By Deirdre Good
The quiche was a disaster–the egg and cheese filling lay flat on the pastry instead of rising to a melting egg mixture. Everyone around the lunch table– my parents, my cousin and my aunt– ate it politely over conversation. I’ve eaten the quiches they’ve baked and there was just no comparison. And it was meant to be something easy for my father to eat after the cancerous part of his jaw was replaced with titanium plate. He’d only been out of hospital a week.
Fortunately, it wasn’t the only meal we ate together celebrating this new incarnation of our family life. No one had known how the surgery would go. Would my father be able to speak or eat? I’d arrived only a few days earlier to discover that Dad had been surviving on vegetable soups and anything soft Mum could think of making. Mum’s favorite foods are leftovers, so I set about trying to generate some. I made a fish pie that night.
My aunt was anxious to see her older brother so she and her elder daughter drove across Southern England for a visit. After tea in the garden, the three of us went for a walk. The sky was blue and the sun shone. We enjoyed clear views on a cliff walk looking out to sea, down to the Roman fort of Reculver, and across the Isle of Thanet as far as Richborough. We heard a skylark. We talked and laughed and rejoiced in being alive. And then we sat down to dinner.
When you live on the other side of the ocean from your family, such mealtimes seem miraculous, even sacramental. My father was recovering. He could speak and eat and he even looked like himself although some facial swelling was obvious. My mother had coped with the surgery, the daily hospital visits for a fortnight, and the daily phone calls updating family and friends. Both of them had survived the ups and downs of the British health care system. One letter notifying them of an appointment arrived on the day of the appointment; another letter confirming an appointment failed to mention where. They went to the office from which the letter was sent only to find that it was at a different hospital (45 minutes closer to home). Having driven further away, they then had to drive at breakneck speed back to the place where the doctor actually was so they could see him before the office closed for a 3-day weekend. And on the day originally scheduled for surgery, after he had exhausted himself shaving off his own extensive beard, the surgeon told my father in the late morning that there was no bed for him in the ICU so the surgery would have to be postponed for a week. The cancer kept on growing. Given all of this, my parents were doing very well.
Over dinner with my aunt and cousin, my mother retold the story of how my father’s cancer had come about. He’d had a tooth extracted in February. There had seemed to be an abscess under the tooth and the dentist had prescribed antibiotics. Since they had no apparent effect, the dentist then extracted an adjacent tooth and followed this with two equally ineffective courses of antibiotics. Sometime after that, a mass began to grow on his lower jaw where the first tooth had been. By the beginning of May, he’d been referred by his doctor to a specialist and by mid-May, he’d been given a date for maxillo-facial surgery. My father added his own commentary in slurred but understandable speech.
I’m so grateful that my father is still alive and that I’ve seen him. I wish I could be nearer to be of help to my mother. To take communion with them both the first time Dad went back to the local parish church was extraordinary. The last thing my father said to me when I called them from the airport was “When can you come back?” As for quiche, it turns out that it is my niece’s new favorite food. When she and her parents come to drop her off for a fortnight’s holiday in Maine next week, I plan to have baked one for our first meal together. By the end of her stay I hope to do it blindfold. That way I’ll be able to make an edible one on the next visit to my father. Of course, by then, he may be ready for steak!
Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. An American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and keeps the blog On Not Being a Sausage.