In Sustenance and Service

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately.

No, not because I’ve been hungry—because the opposite is sort of true. I’ve loved food and eating and cooking for a really long time. It’s been something that I’ve relished for all of my adult life.

When I had an apartment for a couple of months prior to giving up and moving to Ohio (it was just too hard for me to have a long-distance relationship), most of my cooking looked like frozen fish sticks, spaghetti, and heating up refrigerated McDonald’s leftovers. I haven’t been on my own since then. That was mid-1996.

When you consider food, what does it mean to you? Like, what does it represent in your head, or in your heart?

For me, food has always been tied to connection, to love, to the experience. It’s not been about eating something on my own. When I think about the best meals I’ve ever eaten, all of those memories are connected to having enjoyed and appreciated that food with someone, and that someone has most often been Kellie. I can look at pictures of an old fancy burger, or the best soup, or a steak from somewhere great, and tell you who was there with me, what we talked about, and how incredible it felt to just spend that time with them. It’s not just about the food.

Stigma and general nastiness about heavy people really comes into play across all kinds of aspects of our society, but especially related to food. The knee-jerk reaction that folks tend to have when they see someone who’s overweight is that they must just eat and eat and eat. Of course that’s not true, not even remotely true, but that’s the way people act. I think that leads bigger people to have a lot of concern about not being perceived to overeat, and creates a lot of guilt and shame. Open discrimination against people with larger bodies is still very acceptable for most of us, and that’s wrong.

Kellie was larger than the average person, because of all kinds of health issues she struggled with her entire life. That made her life a lot more complicated than it is for most of us, and it wasn’t fair. But it wasn’t because she liked to eat. She has always eaten far less than me—bodies do weird things, and so do metabolisms, and some of us are just always going to be naturally shaped differently than the norm.

Kellie had sensory issues which made it hard for her to eat many different types of food. She was very grossed-out by a long list of things. As we grew up and I got better and better at cooking, of course that meant that the foods I became more and more skilled at preparing were the ones that she liked most. She expanded her palate too, it wasn’t only one-sided. I’ve developed all kinds of cooking abilities (though I don’t think I’m that special in the kitchen).

It probably started out with me cooking so much because of how poor we were when we first got together. I’ve told this story many times over the years, but a staple of our early dinners was Hamburger Helper without the meat (because that’s what we could afford). Cheap pasta dinners! But that was thirty years ago, and we’ve gained more financial stability as we’ve aged, thankfully. We’ve gone on all kinds of culinary adventures over the years.

And yet, even as I’ve driven very long distances for a specific restaurant, or gone out of my way to find one perfect sandwich or whatever, even as we’ve increased our income level significantly, Kellie’s food preferences have remained pretty static: she has told me throughout my entire life that her favorite food is anything I’ve cooked for her. I could buy her a $50 steak, and she would still reminisce about the last steak I made for her and how it was way better.

That was a mixed bag, right? Because I like when other people cook for me, but she liked when I cooked for her. It feels good to have something you do well, and one of the strongest ways I have always expressed my love for Kellie is through the things I have done to care for her.

You don’t even know how many cookbooks I’ve got, or how many kitchen gadgets are in my house. And those things are sometimes a point of humor for people who come over and see the shelves, or try to help organize them (as my parents and Jessie have both done in recent months). I get it, I have lots of food-related stuff.

But none of that is because food is my life—it’s all because KELLIE was my life. And now she’s gone, which has meant that cooking hasn’t really been a part of my life either.

Don’t think that I don’t love a good meal—I sure do—but cooking a meal for myself doesn’t give me the pleasure that making Thanksgiving dinner for Kellie once did. Or even an omelet. Or a bagel, for that matter. I cannot get motivated enough to cook, and I eat whatever random thing I can access when I get hungry.

I know that’s not physically healthy for me, but the task ahead of me in this season of my life is not necessarily about maintaining a good diet—it’s much more about being healthy on an emotional and mental level. I will eventually put effort into WHAT I eat again, but for now it just doesn’t feel worth the effort.

So many weeks had gone by without me cooking anything much. Last week, I did buy a few ingredients and cooked a meal or two. This week, same. I want to feel that I’m worth the time and effort and money that it takes to make a fancy meal, but at this point I just don’t. Maybe that’ll change someday. Who knows?

To me, food is about love and community and connection, and about an act of service and about the experience of eating and about the kind of care you put into a super good collection of ingredients that comes together in an almost magical, perfect, beautiful way.

Just add one more thing to the list of what’s been taken from me over these past sixteen weeks. Yes, I’m about to mark four months since she died. I wouldn’t say I’m doing well, but I’m doing a lot better than I was four months ago. I’ve been feeling lonely this past week, but got to spend more than four hours with a friend today. That made me feel so much better, weirdly (weirdly because I’m such a strong introvert, and I’m not used to needing people like I apparently now do). She hugged me when she walked in, and I realized that I haven’t touched another human being since my parents left two weeks ago. That made me very sad, for just a second, before I told her how wonderful it was to receive that hug.

The thing that made me cry during lunch was talking with my friend about how I found a bookmark last night when I was sorting books on one of my many bookshelves. It was a bookmark that Kellie bought me for Christmas a few years ago—I had started reading something and promptly forgot about both the book and the bookmark until last night. That started me down the path of how Kellie bought me the most incredible presents ever. Which made me realize that I’m never going to get another gift from her. Telling that story to my friend made me incredibly emotional. But of course it did. And all over this bookmark. But back to touch:

I’ve just never been one to touch my friends. Part of that is probably due to my professional boundaries—I’m not hugging or shaking hands with my students, I don’t typically do either of those things with my clients, and all of that is also an attempt for me to not make anyone feel pressured when they’re around me. That’s probably related to me not wanting to exert my privilege as a man in a world full of instances where men have abused those in their circles. Most of my friends have always been women, because I feel far more comfortable when I’m as far as possible from male-coded activities and behaviors. And since I don’t want to freak out my friends, I’m just not going to ever default to going in for a hug. Being creepy is not a vibe I’m going for.

Now that Kellie’s gone, I miss human touch more than I would ever have imagined before I was a widower. It’s not a sexual thing, it’s a human presence thing. I saw someone online today reminiscing about just how sad they were that nobody is ever going to scratch their back for them, and it made me cry for longer than I would have liked. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to wake up with someone hugging you in their sleep. Or what it feels like to have someone pat your shoulder as you walk past. Or what it feels like to have someone straighten your collar, or wipe a crumb off your shirt that you hadn’t noticed. The complete lack of those things feels pretty awful sometimes.

I’ve seen both widows and widowers talk about how they’ve hired sex workers to just cuddle or take a nap with them (or hired professional cuddlers, in bigger cities), and that feels like a bad idea for me. So I’m not ever going that route (FYI).

My experience with that hug (well, two—she also hugged me later on) inspired me to be brave and do more research on local massage therapists who have history with therapeutic touch and who might be trauma-informed. Remember, lots of the new systems I’m trying to set up in my life are all in the service of sustainability for the long-term. I need to be able to experience some kind of human touch if I want to feel less isolated and less alone. Who knows, maybe semi-regular massage would help? I’ll let you know how that experiment evolves over time.

I’m done with all of my grading for this summer semester. That’s a real weight off my shoulders (as it always is). It’s also always sad for me to see these students move to the next stage in their academic careers, but I’ll see them again down the road. For now, I have lots of work to do to get ready for the fall semester.

Thanks for reading. Appreciate what you have while you have it, okay?

XOXO,

Matt