Even though she was in her nineties, I thought my mother should give up eating frozen cream puffs and chocolate éclairs. But she seldom took my advice. At barely ninety-six pounds and with a relatively strong body, she took the advice of a doctor who said at her age she could eat anything she wanted.

Each Tuesday I woke up anxious about driving Mom to the supermarket. I was unsure if it was my fear of crowded places or whether I worried Mom would put only crap in her shopping cart as we navigated separate routes— Mom, starting toward the day-old bakery goods while I headed to the dairy aisle to begin shopping for my family. I knew her stability was better when she pushed a grocery cart. Without support like that, she walked slowly with her left eye closed, wobbling sometimes. She said her eyes hadn’t worked well together since her stroke years ago, and so she saw distances better just using her right eye. But she said she tried to keep both eyes open at the supermarket so men wouldn’t think she was winking at them. She rejected my sarcastic suggestion of a black patch for the left eye.

When she loaded her grocery cart with sweets, I tried to avoid making sarcastic comments. I reasoned that doughnut holes and frozen banana yogurt with peanut butter swirls might be among her few remaining pleasures.

Once we returned to her house after grocery shopping, I unpacked her groceries while she sunk into her sofa. I loaded her small freezer with microwave dinners and pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or frozen yogurt. Before leaving for my house, which was about four miles away, I always said we’d talk on the phone at eight.

She always said, “Thank you for everything you do for me. I really appreciate it.”

Shortly after Mom’s death at age one hundred, I learned she’d passed a cancer gene called Lynch syndrome to my sisters and me. How did her three children contract cancer while she never did? How did she live to a hundred while eating all those chocolate éclairs? Her sister had survived breast cancer and a double mastectomy at fifty but had not eaten chocolate éclairs. Perhaps the éclair was the antidote to the harmful gene.

I don’t think Mom knew she had the cancer gene. Even when her health was declining, I felt obligated to tell her I was receiving radiation and chemotherapy for a tumor in my colon. She had said, “You’ll be fine,” which had been her reaction to all my trials in life.

Mom reached one hundred on June 13, 2015. A few months later Mom stopped eating chocolate éclairs, or much of anything, and was sleeping more during the daytime (often in her clothes in bed). As caring for her became more complicated, and my energy was being compromised by daily radiation treatments to shrink the cancerous tumor, my wife called home healthcare to Mom’s house. And then hospice. Mom died in her sleep in the pre-dawn hours of a cold December morning.

My colorectal surgery occurred ten weeks later. While recovering, I joined the online Inspire network, where many colorectal cancer survivors gave names to the new hole in their abdomen and often posed questions about what they could eat that wouldn’t disturb the path to their altered colon exit, a stoma opening usually located near the belly button. The wrong food could mean a sudden blast into an attached colostomy pouch.

While my chemotherapy sessions progressed after surgery, the thought of chocolate éclairs made me nauseas. As did a lot of other stuff I used to eat. My new go-to food for breakfast was Eggo waffles drenched in maple syrup. I didn’t think this sweet stuff would gain back the twenty pounds I’d lost, but I didn’t care at that point. I was seventy-six and had no plans to make it to one hundred. The hospital nutritionist worried about my getting enough calories and passed along a book of menus to my wife, who was soon preparing stuff like shepherd’s pie and chicken salad wraps similar to the ones I was ordering from the hospital cafeteria while enduring the hours in my chemo chair. Ginger ale too. Lactaid ice cream at home.

During this time, I tried to get used to all this food ending up in a disposable pouch rather than where it used to terminate. I was suffering from stoma depression. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that famous people had had stomas. Before surgery, a stoma nurse had pointed out photographs on the wall in their hallway outside the examining rooms: President Eisenhower, actress Loretta Young, football player Jerry Kramer. I recalled meeting Eisenhower as a teenager on the White House lawn as part of my Boys Nation group. There had been some doubt that he would meet us that day because he was recuperating from surgery. Little did I know when he shook my hand and spoke to me that he was shitting into a pouch, although probably not at that moment.

Later I read about Napoleon Bonaparte, who is often pictured with his right hand in his shirt, a method some say he developed to conceal his goat bladder ostomy bag. What did these people eat? Could Napoleon still eat croissants?

Five years went by without my cancer returning. Periodic CT scans showed only a couple small hernias near the stoma. I was eating normal food that my wife cooked, even indulging in pepperoni pizza and a cold beer on Friday nights. My weight and blood pressure were good. My total cholesterol was a bit high, but the good cholesterol (HDL) that removes cholesterol from the blood stream was better than good.

Then I had a heart attack. A clog in one of my coronary arteries required a stent to open it up again. What had gone wrong? Mom had had a mild heart attack at the same age. Had she passed to me another genetic propensity? Had I been eating something that was a killer? Cheese? That dense When Pigs Fly cinnamon raisin bread? Chocolate ice cream?

To avoid risking another heart attack, I should now eat only “heart healthy” foods. High fiber. Low salt. Low-fat or nonfat dairy. At meals, half my plate was supposed to be fruits and vegetables, the other half, grains and lean protein. My After Your Heart Attack booklet said, “Try to have at least two servings per week of fatty fish.” Fuck! When I tried swordfish, my stomach blew a gasket.

My body did seem to like a new non-dairy frozen dessert. Each night after supper, he and I were enjoying a frozen vanilla bean sandwich made from organic coconut milk instead of ice cream. To cut down on salt, I switched from regular potato chips at lunch with my chicken salad sandwich to sweet potato chips. With respect to sugar, I put less in my ice tea. But on alternate days, I still drank eight ounces of Coca-Cola. If Mom could have her éclairs, I was going to have a little Coke.

Then two months later on a Saturday in early December, my bowel became blocked. I was doubled over in pain. Was it the pepperoni pizza from Friday night? At the ER a medical team performed a CT scan, but because the pain disappeared, they sent me home. I knew previous CT scans had shown that my hernias contained loops of my small bowel and worried the problem was larger than a one-night stand. As soon as I ate breakfast and lunch on Sunday, the abdominal pain returned. I was admitted to the hospital.

I’m still unsure how the medical experts cleared my bowel, only that they said it was too soon after my heart episode to perform hernia surgery unless it was an emergency. Also, they were not exactly sure that one of the hernias was causing the problem. It could have been scar tissue from the stoma surgery. I needed to go home and adopt a low fiber diet, which was just the opposite of the high-fiber, heart-healthy diet. Fuck!

My Bowel Blockage Care Instructions said to avoid high-fiber foods and raw fruits and vegetables with skins, husks, strings, or seeds. These could form a ball of undigested material that could cause a blockage if part of my bowel was narrowed. Chew my food very well, each bite about twenty times or until it was liquid. Then go to the ER for lockjaw.

Eat white bread, cooked or canned fruit, yogurt, well-cooked meat. Don’t eat rye bread, dried fruits, raw vegetables, crunchy peanut butter, ice cream with fruit pieces, nuts, popcorn, and foods that may cause gas, such as cooked cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and cauliflower. All my favorites. How would my body speak to me if there was no gas?

For lunch I’d always cut up a slice of watermelon to go with my sandwich. Now I had to separate out the chunks that had seeds. The markets advertised their watermelons as being seedless, but they lied or just didn’t understand what was going on in Mexico. I’d read that they grew watermelons in Timbuktu. I thought I should write and find out if theirs were really seedless.

My good wife was now peeling and cooking the carrot chunks that she added to my salad each evening. Creating seedless, skinless cucumber chunks too. What a woman. She also turned away discreetly as I chomped on a piece of meat twenty times.

I hated thinking so much about what I ate. And longevity. And how much the two might be connected. Or whether mortality was more related to genetics and luck.

One day I saw a recipe in our local newspaper for peanut butter bacon burgers, and the photo caption stated, “The creamy peanut butter on these bacon burgers acts almost like a sauce.” Two thin beef patties protruded from a potato roll with layers of bacon, sliced red onion, and lettuce. The recipe came from a new cookbook, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans. It made me think that inhabitants of the South were enjoying their food a lot more than restricted old men in the North. If I ate one, how many years would I lose?

Maybe it didn’t matter. At eighty-two, I’d had enough adventures for several lifetimes. My only problem was a diet-conscious wife who’d threatened me about checking out before she was ready. (She was only seventy-one).

The more I thought about the peanut butter bacon burger, the more I thought my body could handle it if I took small bites and chewed each one twenty times. All I had to do was convince my wife.

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