Food was my mother’s language of love. My memories are filled with the sizzle of fresh garlic and onions from my father’s garden cooking in a pan as the aroma permeated the air and called us to dinner. The smell of banana bread cooking in the oven at Christmas time. And always, a properly set table, waiting for whoever she invited to join us.
My mother was passionate about feeding people. She was an oil paint artist by profession and every dish was another form of her artistic expression reflected. She loved her family, yes—but she loved strangers too. No one, ever, was immune to an invitation to our family dinner table.
She picked up people on the street, invited them home for dinner. My childhood was marked by a parade of strangers at our family table: other world travelers separated from their families. An opera singer—she had stopped to listen to singing on the streets of downtown Munich. Nuns who seemed to appear out of nowhere. And all of them, every single one of them, found themselves at home at our family table.
And then there was my father. Always the most enthusiastic eater at the table. He loved my mother with his whole being, and he loved my mother’s food. He ate with joy, with gratitude, with openly expressed delight.
My mother wasn’t careless about what she made. She paid attention to ensure that her food fed the hearts and souls of everyone seated at her table. And she adapted her cooking through the years. When my father became a health food fanatic, she cooked healthy food. When he became vegetarian, she cooked vegetarian. When he became vegan, she cooked vegan. She changed the menu—but the love never changed and the flavor was always epic.
And every night, no matter what, we sat around the family table together. Whatever anger or rebellion the day had brought—was all set aside before we came to the table. We joined hands. We prayed. And then we were nourished, body and heart, by my mother’s food.
When I got older, she assigned me one night a week to cook for the family. One night that was mine. And I learned for myself—that food is more than food. Food is connection. Food is memory. Food is love expressed. I learned as her face lit up when my father hummed with joy at the first bite. I felt her pride when she shared my food to the delight of others. And in her final years, she loved handing her kitchen over to me—not only because she thought my food was better, but because she knew what it meant: she was being loved by me through her own love language.
When she was dying, she shared many final lessons with me, and of course, she wrapped a few in food. One afternoon, I was helping the hospice nurse bathe her. In true form, my mother turned the questions back to the nurse. “Are you married?” “Do you have kids?” “Pets?” “What are their names?” And then she asked, “What’s your favorite food?” She turned to me with a twinkle in her eye and said, “Kayla… know people. Really know people.”
And I knew—if she had the option of living, she would have cooked that favorite food for the nurse. Because that was one of the ways that my mother made people feel seen. Known. Loved.
Later, she asked me for two last promises: “Don’t let your father become a hermit and continue feeding him.” She worried about him, about how he would carry on without her and who would feed him. So, I cooked. I cooked because she couldn’t. I cooked because she asked. And I cooked because grief is best wrested with in the kitchen. When I left after her funeral, the freezer was full, every inch of space crammed with meals—a love letter written in food to my father, from me and my mother.
And then came the past three years with my father as I walked with my dad through Alzheimer’s. The years when memory faded. But food—food always brought him back. Memories of Christmas returned when I baked my grandmother’s Kuchen. Family breakfast came alive when I made her banana bread for him. The past was vanishing from his mind, but in one taste—one bite—the doors opened again for a moment.
In the last month of his life, I found the salami we used to eat in Germany. Back then, my mother packed us picnic lunches for our road trips across Europe. Sandwiches with butter on brochen, fennel salami, and butterkase cheese. We’d stop along the road beside mountains, rivers, fields, castles—and ate together, the world spread out before us nourished by the food of my mothers hand.
So the weekend of my dads last outing, I packed a picnic. I asked him, “Do you want to eat in the park, or in my garden?” He chose my newly planted garden. I had baked sourdough to taste like brochen. I layered butter, salami, butterkase. And as he bit into it, he hummed with joy. And just like that— we were traveling again. Talking about road trips, picnic lunches, the simple beauty of being together.
Then he looked around my garden, the one I had just started planting in honor of him:
He asked, “I was just imagining walking through my garden. I would go boop, boop, boop. Were you alive when I had my garden?”
I replied, “I was. You had a lot of gardens, but this one here is inspired by your Whidbey Island garden.”
He asked, “Was that the one that I’d go boop, boop, boop walking down the paths?”
I answered, “It was.”
He declared, “This is going to be a good garden.”
That was our last walk down memory lane together. Sparked by food. Food once packed by my mother’s hands, now packed by mine, as one of my final love offerings to my father.
He died 22 days later, and the garden has since bloomed. And I can confirm—it is indeed a good garden.
As I prepare food from its bounty, I remember both of my amazing parents through the love language of food taught to me by my mother.
