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A Recipe Book of Memories

by Patty Zavala, RN
Yolo Hospice Director of Compliance, Performance Improvement and Staff Development

At Yolo Hospice, we’ve found patients sometimes struggle to make sense of their past and wonder if their lives have truly mattered. Our response is to help them conduct life review activities often with families to help crystallize how they have created meaning and purpose, influenced their families and workplaces, how they will be remembered. We can gather the threads of our own life review at anytime, building albums which commemorate babyhood, weddings and high school reunions. They say the heart of the household is in the kitchen. Nearly, every family has memories that took place around the kitchen table. Why not create a recipe book of poignant stories connected to family cooks, the kitchen and holiday dining traditions? These are stories that your loved ones can taste in the telling.

I created a book of recipes for my family, with chapters memorializing our father and his favorite meals as well as funny anecdotes that lived on long after the dishes were rinsed and dried. One chapter honored the heritage of my mother and her two sisters as practical, mid-western cooks born of German ancestry, brought up on canned everything and survivors of the Great Depression. I gave a copy to everyone at Christmas that year, including a new sister-in-law who appreciated being brought up to speed on these insider stories so warm and full of the aroma of family intimacy.

It would be easy to design your own version. Find the weathered recipe box or dog-eared Betty Crocker cookbook your family used and invite your loved ones to reminisce about their classic meat loaf or childhood antics at the Thanksgiving celebration. Did you have a cook in the family who wouldn’t divulge the secret ingredients in time-honored specialties? Did Dad burn breakfast every Mother’s Day?

Some of the recipes may need to be modernized, or not, as the whim strikes you. We copied some of the documents directly for the sheer delight, say, of recognizing not only my Aunt Ruth’s handwriting but also her innate nature to be a recycler, long before it was socially appealing. She worked as an IRS auditor, and used outdated 3 x 5 index cards to jot down her recipes. On the back of the card for her persimmon cookies we found the IRS code citation typed up for off-duty police serving a business as a security guard!

Organizing it to be a useful cookbook but also a gentle stroll down memory lane takes some planning. I wanted to include exploits of all my siblings to make it spark a shared family recollection. You may want to focus solely on the person who is ill, and create it purposely to suit their fancy. Even when eating gets to be a struggle, remembering can bring a hearty smile to a hospice patient.

My son helped me format the pages in a landscaped Word document with two columns. The hardest part was keeping straight which page would be attached to which other page once they were folded down the middle and laid one atop the other. Not a fancy publishing task, but we did a few trial runs before the order turned out just right.

We found a few free clip art images to adorn the sparser spaces here and there and decided on a title and a comic for the inside back cover. We took the printed project down to Kinko’s on Christmas Eve afternoon and used their equipment to laminate the cover. Kinko’s finished it up with a spiral plastic binding and we came back a few hours later to pick up our homemade tribute to a family legacy of nurturing and love. One that doubles as a quick reference when I need to make apple pie or lasagna just like Mom taught us.

Yolo Hospice social workers and bereavement counselors work with patients and patient’s families to help them identify ways to help them pay tribute, remember and grieve. This is one example of a project that can help. If you would like more information about hospice, working through grief or this particular project, please contact Yolo Hospice at (530) 758-5566 or visit our website at www.yolohospice.org.

 

 

 

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Ted Skiera
"I've worked for 20+ years in cardiovascular and oncology nursing, most recently working as a nurse coordinator in cardiovascular research. My work with Yolo Hospice has enabled me to focus all of my acute clinical experiences into caring for patients, and their loved ones, during a most challenging period of their lives."
~Ted Skiera, RN