Tomatoes, Custard and leftover pizza

In grief, food has become a way of remembering them.

At school, I got quite a lot of stick for being chubby and for living in a bright pink house on a bit of a rough and tumble housing estate.  

Food became a friend. It was something on which I could rely. It kept me safe. The rush of sugar from my secret stash of contraband became my secret coping mechanism.

Fast forward to now and I am such a foodie. I mean, it can sometimes be my sometimes-toxic friend but mainly my relationship with food now is one of complete joy. A terrible at times cook, I LOVE to eat.

But the role of food in grief hasn’t been lost on me, and especially as we approach Christmas.

The nostalgia it brings (eating trifle for breakfast on my mum’s birthday because she always said if she could, she’d eat trifle for breakfast every day) and the way that I won’t allow myself to eat a meringue nest with fresh cream from Morrisons anymore, as it was something me and mum used to do after every shopping trip. I don’t want it if she isn’t here to enjoy it.  I strangely feel different about the trifle.

My dad died just months after my mum. But the moments in between her sudden death in the summer of 2018, and his death early 2019, I define in ‘food’ moments. Desperate to get him to eat something, he always wanted me to eat it with him and I lovingly agreed. I got quite fat over those weeks. Custard for dinner? That’s fine dad, I can do that. A Greggs Pasty on the way to Wales. His first ever latte. The soup I made for him that he gobbled up with delight. I even shared a photo of a birthday cake he made me on twitter, and it went viral, because it was an act of love and that’s the sort of crazy arsed stuff that happens to me.

But mainly, I remember the custard. We sat together on the sofa, eating our sickly bowls of yellow nectar, the TV blaring. The absence of my suddenly gone mum and his adored wife burning down on our broken hearts. We sat in silence, slurping the custard.

Whenever I was ill, my mum would cook me smoked bacon and tomatoes. I don’t know why she added the word ‘smoked’ – I think perhaps to make it sound posher. She would slowly cook bacon in a little water, sliced tomatoes, puree, salt and pepper. If you simmer it for long enough, it goes into a thick salty sauce. She would add chilli powder and serve it with tiger loaf and butter. It was comfort food in a bowl. Dad made it too but never quite as good as mum did. I have never tasted it anywhere else. Mum showed me how to make it. Now they are both gone, sometimes, when the pain of missing them becomes too hard to bear, I make myself a bowl of it. For a moment they are back with me and I with them.

The nostalgia of it all, the way the sweetness of the tomatoes and saltiness of the bacon pair together so brilliantly, sooths me. I have made myself this dish at three in the morning, when the anxiety and panic of loss is too great. I made it the first Christmas without mum, when dad was still alive. We ate it in comfortable silence at 5.25am on Christmas Day, whilst saying nothing. The only noise our slurps. When I recently came home from several months in hospital, the weight of the sudden loss of my brother still pushing down on me, I made it then.  

Food and grief really are linked. I always think of me and my brother, when he was staying with me, heading for a cheeky kebab. I live in a place full of beautiful restaurants, but a kebab was our go to!

Dad’s final meal was a ham and pineapple pizza. He had been in hospital for weeks. He hated the food. He was dying slowly in front of us. He was bruised all over, his tracing paper skin cracking at the tiniest of movement. On the day that was to be his last, he fancied a pizza. I was already on the way to the hospital when he called me asking for it. It was dark and snowing. The traffic was awful. I found a pizza shop and waited in the snow for 20 minutes whilst the man cooked it for me. ‘He wants loads of pineapple on it’ I said. The man nodded. He didn’t know he was cooking my dad his final meal and I didn’t know I was ordering it. It was just another pizza to him. One of hundreds. I didn’t know dad liked pineapple on his pizza. It was one of the last things I learned about him.

That twenty-minute delay meant I was with my dad when he died, as I stayed longer than usual. I am glad it took the man so long to cook it.

Dad ate the pizza. He enjoyed it but it was too much. He gave some to the nurse who was just going off shift. ‘I will eat that when I get home’ he said to dad, gratefully. I often think of that nurse. Imagining him in his kitchen, heating up the pizza, not knowing dad was already dead by this time. Or maybe, he took it out of politeness. binned it in the hospital rubbish on his way out?  I think about that a lot. The leftover pizza. I felt an affinity with it after dad died. Both my parents gone. I felt like I was leftover. What do I do with this version of me now?

As a single woman, I had a good life. A job I loved and friends and family I adore. But the intensity of the grief of mum, whilst caring for my already sick dad had left me feeling wrung out.

Just before dad died. I hit the hospital buzzer and all these doctors appeared. They tried to save him. They pushed me aside. I didn’t want his last touch to be from a stranger, so I held on to his big toe. It was all I could reach. I held his toe. I was there as his piggy went to market. I was there when he died.

Dad became internet famous after my mum died, for making me a birthday cake. I put a photo of it on twitter with a caption about dad and grief. It went viral. It’s now a meme. That is weird, isn’t it?

At grief group, I met a woman who lost her husband after he had a heart attack after eating a pickled egg. She cannot stomach eggs or vinegar anymore – ‘especially not together’ she told me, stifling a sad giggle. I had never thought eggs and vinegar went together anyway; I replied.

It’s been six years since my mum and dad died, and ten months since my brother died.

Food is still something that I turn to in my grief. When I am homesick for them, I make things they used to make me. The bacon and tomatoes dish, or cheese and pickle sandwiches on cheap white bread, or I wander up the road to the kebab shop. .

But new traditions have come in. My godchildren love my ‘tomato broth’ that I make, from my mum’s weird tomato recipe. I have pineapple on all my pizza’s now, like a little nod to my dad and our final moment together – food connecting us. My new life, by the coast, full of friends and meals out and moments of joy I never thought I would find again, but I still add pineapple to my pizza.

As Christmas approaches, I think about the way my parents and brother would celebrate. It was always with lovely food. When mum died, her brother-in-law said he would always remember her apple pies the size of dustbin lids. She would’ve loved that tribute. My niece and nephew still talk about Grandad’s meat pies he used to make them.

Maybe, in time, I will feel able to eat the fresh cream meringue again. I don’t think she would have stopped eating them if it had been me who died. She wasn’t as sentimental as me, I don’t think. Who knows? She would sometimes eat Glace Cherries from the jar, stood at the fridge, as they reminded her of her mum, so perhaps, maybe she was.