I don’t recall if it was spring or summer, a Saturday or Sunday. But I do know that early on that warm sunny morning, Theresa’s beloved husband, Hendry, kissed her goodbye, jangled his car keys, and said with a wink, “I’ll be right back, Doll.”

Hendry was going to the bakery to buy Italian bread but as he reached for the handle of the screen door, he tugged at his shirt and fell to the floor. Their seventeen-year-old son heard Theresa scream; by the time he got to the kitchen, Theresa was draped over her husband’s collapsed and dead body, her wailing so fierce that neighbors from three houses away ran to see what had happened.

My mother and I were in the kitchen when the call came. She was at the stove cooking as I foraged in the fridge for a snack, eyeing the last piece of lemon meringue pie.

I rarely saw my mother cry but when she did, it usually followed news of death or tragedy. Seeing my mother cry unmoored me; it left me aching to make her feel better. As a kid, the only way I knew how to do that was to behave—be a good daughter. I closed the fridge door and turned my attention to my mother.

She swiped her eyes with the back of her hand and in her usual soft voice, asked me to please get the Pan. I didn’t need detailed instructions; I knew she meant the Big Pan.

She blinked away tears as she preheated the oven and set her ingredients on the kitchen counter: flour, eggs, butter, sugar. In the next hour or so, my mother baked a proper pound cake, dense and cakey on the inside with edges crisp and caramelized from the way she sugared the sides and bottom of the buttered pan. It would be my job that day to bring the cake to the home of Theresa, one of my mother’s closest friends.

When the cake had cooled and was ready for transport, my mother said, “Here, carry it like this.” She fixed in my hands the wooden board that held the long loaf cake, a sweet soft glaze weeping down its sides. Steady as a solider, I walked the cake six blocks to Theresa’s house that day as if I were carrying gifts to the altar at Sunday Mass.

When I say “pound cake,” you may imagine a cake baked in a loaf pan, or a Bundt pan. Or, you may envision a pound cake from the grocery store wrapped in plastic and sealed with an expiration date.

But the pound cake my mother made that day was scratch-baked in a jumbo aluminized steel Wilton pan that held enough batter to yield two cakes in one. Wilton markets it as one of its “performance pans.”

I’ve taken to calling it the Funeral Pan. I inherited it when my mother died. I use it now to bake cakes to bring to the homes of family and friends who are grieving.

Theresa lived more than sixty years as a widow. She died sometime before her hundredth birthday in a hospice facility shortly after suffering a stroke.

In the years following her husband’s death and long after my own mother died, I’d visit Theresa. We’d sit at her round, maple kitchen table, drink black coffee, and graze on fresh, homemade pastries. Holding my hand, she’d invariably recall the day her husband died. “I’ll never forget the day my Hendry died and your mother, God rest her soul, she sent you over with that big beautiful cake!” She’d let go of my hand and open her arms wide, as if describing the size of a freshly caught fish. Then she’d take my hand again and fix her eyes on her tangerine linoleum floor, recalling how the stream of mourners who shuffled in and out of her house that day ate the cake with gusto, as she sat in disbelief in her living room chair, the chair next to hers forever forsaken.

Sometime in her eighties or nineties, Theresa asked me to help her make a frittata to bring to her sister, Assunta. There’d been a death in Assunta’s husband’s family. When I arrived, Theresa was well into sautéing thinly sliced Vidalia onions and tiny cubes of peeled Yukon Gold potatoes. The familiar aroma from her cast-iron skillet was intoxicating. On her counter, she had already organized a large bowl of eggs whisked with whole milk, salt, and pepper. By its side was a smaller bowl of freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese and a round platter that I knew fit over the edges of the skillet. “I can’t lift it anymore, honey,” she said to me in a wispy voice. A voice almost apologetic that she could no longer summon the power of her youth.

“That’s why I’m here!” I said, aiming to assuage her frustration as an elderly woman living independently, no longer able to flip a thirteen-egg frittata from her heavy skillet onto a platter and back into the skillet again. I reminded Theresa that she had cooked everything, that she was the chef, and I was just there as her assistant and her driver.

“You and your sister are the daughters I never had,” she said and kissed my forehead.

Theresa said that to me a lot, and each time she did, I’d smile and take her face in both my hands and exclaim, “And how lucky are we to have another mother.” We’d embrace all over again, and count our non-blood bond as another blessing shared by our families.

Once in my car, Theresa sat in the passenger seat and held the frittata that rested under a freshly ironed tea towel. In the trunk of the car was a large cardboard box (lined with clean dish towels) that was crowded with a 9”x 13” pan of sausage and peppers, a 9”x 13” dish of eggplant Parmesan, Italian bread, a large box of assorted Danish pastries, and a cranberry walnut cake that Theresa made when the birds awakened her at four o’clock in the morning. As we drove to her sister’s house, Theresa repeated the list of what she was bringing and then said, “Jesus, I hope I made enough.”

I folded my lips over my teeth to conceal my smile, knowing it was Theresa’s genuine worry that her provisions were inadequate to the task of feeding Assunta’s family and friends. She squinted her eyes against the sun and glimpsed my smile. “You look like your mother right now,” she said, her voice breaking. “She taught you kids right.”

When I told Theresa that was a high compliment, a sweet silence hung between us. In my mind’s eye, I saw my mother and grandmother cooking and baking the foods of our people, imparting to us the importance of feeding and nourishing those we love. Though I never recall either of them saying it explicitly with words, they taught us how to express comfort and care with food as our medium. They taught us who to be to others in their darkest hours.

Each time I bake a cake in the Funeral Pan and bring it to those in mourning, I envision my ancestors ferrying peasant food through the alleyways and footpaths of their southern Italian villages. Their gifts to others became their gift to me, as I now live my life rooted in the caring traditions of my Italian culture.

When we reached Assunta’s, I walked Theresa into her sister’s house and, dish by dish, brought the food to the grieving family.

Later that day, Theresa called to thank me for my help with the frittata and the food delivery. We were finishing up our conversation when she asked, “What are you making for supper tonight?” I loved that she asked because it’s a question I’ve come to cherish, so deeply steeped in the meaning, value, and place of food in my culture.

“I made eggplant caponata,” I said, straightening the tablecloth I had just laid out across the table on the screened-in porch.

“Oh,” she said, “I love that! Did you make it Sicilian?”

“Yep.” I said, and went on to tell Theresa how I worked to achieve those satisfying balances between sweet and sour—with honey and balsamic vinegar—and smooth and crunchy—with toasted pine nuts and plump, golden raisins.

“Ah! Agrodolce!” she said. “Bittersweet.” I pictured her sitting at her kitchen table, nodding in approval at my eggplant recipe. I told her that I cooked it first on the stovetop and then put it in the oven to bake on a low heat.

“Why do you do that?” she asked in way that implied she’d consider my technique the next time she made it.

“I found that finishing it in a low oven brings out all that gooeyness of the dish.” I asked her if she’d like to come eat with us and though the invitation was sincere, I knew she wouldn’t accept. She’d have already eaten at five o’clock, the hour when most Italians of her generation had supper.

As expected, Theresa declined the dinner invitation and suggested that sometime soon I go to her house and we cook the dish together. “I’d love that, Theresa,” I said, already flipping the calendar in my head to set the date.

We never did find that day to cook together. But right up until the time she had her stroke, we kept up our regular phone calls and I’d visit her when I could. Sitting with Theresa in her kitchen was a little bit like going home. Each time I was there I’d envision my mother, Theresa, and Assunta sitting together at the table or standing at the door with their coats on waiting for me to pick them up and take them somewhere. By then, they all had to stop driving.

Anyone who lives to ninety-eight or ninety-nine sees a lot of loss. Theresa was the last of her siblings and close friends to die. She had lived through the Great Depression, a war her husband fought in, and lost her Hendry when she was a young woman. There were many other losses along the way, yet she delighted in telling me stories of her earliest years with Hendry and others, and about her lifelong friendship with my mother.

One story she never tired of telling me was how she, Assunta, and my mother nearly died in September 1938. They were working at the optical factory downtown when their supervisor told them to leave early because a “bad storm” was coming. They stepped outside and found the City of Providence getting hurled around and uprooted by what would come to be known as the Hurricane of 1938. They, along with three or four other women, formed a human chain and braved the streets of Providence as the gusts blew off their hats and earrings, and the pelting rain soaked their dresses tight up against their skin. They clutched each other until two of the women on the
chain panicked and slid their hands away. “We made it but those two girls, the ones who got scared, they perished,” Theresa said. I’d heard the same stories about the Hurricane of 1938 from my mother and Assunta, the details locked in place as tightly as they held onto each other on that infamous September afternoon.

Death, in my Italian culture, isn’t something we avoid. We talk about it, we anticipate it, we plan for it, we remember it, and we tell stories about our dead. And when death happens, we do what we were taught to do by generations before us; we do our part to help the bereaved mourn and remember their dead. We learn that there’s no rehearsing for death because when it comes, even if anticipated, it shows up with the force of that unexpected hurricane in 1938. We tumble into the breach, and then find our way home.

As Theresa and I finished our conversation about the eggplant caponata, she said she liked the idea of cooking agrodolce. “It’s life itself,” she mused. We take the sour with the sweet and work our way through the gooey, sticky creation that sustains us.

When Theresa died, I was traveling for work. I was heartbroken that I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye. But I made it home in time to go to her funeral with my sister and later that weekend, I made the pound cake for us to eat. When we toasted Theresa, Assunta, and our mother, we did so with the same sweet wine they once enjoyed. We raised our glasses in remembrance of agrodolce—the stuff, as Theresa said, that life is made of.

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