children to step up to oversee her care; she'd outlived her parents and all of her siblings. Eventually, after a herculean struggle, my mother got her into a clean, well-kept facility where, even penniless (though she was unaware of that), she was afforded the relative luxury of dying in a clean bed.

Her funeral was lovely. Like many in her demographic (and there are more 90-somethings every day, many of them, like her, in graduated care facilities that start out as assisted living and inexorably wind their way around to assisted dying, though no one really refers to it as that), she had selected the service, and paid for it all in advance when she was widowed.

We know it was just what she wanted, because she had picked it out. We could all see so much of her in the funeral; there was more of her in the details there than I think anyone had seen of her in the last several years. The casket was a beautiful shade of blush pink. The casket flowers were pink and white. My mother had displayed a few family photos on a draped folding table, and she also spent a full Sunday baking so that the guests -- 13 or so of us -- could fondly enjoy our cousin's recipes and reflect on the feasts she used to serve.

Our priest, coached by Mom, touched on it briefly in the service, but he didn't know her in her heyday. She was the ultimate hostess, and my first introduction to entertaining for the sake of entertaining, and even as a little kid, I soaked up inspiration from her as best and as fast as I could.

When she and her husband moved back here to retire, they brought with them their big-city California ways, and I, for one, had never seen anything like it.

Taco salad? In the seventies?! That was revelatory stuff! Tamale pie. Hummingbird cake. Pizza rolls. Are you kidding? Take everything that's great about pizza, and then roll it up. Man, I was in.

She had retired from a lifelong career at Swanson's, and her knowledge and appreciation of food was unparalleled, even in a family of food lovers like ours. As far as I could tell, those two were living the life -- they built their house to order, with niches like the first butler's pantry I had ever seen off the kitchen (extra fridges and freezers, all filled to bursting) and a dining room with a wall-to-wall hutch that displayed a dizzyingly comprehensive collection of Murano glassware alongside a pink china service for (at least) 20 which made it to the dining room table regularly, not just for special occasions. They had Cable TV before anyone had Cable TV, and despite our parents' stern reprimands that it made us rude guests, my brother and I invariably monopolized their remote and flopped down on our bellies on their brown shag carpet to watch the early days of MTV in front of their giant stone fireplace.

Every visit to her house, no matter how casual, spontaneous, and unanticipated, was accompanied by an unfurling of the culinary red carpet. "Here," she would say, offering a spoonful of some amazing concoction, "taste this. See if it's fit to eat," accompanied by a sly grin. She knew it would likely be the best thing anyone had ever tasted. Of course she knew.

She didn't have kids and as far as I could tell, had never had any inclination towards having any, though she was incredibly loving with us. My freshman year in college, she would send me back to the dorm with shopping bags filled with Tupperware containing everything from her homemade banana pudding layered with real whipped cream to foil-wrapped loaves of zucchini bread and brownies, stacked on top of  Pyrex square pans filled with her famous 9-inch apple pie which (in a nod to their time in Wisconsin), incorporated cheddar cheese in the crust. Savory and sweet? Get. out. She was determined that I would have enough to share -- unaware that I lived in a building filled with anorexics and bulimics, alongside WASPs who dined exclusively on the white food that they considered nothing more than necessary sustenance. I would've never told her that, partly because I think it would've broken her heart, and partly because I suspected that information might have cut into my haul. Maybe my rations would have been sensibly reduced. Instead, I thanked her profusely on behalf of my dorm, and then gamely spent my Sunday evenings methodically plowing through coolers that would've easily fed an entire football team like it was my fulltime job, savoring every crumb.

This is the territory my mind wandered to during her funeral, tuning out the Jesus-y parts, and lingering instead over memories of her Swedish meatballs, her lasagne, and her Shrimp Oliver.

Where ever she is (and I hope it includes a reunion with her husband and her dogs, and maybe a Viking Range), I think she'd be glad to be remembered for her culinary legacy, and glad to know that some part of her lives on every time we serve her tamale pie.

Things You Can Do In Memory When A Good Man Dies

Love isn't something you feel, it's something you do.

--Six Feet Under 

My San Francisco cousin wrote one of the nicest things on my Mom's facebook wall when my stepdad died. "I can't believe he's gone," (a pretty conventional sentiment), adding, "He was such a do-er."  It's a small thing, but nothing could sum him up any better.

When the obituary came out, they somehow left off the designated charities we had picked for official Memorializing (the supportive-housing cancer dorms we stayed in, the Animal Rescue his daughter-in-law volunteers at). The fact that they were left off means several people have called, wondering how they can remember him. We'll have the Obit (the correct one) printed out, but because the Wake isn't til this weekend (we delayed it to coincide with what would have been his big annual camping trip, because flights had already been scheduled for that), there's a lull. A vacuum. I barely know what to do with myself.

sometimes he held my foot when our hands got tired

The first six months of the year was the battle to get him diagnosed, and that was followed almost instantly by the battle to get him enough care to die in a little peace with a modicum of dignity. One of the last things he said to me in his final weeks was, "you have been a big help to me. Thank you for helping me." The only answer I had was, "thank you for letting me." It was an honor. But now that taking care of him isn't my job anymore, I fill the void with worrying about exactly how he wants to be remembered. As long as we serve beer at the Memorial, wherever he is (looking up, as he would say, with a conspiratorial wink), he will be happy. He brought it up dozens of times at the hospital, so it's safe to say it qualifies as a dying wish. Baptists will be alienated, my Mom fears, but if I have to serve it out of my shoe, there will be beer.

The first job was Cremation. I picked the funeral home because they had an onsite crematorium, and I didn't want him outsourced. The funeral director assured me he would personally remove his pacemaker (because I'd seen the Six Feet Under episode where that delayed a service) -- and he confirmed that it isn't an old wives tale -- a pacemaker really would blow the oven "sky high," as he put it.  Removing it "personally," sounded surprisingly graphic when I reflected on his choice of words later, but I appreciated the guy's straight talk. I complained just enough about the price to feel like I was appropriately honoring my stepdad's memory, that I was truly his daughter. When our bereavement specialist ticked off the array of options, I would proudly respond to each one exactly as he's taught us all over the last two decades, with "does that cost extra?" and then I would rub my thumb across the flats of my fingers in his universal gesture, always accompanied by a grin, for "how much?" My answer for every price quoted was a furrowed brow and a contemplative pause, followed by "seems high" (though it killed me to do it; it only seemed right).

I  picked up the cremains as soon as they were ready (a nice young guy came in on the weekend to get them for me), and I drove them to my Mom's house Labor Day weekend. I wanted him to be home for the Holiday. And I knew how much he hated waiting around for a ride. I didn't have any music in the car that I thought he would've especially cared about, so instead, I listened to David Cross's "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" all the way there, because he would've liked it.

Mom burst into tears as soon as I walked in with the ashes, but rallied immediately. She went into her room and came back out with her lipstick on, wearing his favorite pink dress. We wore a lot of pink at the hospital because he said it was so cheerful. Unconsciously, I had put on a t-shirt for the ride home that was the exact same pink that she was wearing. We probably looked a little feeble-minded, but so what. "Come on," she said,  putting her game face on, "Let's take him to the potluck." I dutifully buckled him back into my back seat (just as I had done dozens of times in recent months), and we took him to Church, where we stowed his ashes on a corner niche shelf overlooking the soft drinks for one last meal. 

He'd volunteered in that kitchen for the last 20-some years -- every potluck, every pancake supper, every Valentine dinner, every chili cook-off. In their Church, the menfolk do the cooking and the dishwashing for special events. Although my mother was the cook in the family (three square meals a day, or "three hots and a cot," as he would put it), he was famous for two things: pancakes, and a yellow bourbon cake with chocolate bourbon frosting. I tried to make it one time for a birthday and it didn't turn out, but I am a terrible baker. I plan to print up the Recipe and share it with everybody at the Wake. One of my baking pals is attempting to convert it to cupcakes to serve.

Just as when he was sick, everybody wants to know if there's anything they can do, so just as before, I'm making a list (in addition to the cupcakes, and all the chores I have shared out for food prep and decor). Some things on this list are very specific and unique to him, but I imagine for anyone who's grieving a loss, there will be some variation on this that would be just right.

The first thing I would tell people to do is this: 
Make somebody some world-class pancakes (or whatever it is you're famous for).
If you really cannot boil water, get famous for buying something. Be the guy who always brings that world-class pie, or donut, or kung pao chicken. My friend Jason makes Grief Brownies. He had barely cleared U.S. airspace, returning from a long work trip out of the country when I got his text: "how many people will there be? I will deliver them Friday." Everybody needs a Signature something, and it should be the best. If you can't make it, buy it. If you don't have one, get one. And then show up with it when you're needed.

The second thing I would recommend is:
Feed a stray dog, and if circumstances allow, adopt it.
All of my parents' dogs are rescues, and all were brought into the house under my stepdad's strong and grumbly protestations that he absolutely, positively, for sure, would never have another dog. In fact, he would probably just go ahead and divorce my Mom if she even brought up the subject of saving another dog. Roy is their third. He has one eye, and a wrecked voicebox from where he was either beaten, or possibly hit by a car (the vet is just guessing).
One of my stepdad's old camping pals, Bob, visited us at the hospital every few days. He showed up almost as soon as we'd made it from the ER to a room, and my stepdad's face just lit up, in surprise and delight. "How did you know I was here?!" he tried to shout (though his voice was gone).
"You're on The Internet," Bob yelled back proudly (his kids had been relaying our medical status updates via facebook).
In the midst of all the smothering and mothering and fretting that my Mom and I subjected everyone to, Bob was an oasis of pure testosterone as the two of them traded old drinking stories, swore outrageously, and compared notes on what their girlfriend Rachel Maddow had said the night before on MSNBC. 
I did not know that Bob owed his cat to our family until he told the story of my stepdad insisting that Bob and his wife adopt a stray cat that had been lurking around their campsite many years ago. Bob had no need for a cat; didn't want a cat; and was certainly not in the market for a cat. But my stepdad had apparently been  insistent. He's the one who fed the cat everyday, knowing she would keep coming around, and guessing, correctly, that she would wear down their defenses.
Eventually, Bob acknowledged they should just give the thing a name, once the gender could be determined. Pops tipped her over, announced "it's a girl," and that's how Bob and his wife came to name her Miss Kitty and take her home.
A week later, Bob dutifully took her to the vet for her shots, registered Miss Kitty with the receptionist and waited for the bill. The vet tech who brought her out, overcome with curiosity, asked Bob, "Miss Kitty?" then suggested, "You might want to pick a different name."
Bob was halfway through explaining about Gunsmoke, before he thought to ask, "why?"
"Because," the tech told him unceremoniously, "this cat is a boy," flipping him over to illustrate. My stepdad had misdiagnosed him, and has insisted in the many intervening years since, that the cat just hadn't been "mature" enough for his expert assessment.
I was riveted as to how this story might turn out. "Do you still call her Miss Kitty?" I asked, thinking how great it would be if they did.
"Naw," Bob said matter-of-factly. "Now we call her Buddy."

The third thing I would suggest in memory of my stepdad: 
Fix somebody's bike or lawnmower or flat tire, or loan them your jumper cables (with no expectation they'll be returned). If you're not handy, buy them a really good flashlight or a Triple A membership. If you can't fix their lawnmower, cut their grass.

My stepdad was known to his favorite nephews as Uncle Fix-It, and always described by his beloved late aunt as "handy as a pocket in a shirt." That was her sales pitch to my Mom when she fixed them up (though I don't think she ever admitted that's what she was doing). My mom, then-bitterly divorced from my Dad, was spending the winter at one of her girlfriends' places in Florida. He was newly widowed and drowning his sorrows nearby. Mom's toilet broke, and when she went to the neighbor's to get a plumbing recommendation, her neighbor said, "Let me call my nephew. He's handy as a pocket in a shirt." She did, and the rest is history. That was Christmas and they got married Memorial Day weekend.
His aunt was as good as her word.
He spent an entire summer re-roofing my first house with the guy who would become my ex-boyfriend. (Presciently, he assessed him as "a con man.") He rebuilt the furnace, ripped up the old carpeting, helped sand the floors, and pumped out the basement when we had a 40-year biblical flood. He was the one who had to come inside and break it to my that my dog Travis had died suddenly and in perfect health (maybe a snake bite, nobody knows).
He changed my oil, fixed the starter on three cars in a row (apparently, I'm hard on starters), and repaired a lot of pepper grinders that I would've just thrown away (I am also inexplicably hard on pepper grinders). All the useful presents I ever got for Christmas came from him -- a solar-powered weather radio and TV, a flashlight you can handcrank when the batteries die, safety kits for the car. He rehabbed every closet I ever had with extra shelves, more rods, and custom shoe organizers. Just this past Memorial Day weekend, he came over and hung extra spice racks in the pantry and added towel bars in the bathroom. "You have too much shit," he observed matter-of-factly, surveying my closet. "I don't have any shit," I protested proudly. "This is it. I have gotten it all pared down to just this."
He got a hard time for recycling and repairing absolutely everything -- things most people would've just thrown away -- but he always had an answer. "I might want to buy something with that money I'd be wasting."
To his literal dying day, he never lost his curiosity about how things work, asking the docs in great detail what his new PleurX drain would do. "It will make you feel better," one of the residents patronizingly told him. "I know that," he said good-naturedly, "I'm just wondering how will the vacuum equalize the pressure and not collapse my lung?"  A bit of a Luddite, he nonetheless loved my iPad and iPhone and could play with the maps feature almost endlessly.
When he was staying in that same hospital 20 years ago for bladder cancer, he actually repaired one of the ultrasound machines for them, mid-procedure. "Gimme that thing," were his exact words when the tech couldn't get it to work.
Whenever my Mom and I would leave the hospital, he would say, as he always did, "be careful."
"Yeah, yeah," we would say, as usual.
"No, I mean it," he would say, almost frantic. "I can't help you from here."
 "Well you bought our Triple A," Mom would reassure him. "That's good enough."

Get flowers for somebody who's around to enjoy them. Not just for funerals. All the time. Not as an either/or. "In lieu of" is a stupid phrase. You can do other nice things too. But order the flowers.
This is the subject of minor controversy in our family. Neither my dad or stepdad ever bought my Mom many flowers. In fairness, they widely quoted my mother's token protest, "they're a waste of money."
But unless you have a tendency to blow the grocery money on hookers and florists and leave your children

starving, flowers are never a waste of money.
As much as my stepdad complained "just another thing for me to mow around!" he loved them as much as Mom and I do. He planted a million of them, at home, and at the Church, where he spent countless volunteer hours, mulching and digging and mowing.
Mom cut flowers at our dorms and in the V.A. gardens and brought them to our hospital rooms every day.
When we arrived at the V.A., we were greeted with a beautiful orchid from Tom and Michael, who'd thoughtfully sent it ahead on their way to their summer vacation cruise. Of course we didn't know then we only had four days left.
Never one for sentiment, it was a little surprising that my stepdad immediately asked us to take a photo of the orchid. "Can you put that on the internet?" he asked.
"Sure!" I said.
"Can you tell Tom and Michael it's from me?" We facebooked it to them immediately on their Caribbean adventure.

When he died, nobody sent my Mom flowers.
There wasn't a traditional funeral with a traditional visitation and maybe her pals were relying on her "philosophy" that they're a waste of money. (Hell, for all I know, they just gave her the cash, figuring all new Widows have a tough go of it, but I doubt it.)

He wanted to make sure the food gays saw his orchid.

A couple days later, a lovely bouquet arrived from his nephews. These were the same nephews who all switched their facebook profile pics to a photo of him. I was beyond touched, even moreso when I zoomed in and realized the photo they'd selected was one of him flipping off the camera. That's about right. She'd raved about the arrangement, so when I showed up with the ashes, the first thing I asked was, where were the flowers. I wanted to see them.
"In the garage fridge," she said. 
Maybe this is a new custom? Another Episcopalian thing I'm unfamiliar with (like no one bringing her any food).
No.
She was just "trying to save them" for the Memorial, hoping they'd last.

One day at the V.A. hospice, a giant arrangement (about as tall as I am) showed up in the family kitchen/lounge for veterans and their families: a tower with dozens and dozens of green and pink and red roses. No fillers. No carnations. It had to have come in on a hand truck or dolly. The nurses told us a Bride had sent over a centerpiece from her wedding, thinking it might brighten the veterans' days. God bless her.
That's my recommendation: almost everyone gets flowers for some special occasion, whether it's a wedding or an office Christmas party or a conference. What a great idea to take them to a V.A. or a nursing home, where the residents probably don't see them often.
Whenever a veteran dies at the V.A., the nurses drape the body with a quilted U.S. flag for the last ride out to the hearse. Not especially sentimental myself, I have to admit it's achingly touching.

That's a real rose on his shroud. I stole it.

Unimpeded by sentiment, as much as I hated to judge (and know my mind should've been on weightier things), I was also dimly horrified to notice they top this quilt with a plastic carnation.
I quietly removed it. While we waited for the funeral home representative to arrive, when nobody was looking, I walked down to the lounge and quietly stole three roses (two pink and one red) from the back side of that bride's centerpiece. I put those on top of his quilted flag. (Because sometimes you have to improvise.)
("How much?" I could imagine him saying, rubbing his thumb across the flats of his fingers. "FREE!" I would've told him, and he would've winked, "the best kind.")

One of the things I notice people saying a lot after somebody dies is how much it reminds them to tell everyone around them they love them, while they can.
Whatever.
You could all sit down and watch more Oprah re-runs too, I guess.
Most people agree it's nice to hear "I love you," I suppose, and it is, but talk's cheap.
I have no memory of whether or not my stepdad ever said those words to me, or whether I ever said them to him. Maybe we did. I don't know. Probably. But I do know he re-built my sump pump, and pruned my dogwoods (almost beyond recognition), and fixed my water heater. And I know I kept Sweet n Low in my purse for him for the last 20 years (though I think artificial sweeteners are horrifying), and that I fought for his life every day for the last six months as hard as I would fight for my own. I spoke for him when he wasn't able to. When that battle was lost, I fought for the best, most peaceful death that could be managed, and when that didn't go so well, I just held his hand. 

You could tell more people "I Love You," but no one in my family ever does. Because it isn't something you feel, it's something you do. How are you fixed for cupcakes? Kung pao chicken? Has the grass been cut? Are flowers on the way?

My stepdad was a do-er. When a good man dies, DO something. Send flowers. Make pancakes. Cut a widow's grass. Do their laundry. Go get their oil changed and fill up their tank.

Go have a "piping hot cup of coffee" or an "ice cold beer" with someone while they're around to enjoy it.

When you pay respects, pay respect.