It does, you know. Have an aftertaste. It’s just like I had some kind of keto-friendly cookie, and I can taste the not-quite-rightness of a dessert that has been altered. Instead of brown sugar and butter and vanilla and flour, it’s monkfruit, stevia, erythritol, and almond flour. I can’t quite place the flavor.

Actually, I know EXACTLY what it is. It is CAROB. I didn’t realize it until a few years ago, but my parents were hippies. Not pot smoking, free love hippies. The “let’s make our own yogurt and put wheat germ on ice cream!” hippies. (I don’t even know if that should all be hyphenated or in quotations, but whatever. I’m on an airplane and delirious and masked and dehydrated and have all these random thoughts that I need to get out of my head. So the grammar Nazi is taking today off. I know, right? Is it even me behind this keyboard? Because I detest that phrase I just used. We’ll blame it on rebreathing my CO2.). Anyway, back to the Great Carob Experiment of 1970-whatever. Can we just all agree it was an unmitigated disaster? No, mom, carob brownies do NOT taste like normal brownies. And carob chip cookies are not anything remotely resembling Nestle Tollhouse Cookies. And WHY did someone decide carob was a good idea, anyway? Was it supposed to be healthier than chocolate? I want to know who these people are that come up with things like carob, wheat germ, kale, quinoa, dairy-free, gluten-free anything. I just had a friend over for Easter and I bought a dairy-free gluten-free cheesecake for her. I asked her how it was and she demanded that I taste it. She said, “It’s not terrible, is it?!” Like that should ever be something we congratulate ourselves on when we offer food to our loved ones. The heresy! It WAS terrible, by the way. Let’s cancel all of THOSE people. Forget racism. I say we cancel people who are against FLAVOR!! And JOY!!

Also, who puts wheat germ on ice cream? That should be something for which one goes to The Hague. Even the Nazis didn’t use that method of torture. If you want me to eat the dang wheat germ, give it to me like medicine, don’t ruin my ice cream like a psychopath. I am starting to understand why my sister-in-law tells me we are “all so remarkably stable, considering”. Hmmmm. Let’s put a pin in that.

I’ve also discovered that grief has weight to it. That was unexpected. I thought maybe it would be more like pain. Stabbing or piercing. But this is just heavy. As time goes on I feel it becoming more real. My dad is really gone. He’s not still living in Idaho, eating pudding that someone spoons into his mouth, asking everyone who comes in the door to get him his shoes so he can leave, and go anywhere that isn’t that chair he’s stuck in all day.

Maybe not so incidentally, I don’t know if it’s the pandemic or just getting older or if I’m just starting to psych myself out, but I’m starting to wonder if I have dementia. Just stay with me here: I couldn’t find my car in the parking lot the other day, which I know is NOT that big of a deal, but it took me a full 10 minutes and when I found it I realized I had already walked past it once. And then, a few days ago, something struck me as really funny and Asian, and I said, “That’s SO Korean!” but by the time the words got out of my mouth, I literally had NO IDEA WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT. (Just a quick FYI, that’s the correct use of the word “literally”. Ok—grammar Nazi checking in for a second. ) My daughter said, “What was Korean?” And I had no clue. Is this how it starts? Did my dad know he was starting to lose his mind like this? Or am I just really tired and it’s 2020? 2021? Somebody out there might want to keep track of my deterioration. Frontal Temporal Dementia starts to show up when you are in your fifties, so……what was I saying?

Oh, yes. Grieving. Most of the time, for most of the day, I’m ok. But then out of nowhere, I feel like the universe has shifted. I think that’s what I’m trying to process. Losing a parent is like losing a part of your foundation. It’s like when one of the couch legs comes off, and then you’re holding up the couch with your back while you’re trying to screw the leg back on and the dog and the kids are all running around and you’re trying not to let everyone get crushed by the couch but it’s getting a little hard to handle by yourself but your husband is TDY or whatever and your Asian brain can’t handle a lopsided couch so you have to fix it. It’s like that. All of a sudden. About once or twice a week. Or a month. It just comes and goes.

And then leaves the stupid carob taste.

Which is why chocolate is an AMAZING answer to everything. An amazing answer to grief, to not being able to process your emotions, to actual yucky aftertaste….and I am learning to let some of these feelings out of my kimchi jar once in a while. Thank you to so many of you, pretty much everyone who reads this little corner of the internet, for reaching out to me, texting me, sending me lovely things, (like chocolate), praying for me. I can feel your love. And the people who actually physically touch me. I feel you, too. Especially you, my love. I know you miss him, too. Thank you for going on this journey with me. We all know I am the worst traveler. There is not enough Benadryl in the world to make it fun to be with me. But maybe I can bake some carob brownies…there’s a thought.