The Bitter and the Sweet

The first time I saw a cocoa orchard my husband and I were living on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Miles from the city center, the trees clung to the hills, their trunks speckled with tiny pink and white flowers until the red and yellow fruit pods appeared resembling loose teeth in a kindergartener’s smile. On one of my tours of the Ivorian countryside, our guide stopped at a village with a boulangerie where I could smell smoke from a roaster long before I heard the rollers cracking and grinding the cocoa seeds, which had been plucked from the white flesh of the fruit.

“Qu’est ce que tu veux?” asked the woman behind the display of gâteaux and bonbons. I chose a chocolate croissant. The pastry was buttery and light. At its center the chocolate was tart, bitter like the last cup of coffee in the pot, with a sweet finish. The sharp taste reminded me of dark Frangos, the special occasion candy from my childhood, and one of my mother’s favorites. “Good chocolate is like a good life,” she once told me as she removed the accordion paper cup from the green box and shared a piece with me. “A mixture of bitter and sweet.”

* * *

My mother tasted bitterness at a young age. When she was eleven, her grandmother, who lived with her family, died. Less than a year later, my mother’s fourteen-year-old sister, Flora Ann, died. The third blow came the following year, when her father died.

At his funeral no one cried. There were no tears left.

I had seen death before: a bird fallen from its nest, possums and raccoons on the highway, the fireflies we’d trapped in pickle jars at dusk whose lights sputtered out by bedtime. The first time I understood the shock of loss was when I was fourteen and attended my first funeral. My mother had tried to prepare me and my two siblings for Aunt Lucille’s homegoing by describing what would take place.

“First, we’ll go to Aunt Lucille’s church. The service will be a little longer than Mass. Then we’ll go back to the house and help set out all the food. There’ll be ham and fried chicken with all your favorites. Lots of desserts too but you only get to have some of that if you’re good and sit still at church.”

My mother said Aunt Lucille would look like she was asleep.

She didn’t.

She lay, wearing a sky-blue dress and earrings, in a shiny maple-colored wooden box with handles, lined with white satin. During the viewing, I remembered how the smell of menthol cigarettes had coated Aunt Lucille’s hugs. That scent was gone, replaced by one that called to mind the science lab at school. Aunt Lucille wasn’t bloody or broken, but she wasn’t asleep either. She looked empty - devoid of laughter and love.

* * *

My mother was empty before she died. The light in her dimmed as she forgot my birthday, then my name, until, at the end she had no idea who I was. Her body caught up with her spirit one December morning, the Monday after Christmas. She had stopped taking in any kind of sustenance on Saturday; my siblings and I knew it was the end. We stayed at her bedside Sunday evening, sliding ice chips along her lips, holding her hand, rubbing her feet, reminiscing, and praying. As the earth tilted from night into day, she passed away.

We decided to hold the services after New Year’s Day. It would have been risky to bury my mother during a Chicago winter, with the ground a dark block of ice too hard to cut through for a six-foot long hole. We soon learned that she had requested cremation. Perhaps she wanted to spare her children and grandchildren the pain of watching a maple-colored wooden box descend into muddy snow.

* * *

My mother’s passing triggered in me what I call the ‘Grief Diet’. Without her I was empty. Food slipped through my body like tears down a shaft.

The first ten pounds disappeared within weeks after the funeral. I welcomed the loss. I had always wanted to lose ten pounds without exercising or changing my eating habits. By March, my mother’s birthday month, I had lost another ten pounds. With my newly shrunken frame, I could fit into those clothes stored in the back of my closet in the hope that I could wear them again one day. They were so unfashionable that I sent them to Goodwill.

I have a small build. On my driver’s license it reads 5’4” and 130 pounds, so losing 20 pounds in six weeks was striking, and alarming, to everyone except me.

I was too sad to care.

My outdoor friends suggested walks to lift my spirits and stimulate my appetite. They deemed interaction with nature in any season the cure for all ills. I treat nature, particularly in the winter, like animals at the zoo — interesting to view from behind glass. Still, I trudged along the trail with our dog, Lizzie, in tow, so as not to hurt their feelings.

On those outings they offered advice, reassuring me, and themselves, that my weight loss wasn’t an unusual response to grief.

“There is no one way to grieve. However you do it is the right way for you,” said Nancy.

“You are going to miss her every day. Every. Day. Do not beat yourself up about getting over it because you will never get over it,” said Mary, whose mother had died three years before.

“The first six months are the hardest,” said Michelle. Her mother had been gone for 25 years.

The best advice came from a minister. “The depth of your grief is a reflection of the depth of your love,” she said. “Embrace both.”

My indoor friends invited me out to eat. We’d meet for coffee where I picked at the chocolate donut with sprinkles. At a variety of chain restaurants, I tried to bulk up on carbs by ordering a short stack of pancakes for breakfast, or ravioli for lunch. I nibbled on the food until a memory of meals with my mother floated before me, and a cloud of despair enveloped me, like the dirt that follows the Peanuts character, PigPen. Then I’d push my plate away signaling to the server that I would take the remainder to go, dooming the Styrofoam carton to sit in the refrigerator for a few days before I threw it and its contents away.

I cooked dinner for my family, daily, and did not pretend that chopping onions triggered my tears. “I’m sad,” I explained to my children as I wiped my eyes. “I’m just so sad.” Unbeknownst to me, my husband had warned them that I would act strangely and cry unexpectedly.

“I miss grandma too,” they’d reply, giving me a tentative hug.

I sat at the table with them, my plate a small collection of small portions from which I’d only take a bite, maybe two. My clothes hung on me like a sheet on a broomstick.

“Aren’t you hungry?” my oldest girl would ask.

“You’re not finished yet are you, Mommy?” the youngest would say as she cleared the table. I signaled with a nod that I was done and pushed away the dish for her to take to the sink.

I ate, but I didn’t taste anything. I didn’t want anything, except my mother.

* * *

When my parents divorced, I felt as if my family had been on a train that without warning had reached the end of its line. Angry and hurt, I remember asking my mother how she’d survived losing so many members of her family without withdrawing from the world or slipping into depression or despair.

“I do that.” She smiled at my surprise. “Sometimes.”

She looked pass me into her past. “I miss Dearie, and Flora Ann and Daddy, everyone who’s gone before. I always will. I miss the times when they were here.” Her gaze shifted back to me, “I miss being young and beautiful,” she stopped me before I contradicted her, “not just young for my age. I miss the times when you all were babies. I miss being married.” She chuckled. “On very rare occasions.”

She handed me a tissue so I could wipe away my tears.

“Angie,” she sighed.

She continued in her teacher-voice, the one resonant with understanding and compassion, along with a tinge of impatience that she had to repeat this lesson. “Life is full of bitter, and sweet. When I’m depressed, I force myself to remember that there’s both. Everybody gets some of both.”

* * *

One week after my first Mother’s Day without my mother, my husband was packing for a business meeting in Chicago. In the past five months, I had lost a total of 28 pounds.

As he folded up his ties he said, “You’re thin enough. I really want you to try to eat something.”

“I’m not as skinny as I was when we got married,” I said with a forced smile.

“And you aren’t supposed to be.” He zipped his bag.

“Eric, you know I eat.” I protested. “You’ve seen me eating.”

He hugged me with a tight squeeze. “Please. I’m worried about you.”

“I miss my Mommy,” I whispered, tears welling up yet again.

“I know, but she would want for you to eat.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll be back on Friday.”

He returned from his trip to find me on the couch in front of the television, surrounded by a wad of crumpled tissues. LA Confidential was on. My mother and I had seen it together when it had been in theaters. Eric rolled his suitcase into the den, and then carried over the trashcan from across the room. I shoved the dirty tissue pile into the basket clearing a space for him to sit.

“I brought you something,” he said.

I gave him a weak smile.

He opened his suitcase and pulled out one of those immediately recognizable spinach green boxes - Frango mints, from the department store I will forever remember as Marshall Fields. In 1999, Field’s stopped making the candies in the kitchens on the top floor of its flagship store on State Street; Field’s became Macy’s in 2005; Frango mints and its derivatives are now available online. The sight of that box - knowing it was bought in Chicago - cleared the dust of my sorrow like a prairie wind. The image in my head of that frail, withered woman with the dementia stare, unable to speak, dissolved into the smart, strong, courageous woman who was my mother.

My husband lifted the top off of the box of candy. Like a parent spooning medicine to a sick child, he said, “Open your mouth.”

The chocolate melted on my tongue. I tasted the flavors of rich buttercream, cool mint, and bitterness mixed with sweet.

I tasted it. I tasted it and reached for another.

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