This is how it starts, I was told.
The appetite going first, or going small, the body beginning its own accounting of what it still needs and revising the number downward, the way old systems eventually simplify themselves, reducing to the essential, releasing the rest. I was told this and I understood it intellectually and the understanding did not prepare me at all for sitting across from her at the table and watching her push things around the plate and knowing the pushing was not about the food.
I make the things she likes.
Or the things she used to like, the distinction blurring now because what she liked at seventy is not always what she likes at eighty and the updating of the list is a moving target and some days I arrive with the thing I was certain would be welcome and it lands wrong, the interest not quite there, the hunger not quite reachable. I do not take it personally. I take it as information. I adjust. I come back with something smaller, something simpler, something that asks less of a body that is asking less of itself.
She ate half a bowl of soup last Tuesday and said: that was lovely.
It was the soup. Her soup, the imperfect inheritance, the version I make that is close but not the same. She said it was lovely and I believe she meant it, that in the half bowl there was enough to constitute a meal by her current reckoning, and I am trying to recalibrate my own reckoning accordingly, to stop measuring by the old portions, to understand that less is not a diminishment of what is happening between us at the table but a different kind of the same thing, a smaller ceremony of the same fundamental act, which is: I made this for you, and: you are here to receive it, and: both of us are here, together, at this table, for as long as we are.
I am here. She is here.
The soup is warm. The half bowl is enough. I am practising believing that. Some days I actually do.
