When my father was taken to the ICU in December 2020 following a critical injury in a car accident, he was still talking.
“Don’t get COVID!” said my sister on the phone.
“COVID is the one thing I don’t have,” he told her.
The following evening he expressed his annoyance at the Hippocratic oath.
“One of the nurses thought I was aspirating. Took away my dinner.”
It turned out that he was aspirating. Later that night he was heavily sedated, intubated, and put on a ventilator to wait out the days until it was safe for the doctors to perform major neck and spinal surgery.
Six weeks later I flew from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in a surgical mask and face shield to see him. We were finally allowed one visit in the ICU as part of a “goals of care” meeting—the doctors having deemed the risks of COVID secondary to the urgency of my father’s condition. He was still on the ventilator and no longer talking. I was heartbroken.
Just before the meeting, my sister and I arrived at our childhood home and found in the refrigerator the vestiges of our father’s culinary life before the accident. It was as though someone hit pause in the kitchen. He was always the family cook, preparing dinner every night and doing all the grocery shopping. Since the accident our mother had been making do with Cheerios, peanut butter crackers, and Stouffer’s frozen spinach soufflés. She had not cleaned out the fridge.
I found myself conducting a sensory inventory: smelling, touching, and tasting all of the foods my father left behind. They provided a bridge to the memory of him as a healthier person, and I felt a sweet melancholia as I imagined him cooking (“Can everyone get out of my kitchen?”) and eating (“Can everyone come in and sit down?”).
I sniffed some stinky Pont l’Évêque and some stinkier raclette, squeezed a bag of moribund green grapes, held an old bottle of Hidden Valley blue cheese dressing to my cheek before pouring it down the sink. I dipped my fingertip in two different containers of honey—a Dutch Gold and a wildflower— and sampled. I ate a lone Cento cherry pepper and drank some of the vinegar from the jar, cradled a rotten Winesap apple to my chest. I cried over a bottle of Kadoya sesame oil and a half-can of La Choy bamboo shoots, then again over a weird Tupperware full of stale Swedish Fish.
But it was what I found in the vegetable drawer that most moved me. Tucked behind a deceased yellow pepper and a bag of shriveled carrots was a half head of purple cabbage.
My father was a man with a special relationship to purple cabbage. Did his life revolve around the vegetable? No. But if you spent enough time with him, you’d inevitably notice him sneaking away with a plate of it—maybe a little blue cheese dressing on the side—for some alone time.
He incorporated the vegetable into group gatherings too— particularly into a chicken and purple cabbage salad that was on the table at every birthday luncheon, barbecue, and graduation party I can remember. “Does it meet your approval?” he’d say eagerly, waiting for a compliment.
The purple cabbage embodied my father’s wry earthiness, his love of nature and gardening. Plus, an inherent Jewishness given the vegetable’s presence in so many Eastern European diasporic dishes.
The cabbage also felt aesthetically apt. My father had a round halo of curly hair and a matching mustache—a late-1970s style set that he sported my entire life. (Until they shaved his mustache in the ICU, I’d never seen his upper lip). If my father’s silhouette were a vegetable, it would be cruciferous.
Unfortunately, things were not looking good for the half cabbage in question. I found it wilted and moldy, the outer leaves plagued by a black rot. The interior cross section, where he’d cut the vegetable in two with a knife, was striated with dark slime.
Despite its poor appearance I felt compelled to find a way to eat some of this cabbage—even just a bite. I wanted to share the vegetable with my father, to pour out a little cabbage, if you will. If the cabbage was something he’d started, I knew that I must finish it. I didn’t necessarily believe that I would keep my father alive by way of comestible symmetry (I did), but I feared that I would never be able to share another meal with him (I would not).
And so, I conducted surgery on the cabbage. One by one I eliminated the outer leaves with my fingers. Then I carefully cut out the runny blight from the interior section with a knife. I washed the whole head under the sink, dried it in on a paper towel, and examined my handiwork. What I found was heartening. Underneath the death and decay there were still healthy, vibrant, juicy layers of vegetable left.
I ripped off a chunk of the living leaves and placed them in my mouth. The flavor was sweet and juicy, delicious. It was as though no time had passed since my father had cut into this vegetable and ate it himself. I laughed as I thought of the words miracle cabbage, remembering the story of the Hanukkah miracle, where a small amount of oil served to light the menorah in the old temple for eight nights. For me, nothing could simultaneously conjure the ephemerality of organic matter and the eternality of love—the paradoxical ways that linear time both matters deeply and also not at all—like that old cabbage.
The following morning I woke up and immediately ate another chunk. The next day, more. For four days and nights I ingested all of the edible parts of the cabbage that remained. What had appeared to be a pathetic wilted vegetable became part of a sacred ritual, like taking the wafer or lighting a yahrzeit candle.
Was my cabbage actually a miracle cabbage? Maybe all cabbages are able to stand the test of time. Maybe every cabbage is a miracle cabbage. Or perhaps I was just desperate and sentimental enough to perceive that one as magic.
To me, the intellectual reality of the ritual matters far less than the experiential reality. It is the same way that God is something I know with my heart rather than with my mind. It is the way I carry my father’s spirit, even though he is physically gone.
Melissa Broder is the author of three novels: Death Valley, Milk Fed, and The Pisces; the essay collection So Sad Today; and five poetry collections.
