December 10, 2024
Ll1324, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Spam Means I Love You
Evan told me I saved his life when we met. I was never quite convinced that in my early 20s I was capable of such a feat, but he was adamant. More than ten years later, we sat together in tears, having been just told an MRI had revealed a sizable mass on his pancreas, and I told him I’d save his life again. Seven months after I said it, after more than 14 rounds of 48-hour chemotherapy infusions, and a complete loss of the life we once knew, I sat staring at his lifeless body, unable to keep my promise. The port used to administer his treatment-cum-poison and the tube connected to his side to drain bile a tumor had blocked shared my dashed hopes that the human spirit’s strength could outweigh the fragility of the human body. What starts as a tumor can end in two strangers entering an apartment and leaving with a body bag containing the physical container of years of memories. As I looked at the person who shared in every victory and defeat of more than a third of my life, my mom sat across the room, tears in her eyes mirroring the grief I felt but had gotten lost in the numbness that had taken over my body.
I was a former anorexic and he was a chef. His presence had quickly become an essential part of mine after we met even though we were in different time zones. Texts had turned to hours-long phone calls, which turned to hours-long video calls. His voice was somehow never unfamiliar to me, and its docile register calmed the anxiety that pulsed through my veins. The stories of the kitchen he was running became lullabies. When we talked, I could almost hear his smile I’d seen weeks earlier, the tooth to the left of his front one slightly protruding.
After he died, I would wake everyday for the next two weeks shocked that he was still gone. The vases of flowers I’d received in the aftermath of his death, much like the support of friends who assured me I wouldn’t do any of this alone, wilted in every windowsill in my apartment. The only constant in my life for those two weeks was my mom. She’d come to stay with me in California from Ohio for what we thought would be a few days, but had morphed into a few weeks when it became clear that Evan’s hospital stay would be his last. At 33 years old, I was reluctantly starting over. I’d spent the past seven months as a caretaker for someone with an aggressive, unforgiving illness that left him an incapacitated shell of his former self. When that caretaker identity, the only one I knew at that point, died with Evan, I struggled to find any sense of personhood.
My understanding of being a widow, whose very etymology is a root word meaning “to be empty,” couldn’t be removed from my understanding of being partnered. Being partnered with Evan meant eating well. To him, food was a central tenet of joy. He made a livelihood cooking for others and had a passion for tasting every delicious thing he could get his hands on, which for him meant everything from Hot Cheetos to that trendy Los Angeles restaurant every food critic says is a must. As a survivor of an eating disorder, Evan’s understanding of what it meant to take care of another person–to feed them–was often what kept me from relapsing in dark moments. He was more than my husband; he was an anchor. In the last weeks of his life, Evan didn’t enjoy food the way he once did. In a cruel twist of fate, he had been diagnosed with a gastrointestinal cancer that didn’t allow much of what he ate to stay down, and whose treatment only exacerbated that. In some act of subconscious solidarity, I didn’t eat much either. I’d felt immense guilt that I still had the ability to enjoy the thing that was so tied to his identity. I don’t deserve this, I thought.
Facing mortality everyday and being unable to stop its inevitable arrival left me trying to exert control the same way I did at age 19, when I had become severely anorexic. I’d always been a very good girl. I kept my head down, my grades up, and never gave my parents any reason to worry about me. It came as no surprise to me then, that I had unwittingly been infected with what’s widely thought of as the “very good girl” eating disorder, a perfect foil to the “greedy” bulimia. “The personality traits attributed to anorexics center on self-denial, anxiety, and a need for control, while bulimics are assumed superficial, not to mention self-indulgent,” Emmeline Clein writes in her 2024 essay collection Dead Weight. She goes on to explain that to bulimics, anorexics are considered “successes,” something I desperately wanted to be. What started as a way to control the only thing I could after my parents lost nearly everything in the 2008 financial crisis, had become a secret sickening type of security blanket and the only stable force in my ever-changing life. I couldn’t control the dizzying amount my father began to drink, or the stranger he had become to me. I didn’t know my mother had bargained with her own father to put our home in his name so we didn’t lose it. I did, however, know that if a serving size is a half-cup and I only allowed myself a quarter-cup or less, that meant I was consuming less. I knew consuming less meant a shrinking body. I knew a shrinking body meant a more palatable experience for those around me whose reality was especially fraught. I was making a choice. I was “reading the room I’d been locked into,” as Clein so eloquently puts it. I’d been witness to Nicole Richie’s star rise as her body shrank. I remember with astonishing clarity the shape of the jutting hip bones of every early-aughts it-girl. To be a woman, I thought, was to suffer because that suffering earned praise, which is all I really wanted. My weight loss was applauded by my ballet teachers, my illness disguised as hard work. “You’ve shown real improvement,” I was once told by a teacher in the throes of my eating disorder. While I can’t be sure my turnout or jetés had improved, what I do know is that my body had gotten markedly smaller.
Though 9% of the US population have an eating disorder in their lifetime, it was easy to feel like I was the only one suffering. My body was no longer mine and I waded through the waters of anorexia, searching for an island of complete body-lessness. No matter how small I got, that island continued to move further away. Once a week I was forced to strip down to my underwear, use the bathroom, and step on a scale as Nikki, the plucky and athletic nutritionist assigned to my case, shook her head, telling me I’d lost more weight. I didn’t see any of it because I refused to look at myself. I didn’t like what I had been or what I had become, but I was sure there was a version of myself I loved on the other end of this. My insecurities were given reassurance from those around me, my dad even telling my mom he couldn’t look at me anymore. My mom, however, didn’t have a choice but to keep looking.
She began to enforce dinners together for the first time since I was a small child, and cooked light fare she thought would be more comfortable for me to eat. We would sit at the dinner table, two soldiers who didn’t have the option to dodge the draft for this battle, grilled salmon and once flash-frozen veggies on our plates.
“Wow, good food,” she’d say, her mouth full.
Though the meal wasn’t inventive or even expertly seasoned, she ate it with the merriment of a parent trying to get their picky toddler to take just one bite. Beyond the threshold of a full stomach, she’d finish her plate and go for seconds, hoping for me to follow suit. Her performance was riveting, a breakdown mere moments away, only kept at bay by a mouth full of lukewarm cauliflower. She was no longer sharing a meal with her daughter, but the shell of what once was me, the plump baby who always took her vitamins because they tasted like candy, and indulged in a chocolate cake like it was the last one she’d ever eat. I wanted so badly to be able to get better on my own, to have the strength to eschew what my starved brain was telling me, but I was tired.
My mother, I’ve learned, doesn’t give in to fatigue. More than a decade later, here she was again, seeing me through a very different battle, having just barely survived the first one. The effects of grief on my body weren’t all that different from the effects of anorexia. A week after Evan died, as I slipped on a pair of jeans that typically fit me snugly, I saw the toll grief had taken on my body. Looking in the mirror at myself, I saw the shape of my own hip bones flanking a deeper-than-normal valley. Though I knew this weight loss wasn’t intentional, I couldn’t help but feel a twisted sense of pride in what I saw. Unintentional weight loss can often be a trigger for those with a history of disordered eating. I clocked my own change, rationalizing that gaining it back would be some kind of betrayal to the person I had just lost.
* * *
I couldn’t clean up the emotional mess that time had caused, but looking around at the bins and tubs with Evan’s pop-up restaurant equipment, I figured tidying up could at least put my mind to work. Together my mom and I unpacked spices and oils which hadn’t been used for months. I dragged the deceptively heavy bins—now covered in a layer of dust and cat hair—to the kitchen. We gave the rice vinegar and mushroom powder, the cleanest of the sticky and well-used bottles, a permanent place on the spice rack. Hotel pans went on a newly purchased baker’s shelf. I knew these would never be used again but getting rid of them wasn’t an option for me. Evan’s wok, most recently used to make mapo tofu, now shared a shelf with the pot I used to hard-boil eggs, the extent of my own culinary endeavors.
Touching Evan’s tools and ingredients almost felt like holding his hand. These items allowed him to not only make a living, but also were bound up intrinsically with the deep core of who he was as a person. Unpacking them gave the events of the past several months finality, when everything up to that point had felt temporary. In his final days, I’d wake from a shallow sleep on the couch, make my way to the hospital bed that took up most of our small living room, and place my hand on his chest, holding my breath until I felt his. During my own illness, years earlier, my mom had done the same, afraid that one day my body would be unable to take the abuse it had been enduring.
Science and treatment had failed Evan and no matter how hard I willed my love to save him, it was unable. My mother, however, did what no therapist, nutritionist, or physician could do. She lifted the weight my illness had placed on my shoulders over and over until I was able to do it myself. It wasn’t until I met Evan that I realized the meals she made and her insistence we eat them together were her way of telling me she loved me and wanted me to live. She saw a way out of my illness that I was unable to see. Unpacking Evan’s ingredients with my mom made me realize that the real betrayal would be forgetting all he showed me; that would be how I lost him for good. What my mom first taught me, he reinforced: food and love are inexorably linked. The heavy-bottomed pot he used to make Buddae-jjigae, was the one that held his antidote to an exhausting day. The canister of mushroom powder had been mostly emptied, having been used to express that I deserved delicious savory food, and an equally delicious and savory life. Inheriting all of these pans, utensils, and spices from Evan was a responsibility I did not take lightly. Cooking for and eating with my mom became suddenly necessary. I couldn’t think of an ingredient more synonymous with love as I learned to receive it than Spam.
“Have you ever had Spam musubi?” I asked her.
“Never,” she said.
In the early days of Evan’s illness, I watched him make Spam musubi in our kitchen, one of the first returns to normalcy after cancer had rendered our sense of the word flimsy at best. I didn’t know exactly what I needed to make the dish, but I knew I needed to make a trip to California Market.
California Market, on the corner of 5th and Western in LA, was Southern California’s first Korean supermarket. The parking garage is hectic, run by a security guard who wields a whistle and flashlight with authoritative glee. Inside, aunties hand out samples with stern insistence. Watching Evan traverse the aisles of an Asian supermarket was truly a thing of wonder. He entered an almost childlike state, creating a recipe on the fly when he saw an ingredient that caught his eye. He would gather bundles of perilla, expertly inspecting each leaf and smiling with certainty before tossing it in the basket. I had always loved a grocery store, but sharing life with someone whose livelihood was food had made it an almost sacred space.
The Spam at California Market is kept in an aisle with mostly western brands. Crouching down to look at the options, I wanted to call Evan, an instinct I’d often had in the two weeks following his passing. I knew he passed over the bright blue and yellow Hormel and opted for the brown can. I reached for it and quickly noticed that there were two options with almost identical branding. I racked my brain for a memory that would tell me to choose one over the other. I even waited a moment for some kind of sign, something so many people told me I would start to see. When nothing came to me, I settled on the Chung Jung One brand luncheon meat and headed for the checkout.
When I got home, I was greeted by my mom sitting on the couch, reading news on her iPad. Her presence immediately put my heightened sense of anxious grief at ease for a moment. My trip to the supermarket had pushed my solitude to the forefront of my mind, but my mom’s mere existence pushed it away. She had become a part of my routine over the past month and had taken care of me in ways I didn’t know I needed and in ways I will likely continue to realize for years to come.
I headed to the kitchen, unpacked my purchases, and got to work, using foggy memories as my only guide. As I let the slices of Spam simmer on the pan, a savory and familiar scent filling the kitchen, I entered an almost meditative state for the first time in recent memory. I was on the other end of an experience I had been a part of many times over the years. Moving about the kitchen, haphazardly piling rice on Spam, I remembered how in control Evan was while cooking. Usually shirtless, he would hum along to reggaeton music, oozing coolness I could only dream to one day possess. Almost getting the hang of this dish by the final step, I made a plate for my mom.
“It’s not very pretty,” I proclaimed, grimacing as I handed it to her.
She slid her readers to the top of her head and smiled, reaching for the plate. I watched her take a bite and saw in her what I imagined Evan had seen in me time and time again. Her eyes widened and the corners of her full mouth turned up. I sat next to her and did the same, the taste overwhelming me. It wasn’t a way out of my grief or the bad habits threatening to emerge, but a life raft that allowed me to float for a while. This meal was the version of love that I knew because I’d received it from my mom and from Evan. Maybe my love wasn’t enough to cure cancer, but it had saved Evan’s life. I knew it was true because he told me. I knew how to do it because my mom had shown me how to save my own.
Leah Rae Hulgin is an MFA recipient from UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television, and a current MFA candidate at Columbia University's School of the Arts.