I always thought that I would write an obituary for my mother, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Joan Farrell McArdle was only 78 when she died last week after a short illness, holding the hands of both her daughters. We had no warning that the end was upon us until it was almost there; a week earlier, she had been planning her garden and what she would cook when she got home from the hospital.
So I had not prepared myself for the problem that afflicts any writer in similar grief: How do you describe your mother to someone who hasn’t met her without resorting to cliches — her warmth, her smile, her infectious laugh, her steadfast love? These things are true, but they are not special; the specialness lay in the fact that they were her smile, her laugh, her love. For once, I found myself at a loss for words.
Instead, in the week following her death, I have polished copper. Two of my mother’s great passions were cooking and antiques, and they united in some 40 pieces of copper cookware, acquired over decades.
The first pieces she bought new at Zabar’s when she was a young housewife from a little canal town in Western New York, figuring out who to be now that she lived on the Upper West Side. One answer was “fancy cook.” It wasn’t the only one — she also made our co-op into her little village, and when her daughters were older she became a real estate broker. But the job was something she did, while the cooking was who she was. Few of the people who loved her will ever think of her without remembering her kitchen, and her in it, leaning against a counter or over the stove, stirring, smiling.
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Sometimes she regretted not having made more of the other parts of her life, especially her career. She had been recruited by Radcliffe and declined to apply — the small-town girl had never heard of it and thought the girls there looked too serious. Anyway, she was going to get married and raise a family.
“I could have planned better,” she’d say, in the same wry tone she would later use to dismiss the considerable toll on her health from a lifetime of water skiing accidents, home improvement projects executed without adequate safety precautions, and 40 years of smoking: A-fib, COPD, spinal stenosis, a poorly healed cervical fracture.
“It’s all very tedious,” was her standard line about these afflictions, and with a shrug she’d turn back to making the best of things, which usually meant excellent food, much of it cooked in her beloved copper. After those first pieces from Zabar’s came the ones bought on her frequent auction-and-flea-market expeditions: giant stockpots, an amazing diamond-shaped turbot pan that turned out to be too large for the oven, a cauldron too big to sit anywhere but on the floor — and innumerable littler pieces, saucepans, strainers and ladles.
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After she followed her daughters to D.C. and lost her antiquing companions, there was eBay. My mother was an obstinate Luddite, but for the sake of copper, she learned all the tricks of winning online auctions — too well, she often lamented; she couldn’t really afford so many treasures, or the space to store them. She often declared she was going to sell some to free up space and money.
“But they’re so beautiful,” she would say wistfully.
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My sister and I will divide her other treasures, but the copper has come to me because I am the remaining cook in the family, and the most important thing about Mom’s collection is that it was meant to be used. Her pans didn’t sit gleaming on a high shelf; they were kept on racks, within easy reach, or on her stovetop, oxidized by heat and streaked by past spatters because she didn’t see the point of cookware you didn’t cook with. My mother liked things, and people, in themselves, not the idea of them.
It was the same with her food, which was excellent without pretension: She made three-day fish sauces and her own croissants because they were delicious, and for the same reason she made orange Jell-O studded with shredded carrots and pineapple.
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In the empty days after the hospital, I cleared a space on my own shelves and brought her copper pans home. The turbot pan, it turns out, just fits in my oven. Mom originally bought it thinking she could use it to roast a Thanksgiving turkey. This coming November, it will fulfill its destiny.
All through that awful week, every time I started to cry, I picked up another piece and began polishing. I didn’t know what else to do. Nothing prepares you to lose your mother because, for you, there has never been a world without her in it. You floated through your days unaware that you were sustained by knowing she would be there to return to, in triumph or disaster.
All you can do after is find things to fill the void, ideally things that remind you of her. I polished copper and remembered how much love can be packed into the smallest acts, and what comfort can be found in performing them.
