Elizabeth Fritzler - I Don’t Like Lima Beans

 

So, I work as a personal chef. And during the pandemic, I was still relatively green in my three-year-old business. And normally, I cook in people's houses, but it turns out that nobody really wants you in your house when there's COVID afoot. So, one day I got an email from this lady asking if I could cook for her 80-year-old diabetic father and his live-in girlfriend. But she wanted me to cook the meals in my house and deliver them. Normally, I would have turned this sort of thing down, but I was desperate for the business. We all know that desperation is the place from which all the best things come. [audience laughter] So, I agreed to it.

 

So, on the first meal delivery day, I walk into this very nice house in the suburbs, and there's a gaunt man in a wheelchair waiting for me in the hallway. He introduces himself as Jim. Both of his legs have been amputated, so his thighs are wrapped heavily in bandages. He has thick glasses and swollen, purple, infected fingers. So, it's clear to me that the diabetes is very advanced, really taking a toll on his health. So, he says, "What did you cook for us today?" I start listing off the meals, stuff that's healthy. I get to the word salmon, and he gets this disgusted look on his face and he goes, "Ugh, that one's going to be a loser. [audience laughter] I don't like salmon." Now, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to feedback about my meals, okay? But saying, "That one's going to be a loser" right off the bat, [audience laughter] it does seem a little harsh.

 

However, I realized that I probably needed to temper my expectations about this man's diet. He had probably been eating a diet of canned vegetables and meatloaf from the black-eyed pea for his whole life, and I needed to figure out what else I could cook for him. This also made me think of people like my 92-year-old grandpa, who will not eat my mom's Thanksgiving turkey, because she uses herbs and he "doesn't want all that green shit on the turkey." [audience laughter] So, spectacularly, they did not fire me. But Jim was impossible to please, extremely picky. I had an agonizing time trying to figure out what I was going to cook for him every week.

 

But after a month, his daughter actually emailed me to tell me that the meal service was going quite well. Shocker. [audience laughter] I stuck with it. So, one day, I'm standing outside in the driveway with Jim and I ask him how he liked the fried rice that I had made for him the previous week. And he goes, "I don't like lima beans." I was like, “Lima beans? What are you talking about? I've never cooked lima beans in my life, let alone put them in a fried rice. What?” But then, he said something that gave me pause. He said, "I don't like a lot of things, but it's okay. We'll get there."

 

And the phrase "We'll get there" threw me off, struck me as odd, because I wasn't sure whether he meant get there in terms of getting to a perfect meal plan, or if he meant get there in terms of getting physically well again. And then, it occurred to me that maybe Jim didn't realize that he was dying, [sighs] even though his daughter had basically told me as much. And then, I thought about sitting with my grandma right before she passed, and how I was sitting at the edge of her nursing home bed, and she looked me in the eyes and she asked me if she was dying. And I said, "I don't know, Grandma. What do you think?" And she said, "I think I am." And I said, "Are you okay with that?" And she said, "Yes."

 

And in that moment, I had the privilege of watching my grandma move from denial to acceptance about her death. It was the last conversation that I had with her. And so, there in the driveway with Jim, I was thinking about this dichotomy between denial and acceptance when it comes to love and to death. I thought that maybe this meal service was more for Jim's daughter than for Jim, that maybe she thought that she could just prolong her dad's life a little bit longer by feeding him better food, and she wouldn't have to face his death quite so soon. Because the hardest thing about love, is that it will, in the end, be lost. 

 

And so, a few weeks later, I was packing up the meals to deliver to Jim and I texted his girlfriend to let her know that I was running late. But she texted back that Jim had actually passed away the day before. And I was in shock. I was standing there in my kitchen with all these ready-made meals and nowhere to put them. I really hoped in that moment that Jim's daughter had a chance to move to acceptance about her father's death, just like I had with my grandma. I haven't had any more difficult clients quite like Jim since then. But that man did tell me and teach me how to face criticism and how to stay grounded in the face of nonsensical comments about things like lima beans. [audience laughter] But for whatever it's worth, those green things in the fried rice were edamame soybeans, [audience laughter] not lima beans. Thank you.