Photo courtesy of Stephanie March
refugee-camp
Brigitte von Haken, my mother, standing tall and smirking at the camera in a photo taken in one of the postwar refugee camps in Germany.
How often have you played the Last-Meal game? I have personally sat at countless dinner parties where the question is posed: What would you eat for your last meal on earth? People often expect my answer, as a food human, will be foie gras, Wagyu steak with morels, or something obscurely fantastic or exquisitely “foodist” and elegant. And yet, my classic answer has always been a double cheeseburger with an absurd amount of pickles and onions. I figure: Go out as your best self.
In January, I started playing this game with my mother, who had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, which made it less of a game and more of game plan. Of course, I wanted to cook her hugely magical meals of things she had yet to experience, food she had never even tried before. And at first she thought that might be fun; she always sent a morning-after text of gratitude about the meals at my table (with a bit of a review, if I’m being honest—she’s also been at every Thanksgiving meal I’ve ever cooked, and there have been notes).
My mother grew up in postwar Germany and had clear memories of hunger. She made a turbulent ocean crossing with her family when she was 11 and remembered vividly the thought that potato-peel water would be her last meal. Once safely on a train bound for Ontario, she was given a Spam-and-white-bread sandwich, which she often remarked tasted like freedom.
When we looked back on her food life together, we could both see that she had been torn between the fear of having nothing and the fear of having anything you could ever want. Neither felt right to her. Her indulgence was always a controlled and examined one. So German.
During the spring, we’d wind our way through the grocery store and try to find something she wanted to eat. Surprisingly, it was often supermarket sushi or a random grab of coconut fried shrimp. But as we loaded up the cart with eggs, yogurt, and some basics, I kept trying to push the things she had denied herself over the years: “Mom, if ever there was a time to eat all the bread, it’s now! Ice cream for breakfast! French fries for dinner!” She would laugh and toss a few things in the cart, but I could see she was humoring me and my own attempts to deal with her loss of appetite and what that implied. As the cancer kept adding evil white blood cells to her body, food became less entertaining. To us both.
She moved from eating for fun to eating for fuel—never without a flourish, of course. My talented friends cooked vats of soup, dropped off freshly baked bread, provided bright vegetables and nutrient-loaded meals for her. She ate most of it, or so she said. She admitted to me that even if she couldn’t eat it, she could feel full from it.
I dropped by on a Friday afternoon in June, and we sat in her living room, just talking, with her answering my increasingly insistent questions about the holes in her timeline: What was it like in the refugee camps? How did you manage a Dairy Queen when you were 16? Who was that guy you almost married in college? We ate cherries. We ate them one after the other over a few hours, like the stories rolling forth. And like punctuation, we spit the pits into a bowl on the coffee table, from the couch. Often missing, we laughed with the dark wink that there’d be time to pick the pits up later.
It turns out, it was the last meal my mom and I shared before she took her leave a few days later. It was simple elegance. Her best self.
