Hi Everyone,
We interrupt your midsummer weekend frolicking to bring you an account of grappling with grief. But fear not, this week’s contributor, Phinehas Hodges, has included a healthy serving humor and taco salad (complete with a deranged recipe) to keep things…if not light, at least a little crunchy. It’ll make sense once you read it.
We’ve even added a list of other “funny” grief content in this week’s Prism Angle, in case you’re hungry for more of this niche category.
More wedge salad fans tbh,
The Prism Team
Phinehas Hodges is a writer and director based in LA. Current projects include a dark Sci-Fi satire TV show and a memoir about his crazy childhood.
One thing that makes Phinehas feel well: “My little lame ass morning meditation in my backyard. Pilates. Beach volleyball.”
Death by a thousand taco salads
You might not know this, but possibly the worst part of someone you love dying is that you’re still not exempted from that already annoying question hanging around the end of every goddamned day of life, which is:
What the fuck is for dinner?
Despite the fact that your world has been fundamentally, permanently altered, around 6:30pm you must deal with the fridge (half full), the cupboards (half empty), the waiting stove, and your plummeting blood sugar levels.
* * *
In my Dad’s case, left as head chef to four kids after Mom died (a role complicated by his follow-up decision to haul the whole family to an off-grid cabin in the woods of Washington state), the answer to this terrible question was simple: cook the same thing, over and over, until everyone wants to puke at the sight of it.
His first dinner dish was pancakes. Frankly, it’s hard to mess up pancakes, but Dad miraculously succeeded, slapping down a plate of blackened pucks night after night with a “Hey, a little char is good for you!” — one of his favorite phrases, since he burned everything he ever cooked. Other favorite phrases included: “Dirt has iron in it!” and “Get your blood going, you won’t feel sick then!”
Eventually even Dad got tired of pancakes. After that it was beans and biscuits, but whatever buttery delight you’re imagining is dead wrong: these were biscuits that 18th century drunken sailors would’ve recognized as they broke their last, scurvy-loosened tooth on them.
Then there was a strudel phase that ended one day when, wrestling the skillet from the top of the wood stove, he spilled the entire sizzling mess into his lap.
He also happened to not be wearing pants at the time.
But the longest phase was something he made for literal years, often five nights in a row: taco salad.
* * *
I think this dish became a mainstay for Dad because, despite the corn chips, ranch, and canola oil he fried the ground beef in, he somehow thought of it as healthy. It’s easy for me to picture his skinny frame standing over the ancient stove in our tiny kitchen with the peeling linoleum, burning the ground beef, often in the same grease he’d used the night before.
This taco salad haunted my teenage years, when I was in most need of nutrition, ravenous after school and basketball practice. Looking back, I can see that being a cash-strapped single parent tasked with feeding four kids must have been a nightmare — but at the time I was just hungry and so, so tired of eating taco salad.
* * *
Dad died last year. I said goodbye to him from my LA kitchen, doubled over, trying to hold back sobs, as my sister held the phone to his ear.
“You’re the best Dad I ever had,” I said, because I thought he would think it was funny, and because it was true.
All I heard in response was his shallow breathing on the other end of the phone.
For months, when I tried to fall asleep, all I could hear was that shallow breathing.
But of course, it was my own breath that I heard.
* * *
The one time I tried to cook in the weeks after his death, I burned the pork butt I was slow roasting so badly that I ruined my fancy dutch oven, and my neighbor called the fire department.
A lot of times, instead of cooking, I drank a bucket of martinis. I ordered a lot of takeout. But six months in, I was at some kind of crossroads, one that even in the midst of grief, I recognized: I had to take one step out of this thing — even if that step was just a gesture — towards a hope that the pain could end.
That’s how I found myself, mourning, facing the same question my father, mourning, faced all those years ago:
What the fuck is for dinner?
The next thing I knew, I was zombie-walking through Trader Joe’s, clutching a bunch of bagged salad kits. Health, I thought. I also bought a bunch of ground turkey. More health. And a bottle of mezcal. Some health. Agave — it’s easier to digest. (I realize as I write this that my ideas about health are at least as insane as my Dad’s.)
For the first time in weeks I cooked myself dinner. By that I mean, I opened the bag of salad, and then I opened the little bags inside it containing corn chips, ranch, and cheese, and I browned the meat in a skillet, and I dumped it all in a big blue bowl, then slumped down on the couch and fired up the TV to tune into a world where no one important ever died.
Then, as I lay there eating, I realized something you may have already:
I’d cooked, unintentionally, Dad’s Taco Salad.
Something (intuition, the subconscious, maybe even the chef hand of Ghost Dad himself) had led me to that couch with that big bowl of blackened turkey and onions and vegetables.
And I started crying.
Which wasn’t unusual — I was crying all the time.
But, for the first time since he died, I was crying because I felt close to him.
* * *
Over the next few nights I experimented with Dad’s Taco Salad. First, I realized to really blacken the meat as much as Dad did required frying longer than anyone recommends, and since it was turkey, I had to add broth so it wouldn’t dry out. One night I added fish sauce, and then salt and pepper, and then dried onion and garlic powder, and then later the following week, I actually got out my mandolin and sliced white onion and diced some garlic and the next thing I knew I was cooking — really cooking — and it wasn’t Dad’s Taco Salad anymore. It was mine.
Or, maybe, ours.
Because I was still using ranch dressing, to be clear.
* * *
Over the next few months I cooked a shocking amount of this basic meal. Over and over and over again. Was it healthy? More than takeout. Was I learning how to live again, in the face of death? Yeah. Did I feel bad for how much plastic the Trader Joe's bagged salads have? Yes.
* * *
I started going to Pilates. A friend said I should try it, and, like the taco salad, I tried it, because I would try anything to feel better.
I went to therapy, even when I didn’t want to, when my own voice seemed to be coming from someplace far outside my body. I cried a lot, but over time the crying changed — or how I felt about it changed — and now the days when I cry are, surprisingly, good days, when sadness has punctured through grief to reach me. These are the days I am awake, the days I’m feeling all of it, the love, the pain, the growth, bundled up together, impossible to separate.
* * *
You don’t really realize you’re getting better while it’s happening.
It’s only months later when you’re actually there, feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, slipped in your body like a glove, that you realize you’ve rejoined the land of the living, and you can taste the food you make again, and you can imagine going on a date again.
Most importantly, you can think of your Dad with mercy, your Dad who shouldered that Sisyphean weight of dinner by cooking the same, awful dish, night after night after night, for you and your brother and sisters.
Something that, in retrospect, feels as close to a definition of love as you can imagine.
* * *
Dad’s Taco Salad