a day ago
My Dad's Freezer Is Like a Time Capsule. Inside, It's All Love.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
In May 2020, when my father was 73 and I was 36, he sent me one of his trademark emails. My father loved his iPad but hadn't learned to text. His signature move was writing a majority of the total words in the subject line rather than in the body of the email.
The subject line that landed in my inbox on a Sunday at 9:21 p.m. read: I bought a pork chop for each of us. You can have tomorrow or whenever.
The body of the email read: Drive carefully. When do you plan to leave Cleveland? Daddy
At the time, my wife, Sarah, was finishing her medical residency at the Cleveland Clinic, so I spent many Monday mornings driving at the crack of dawn from Cleveland back to our home in Cincinnati, where I worked during the week, and where my parents also lived.
My father was significantly more carnivorous than my mother. By the time I was an adult, if my father purchased and cooked a rib-eye steak for dinner, my mother was more likely to eat leftover vegetarian spaghetti, or, if she ate meat, it would be an overcooked chicken breast. This meant that when my father wanted a partner in red meat consumption, I was usually his first call. It was an invitation I was happy to accept.
I forgot to reply immediately to his initial note and instead, two days later, sent him a new email with the entirety of my message in the subject line: Call about pork chop, I wrote to him. That was all. Yes, clearly, I am my father's son.
My dad loved to eat. He loved to think about food. He loved to talk about food. He loved to share meals. His best place was around the kitchen table—his or yours—where he would do all he could to ensure that both the food and the conversation were delicious.
That probably helps explain why, in March 2021, when my mother, my sisters, and I were sitting around my father's deathbed in the intensive care unit, we felt comfortable admitting to each other that we were hungry. My dad had been diagnosed just a week earlier with an advanced form of liver cancer and was now receiving 'comfort care' in the form of a morphine drip, which caused him to appear as though he were taking a peaceful nap.
On that final morning, my mom, my sisters, and I had skipped breakfast to rush to the hospital and say our goodbyes. By around 1 p.m., we agreed that, of all people, our dad would strongly concur that no situation should preclude considerations of food. We had cried up an appetite, and there was a Chipotle two blocks away.
My sister Curtis said there was the movie version of death, and then there was its untidy reality. Curtis said if he died during the brief time that she would be gone picking up our Chipotle order, it would not haunt her. Twenty minutes later, she returned, as my father continued his gentle breathing.
When he died, at 3:25 that afternoon, one of the things that immediately made me saddest to think about was that he and I would never share another meal.
That night, my sisters and I wrote an obituary, which we concluded by telling friends and family that among the ways they could honor our dad was 'calling someone you haven't spoken to in a while, or eating an extremely large piece of cheddar cheese.'
Three months later, my wife finished her medical residency, and we began living in Cincinnati full time. Sarah and I had bought my parents' house from them two and a half years earlier, but because we'd been constantly back and forth between two cities during that time, we didn't consider ourselves fully moved in until our family—including our then-2-year-old son George—was under a single roof.
While my parents had removed 97 percent of their belongings, that still meant that 3 percent of their stuff remained in the house—and 3 percent of stuff accumulated over 35 years of living in a house is not insignificant. In various closets, bookshelves, and nooks and crannies, there were pieces of Christmas-themed folk art from the 1970s; Laura Ashley dresses from the 1980s; and old issues of the New Yorker from the 1990s.
During my, Sarah's, and George's first weekend home—which also happened to be Father's Day weekend, and what would have been my parents' 51st wedding anniversary—while inventorying the contents of the freezer in the basement, I noticed a circular red tin. The label on the outside said Caroline's Cakes.
Standing in our cold, cobwebby, unfinished basement, I remembered that I'd tasted a Caroline's seven-layer caramel cake once before, and that it was decadent and delicious. Then I thought that the cake had surely been purchased by my father.
How old is this cake? I wondered. Is it still edible? The cake dated back at least two and a half years, to when the house had still belonged to my parents, though it was likely older than that. My mother-in-law, Debbie, was in town helping us unpack, and she said that if the cake looked and smelled OK, she thought I could give it a try.
When I removed it from the tin and split open the plastic wrapping, it appeared pristine. I cut into it, and its interior also appeared perfectly preserved. Yes, I considered the potential GI risks, but eating the cake felt right. Not only was this cake my father's, but I was certain that if he'd been in my position, he would never have voluntarily passed on a piece of Caroline's seven-layer caramel cake, no matter how long its tenure in the freezer.
As it turned out, the cake was delicious, and my stomach and I were none the worse after consuming it. Sarah, Debbie, and George all sampled the cake too. Since we didn't yet have a kitchen table, we sat at our dining room table—in a room where I'd watched my father preside over hundreds of festive dinner parties. After we'd each taken a few bites, it occurred to me that while my wife, son, and mother-in-law had been engaged in the act of eating dessert, what I'd really been doing while chewing was thinking about my dad, picturing how he always looked like a giddy little kid whenever he was indulging in a food he loved. The whole episode felt like I'd tapped into an unexpected way of saying, I love you, Daddy, and I miss you.
Just as my dad had left food in my freezer, he'd left it in the freezer he shared with my mom. Characteristically, my mom suggested that I take my dad's handful of remaining pork chops and slab of ribs.
Over the next year, every few months, I would turn the oven to 350 degrees and heat up one of the pork chops. A similar dynamic existed between Sarah and me as had between my father and mother: Sarah wasn't going to stop me from eating a juicy, fatty, oversized pork chop of unclear vintage, but she had zero interest in consuming one herself.
I would sit at our dining room table, usually with Sarah and George, but sometimes by myself, and right after saying our nightly grace, I'd ad-lib an extra line—'Thanks for dinner tonight, Daddy'—before cheerfully devouring the pork chop. I'd imagine my dad sitting there with me, both of us taking big bites, remarking on how tasty it was, and bantering about life.
Immediately after my dad had died, he was so present to me and it was easy to conjure his voice, to picture his every expression. But the more time passed, the more effort it took, and the more I wanted and appreciated tangible connections to him. There was something poignant about knowing that this particular frozen pork chop was one that my father—when he was here among us, still full of life and appetite—had laid eyes on, had chosen, had held in his hand, and had been excited to eat as part of some future meal.
And then, in the autumn of 2022, a year and a half after my father had died, I defrosted what I believe was his last gift, a slab of frozen ribs. While I certainly might still find, say, a tucked-away 6-year-old Klondike bar sometime in the future, as far as I can tell, those ribs represented a farewell, the end of an 18-month stretch of my father posthumously continuing to nourish me. As someone who has always eaten too quickly, I slowed down while eating those ribs—an instinctive reaction, to fend off what felt like a second goodbye. Just as food can help fuel meaningful moments, it can also contain a somber reminder: Cherished relationships, like good meals, eventually come to an end. Although it was a comparatively small loss, I was sad to have reached the end of my father's frozen food. If only for the number of bites it took to finish a pork chop, I could pretend we were sharing a meal together one more time.
