Funeral Baked Eats, or, What We Cooked When My Dad Died
From Baltimore to Kentucky and back again.
Behind the Counter with Babette is the blog portion of the Babette’s universe. I’m your host, Brittany Harrison, and this is where I post writing in my own voice.
the next morning and the dad-breakfast connection
My father dies shortly before midnight on January 20th, 2023.
The morning after, I wake up at 5 am. I am numb, which feels like a strange relief, not just from the searing grief I know will come, but from the shrill background anxiety of my normal existence. The worst has happened, or a piece of the worst. Nothing left to dread now. I turn to work and routine for something to do. I get up. I do yoga and load the dishwasher and soothe the dogs and feed the cats. I make breakfast biscuits: six egg and cheese, and six honey butter. I take food on a plate up to Robin's room and wake them up with a hot breakfast. My dad did this for me any time we were both under the same roof. He wasn’t a cook, as such, but he made the best bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit you ever ate in your life.
Megan makes me pommes de terre Cendrillon
My girlfriend sets off from her apartment in New Jersey that morning and reaches Baltimore before noon. I greet her with an itinerary. I’m so incredibly numb. Rather than make her guess how to make me feel better, I tell her that I want to get groceries and make some fancy French baked potatoes I saw in a YouTube video. Megan prepares pommes de terre Cendrillon for dinner that night, and we agree that it’s delicious, but not that much better than an ordinary twice baked potato. We have ice cream cake for dessert.
Dad had come through his shoulder replacement surgery successfully, only to die from a blood clot in his lungs less than 24 hours after he was discharged from the rehab hospital. My mother and I don’t talk on the 21st, although I send her pictures of our fancy potatoes. On the 22nd, I call her. It’s my 41st birthday. She tells me that she and my brother are eating the baked potato soup she had made to welcome my father home from the hospital.
numb that afternoon
The next few days run together. I'm surprised by everything, especially the passage of time. I have lunch at a local restaurant with the vibe of an indie Cracker Barrel, hoping to stay for awhile, but they’re closing in half an hour. The patty melt slaps.
I typically do all the cooking for the people in my house: me, my roommate Kim, her seventeen-year old offspring, Robin, and whichever of our friends or partners happen to be around at dinner time. A few days after my birthday, Kim asks me to make a casserole. I think about all the funeral casseroles I’ve ever eaten. I’ve been to so many funerals for so many elderly members of my extended family. I’ve never been to a funeral where I was this close to the dead person. Grandparents are different. I ask my mother if she’s gotten any casseroles from her neighbors, and she says she’s fending them off until she has an appetite again. I met all my neighbors in the early days of the pandemic when I was making masks on my sewing machine, but I don’t remember anyone’s names. In my own house, the only one who instinctively comforts people with food is me. I don’t really feel like cooking that night, but we all need to eat, so I make the casserole. Running to the bathroom at 3 am, I discover that I’ve developed a sensitivity to butternut squash.
the drive
Five days after my father’s death, my girlfriend heroically rents a car and drives me all nine-plus hours from Baltimore to Kentucky for the funeral. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons. Megan and I have been together for two years, but she only recently met my mother, and has never met any of my other relatives. We’re a same-sex couple, and my family is very conservative. I’m not that worried, but I’m concerned that Megan might be. (She tells me later that she was too nervous about handling a large rental SUV during a multistate roadtrip to be scared of meeting my family, which is relatable.)
I order Dominos pizza the night before we set out. On the way up, we get McDonald’s coffee and hashbrowns for breakfast, and Taco Bell for lunch. I haven’t eaten this much fast food in years but Megan is a Taco Bell noob, so I jump to recommend the chalupas. When we’re an hour away from my mother’s house in Berea, Mom texts to ask what we’re doing about dinner. I reassure her that there’s no need to cook. I know she’s tired when instead of arguing she just replies “okay”.
we try to take care of each other
My mother makes a Walmart run first thing the next morning, assembling a careful grocery list that encompasses all our needs, from hand lotion to yogurt to black dress socks. While she’s out, my brother bakes up a frozen breakfast pizza (biscuit crust, sausage gravy, cheesy eggs and sausage on top) that he bought for us himself, a significant gesture from a man who doesn’t cook. Throughout the day, we all take turns cooking for each other, preparing plates of crackers and cheese and sliced fruit, slicing veggies for quesadillas and omelets.
The days of waiting for the funeral run together. My mother has already made the arrangements, and there isn’t much left to do. Megan and I take long walks around my parents’ little neighborhood, just to be moving. One day we go into town and eat lunch at Boone Tavern, the local fancy restaurant that specializes in southern delicacies, like spoon bread and fried green tomatoes drizzled with pimento cheese. The next afternoon, we watch a video in which British people eat at Waffle House for the first time. Megan has never eaten at Waffle House. I insist we eat dinner there that very night. We have blueberry pecan waffles and hashbrowns, and Megan agrees that they slap.
That night, at my request, my mother makes banana pudding. I’m startled when she uses banana flavored pudding instead of vanilla. She made it differently when I was growing up. She tells me Dad liked it better with the banana pudding mix. I chalk this up to old age and dying taste buds.
funeral day
The night before the funeral, I remind everyone to be sure and eat in the morning, because there won’t be much time between the service and the interment to grab lunch. I proceed to eat only a small blueberry muffin, and find myself cranky and nauseous just before the funeral starts. My cousin Allison volunteers to find me some food and vanishes up the road to McDonald’s. I gnaw on a dry bagel my mother finds in her purse. Allison gets back with only seconds to spare with a cinnamon roll and a small cheeseburger.
The preacher leading the service is an old friend of my father’s, someone I know by name but have never met. I deliver a eulogy; a recording of me, singing “Wayfaring Stranger”, plays from the sound system. Then Ronnie comes to the pulpit. He tells stories about his friendship with my father when my father was an almost unrecognizably young man. Ronnie talks of being underfed and far from home, and of how his heart lifted when he entered my grandmother’s kitchen for the first time and witnessed the bounty of her dinner table. My grandmother died in 2002, and as he speaks I can taste her food: cornbread and ham, red-eye gravy and hominy and fried apple pies. Dying at 75, my father outlived his parents and all of his brothers and sisters. (He was the middle child of seven siblings.) He also outlived several nephews. Almost the entire house full of people I remember from annual Christmas visits as a child is gone now. Part of me wishes my parents hadn’t moved back here after they retired, as if that would have kept him alive for longer.
The drive to and from the cemetery is cold, grey, and eerie; an otherworldly fog blankets the landscape in all directions. Next to the military cemetery where my father’s ashes are interred there’s a farm with a barn and a field of cows. I think, Dad would love that. My mother tells me later that they had visited the cemetery together and Dad saw the cows for himself. For some reason, I find this knowledge soothing.
We gather at my aunt’s house to eat after it’s all over. I try to assume responsibility for the after-funeral meal1, but my aunt takes care of all the cleaning and organizing before I get there. My cousin Matt, a restaurant manager, helps as much as I’ll let him and remembers to buy the ingredients I forgot to ask for. I make bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits for 30 people, explaining that it was Dad’s signature dish. The only person he ever made it for was me, and his technique was refined over the years to suit my exact tastes in the matter of a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. The formula, if it can be reduced to that, is: scrambled egg, crispy bacon, melty American cheese, and grape or strawberry jam on the insides of the biscuit. The biscuits I make for my family don’t hold a candle, but how could they. My aunt contributes fresh fruit, coffee, and a dish of funeral potatoes to the meal, although she calls them breakfast potatoes and has never heard of another name.
After we’ve eaten, my cousins take me and Megan to a restaurant called The Saucy Crab. We sit in a corner booth in the deserted bar area, and Megan and my cousins nurse their drinks while I rant about the failures of the American healthcare system. I have my first-ever tequila sunrise.
last pipe
Megan and I have one full day left in Kentucky before we have to drive back east. My mother’s house is near the Kentucky Artisan Center, so Megan and I go there to buy presents. We each get an art print by the same artist; the old-timey backwoods spooky adventure vibe of the picture makes me think of my father, who would skip school as a kid for the joy of running around in the woods all by himself. There’s a cafe at the Artisan Center, but the vegetarian options are limited; we decide to go to Cracker Barrel with an option to come back for ice cream after.
At Cracker Barrel, we get hash brown casserole. Then I learn that Megan has never had dumplings. And of course, there are biscuits for the table. It’s a southern feast made up entirely of bread and potatoes in various forms. We decide to skip ice cream.
When we get back to my mother's house, we find that the neighbors have come by at long last with casseroles. One of the casseroles is called cheese pasta. It isn't called macaroni and cheese, we’re told, despite having no visible ingredients other than macaroni and cheese. There's a dish containing kale, quinoa, and spicy brown mustard, and another with baked apple dressing. Momentary confusion on Megan's part as we confirm that dressing equals stuffing. Mom wraps up the leftovers to send home with me. We leave for Baltimore in the morning; our alarms are set for five am.
That night, my mother and Megan and I watch Dial M for Murder on TV. We are very different people, but we all love a good Hitchcock movie. I then face a task I’ve put off to the last minute. I go out to the garage, where Dad had a small workshop. This isn’t where he died, but it’s where he fell off a ladder while putting the Christmas tree away on the evening of December 26th. I remember having an impulse to call my parents on the 26th, but that day I had tested positive with Covid for the first time, and I didn’t want to worry them. I’ve wondered since if my doing so could have saved him somehow. I lay down on the concrete floor of the garage in the approximate spot where he would have landed, and I stare at the ceiling. He fell twice, actually; trying to ignore the pain of his broken shoulder made him pass out a few hours after he fell from the ladder. His nose was broken, along with his shoulders and wrist. I think I see a small bloodstain on the floor next to me. Finally, it’s too cold to stay down there any longer, and I go sit on my father’s folding chair, next to the propane heater, which I’m too scared to try and light. Two months ago, I was sitting in the chair opposite his, and we were smoking from the same pipe. He made his pipes himself with a wood lathe. The last time I saw him, in November, he told me the wood came from the remnants of a 300 year old white oak tree cut down on his friend Jerry’s land. I sit there for a minute, and then I start putting odds and ends in a small box: a red toy truck, replica of the 57 Chevy he restored over the course of a decade; the softball I’d written my name on in 4th grade; rocks that look like uncut gemstones. I take every pipe I can find, including the unfinished pieces with his pencil marks showing where the cuts would go.
In the corner of the garage, in the cabinet where my mother keeps her baking supplies, I find the last of my father's pipes hidden in the drawer, along with his tiny weed stash. I cry for awhile, then I smoke it.
going home
The next morning, Mom gets up when Megan and I do and puts cinnamon rolls in the oven to bake while we shower and pack. I'm going home laden with food, leftover cinnamon rolls included. I know it’s my mother’s way of trying to take care of me from a distance. I have similar instincts when it comes to food and people I love.
Starbucks—any coffee shops—are thin on the ground in east-central Kentucky, at least by coastal standards. We get McDonalds coffee on the way out and Taco Bell for lunch. After ten hours of driving, we finally get back to Baltimore and order General Tso’s tofu for dinner.
When I was in Kentucky for a week in November, there was a shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that killed five people. My dad and I had our first and only conversation about my being queer after we saw the news report. He asserted that it—my queerness—“didn’t matter”. I said that it mattered an awful lot to some people, meaning the shooter. He was quiet for a couple of seconds, then pulled a roll of folding pocket knives out of a drawer and told me to take as many as I liked. I took a few then. When I went back after the funeral, I took the rest.
Just before bed, I knock on Robin’s door to hand over a sack of candy from Cracker Barrel, and a stuffed hedgehog with a quilted belly from the Kentucky Artisan Center. Then I show them the knives and offer them a selection. They take two.
since then
Megan and I go out for breakfast the next morning. We get egg and hash skillets, mine with bacon and cheese and a pancake, hers with avocado and black beans. She leaves soon after we eat. Her cat is boarding at a pet hotel, and she has work the next day. We hug on the sidewalk for a long time, and then I'm alone.
My father is still dead.
At home I have pudding mix and sacks of beans and cans of peaches and tomatoes, but when it comes time for dinner, I don’t feel like making anything, so I warm up some of the leftover funeral casserole. I freeze the rest, for the future.
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I don’t know if there’s a name for this, but I made the mistake of watching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet the day after my father died, and so the whole week my brain kept pushing the phrase “Funeral Baked Eats” at me until I surrendered to the inevitable.
Love “old age and dying taste buds “ 😂