The Race is Not to the Swift

I had a front row seat to my mom’s last supper. I mean the last one she cooked. From the first slice of white onion to the last drop of fresh cream, I watched her craft a sublime clam chowder before ALS clamped down on her last muscles. In spite of 2021-level health-consciousness, an eight-glass-a-day water drinker before it was cool, a life-long slim waistline and at least two-miles of walking per day, she wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

That night, she brought her chowder as a gift to two couple friends we met for dinner. Both of those couples are alive today, fifteen years later. Her husband, my dad, survived her by ten years. None were as health-conscious as her. Not even close. They often chose fried. They settled for sedentary. Why did ALS choose Olga, my mom? In spite of all her efforts and prayers and micro acts of food-choice self-denial and plenty of ruffage and and positive thinking and Andrew Weil health-books, she was the first of them to go.

My front row seat was a heavy, black wrought-iron barstool my parents had commissioned a Mexican ironworker to make years before. I leaned on a teal-and-chocolate splattered granite bar that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Olga had specifically designed the stove to face the bar so she could visit with family as she cooked, but I think it was so she could show off her cooking skills. When the onions splashed the hot olive oil, turning the tear-inducing sulphur compound in onions into a yeasty, meaty sulphur compound, I knew I was home. Then came an ungodly amount of garlic and I witnessed Olga migrating into the zone like Michael Jordan did when the clock was a single digit. A splash of water, clam juice and chicken bouillon completed the chowder base.

I had been coming back to their home in Sierra Vista, Arizona, an hour outside of Tucson, in view of the Mexican border, since the ALS diagnosis. The trip from Los Angeles was only an hour and I knew the progression of ALS only goes one way. Before this trip I’d called her on my hour drive to work and this bulwark of a woman had cried for thirty minutes about being taken from her family. I sobbed when I put the car in park in the dark garage under my office building. She’d been so lucky, so many times, it seemed, like, it wasn’t happening…this couldn’t happen.

Olga, a quintessential Austrian, with an accent as thick as the matriarch of TV’s Modern Family, was a survivor. She avoided harm when the hungry and ruthless Russian army plowed over her border town, looking for Nazi’s, and, if they happened to find them, fresh thirteen-year-old girls. She hid in hay-loft, inches from Soviet eyeballs, and had her own Julie Andrews, Sound of Music-moment. This is a woman who met a fresh-faced American Lieutenant while working a kiosk in Vienna, married him, and made homes in Colorado, California, Germany, Turkey and Arizona, charming Army generals and endearing herself to foreign dignitaries.

This day in the kitchen was a sunny, winter afternoon, with rays of sun beaming sideways through the rising smoke of the sauté. They shadowed the new, deeper lines on Olga’s face, making them look like deep crevasses. Were these deeper wrinkles from stress? Or muscles losing their grip on skin tissue? ALS does that. It attacks motor neurons which control the muscles responsible for basic movements. This meal would be Olga’s last voluntary, discretionary act of love.

Knowing she was near the end of normal conversation I asked her about something that had perplexed me for years. Ten years before, Olga had developed a fascination with Alpacas: that cute, furry, llama-looking creature from Peru. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars raising a herd of them, traveling to shows throughout the US and then travelling to Peru to research them. We, her four kids, couldn’t understand the allure and scratched our heads over why she loved that critter. This day in the kitchen, both of us knowing what lain before us, knowing that conversation with words was almost over forever, I asked her to think deeply about something before I asked her. She smiled, puzzledly. I waited. She waited for the question. Finally I asked, “Mom, can you help me with something? I need to know this and please take a moment before you answer. Are you ready?” She nodded. “Tell me, what was the fascination with Alpacas? What was it that so captured your love and devotion and investment? I have never seen a woman fall so in love with another creature.”

She relaxed into a smile and hesitated. I waited for the world. Then she said, “They’re cute.”

“No, no, you can’t say that mom," I said, "there is no way you can say you did all that for cuteness…come on mom, you gotta tell me…you may never have another chance…please.”

She tilted her head back and to the side, took another moment and said again, “They’re cute.”

In spite of every insistence of mine, it’s all I got. I never got a secret or insight or “on my bucket list” or leave-it-all-on-the-court or pursue your dreams. I got one contraction and one adjective. Thanks mom.

The bacon for the clam chowder had already been cooked and placed on paper towels and patted with another on top. She couldn’t keep bacon out of the recipe but wanted to make sure there was no excess fat. The fresh cream was equally important but was used sparingly. Then came lightly parboiled, still-toothy diced potatoes and two huge fifty-one-ounce cans of Costco clams and enough Morton salt to be granted company stock. These were all brought to a low boil in a heavy pot. With angular hands, pocked with shiny spots on top of bulging joints, she stirred the soup. After letting it cool, she scooped portions of the soup into a Vitamix blender and filled a couple Mountain High yogurt containers with the elixir to bring to the dinner that night. She was glad to have cooked for dad and me; she was glad it brought smiles to our faces. But her real joy was to bring her last supper to her best friends that night.

The dinner with friends was normal. It was festive. We met at the Mesquite Grill in the foothills of the ten-thousand-foot Huachuca mountains. Olga’s dearest friend pulled me aside in the parking lot, out of eyesight of Olga, with tears filling her eyes. We hugged. We all knew it was near the end. But dinner was normal. We all pretended life would go on as normal, just like Olga wanted us to do.

The poster child for ALS is Lou Gehrig. It’s often called Lou Gehrig disease. How did he feel as the end stared him down? What did he say to 62,000 fans in Yankee Stadium in his final words? Even though he was known as the “Iron Horse,” having played 2,130 games in a row, after starting to miss easy pitches, he was diagnosed with the disease. A couple weeks later, at his farewell ceremony on July 4, 1939, after telling the emcee he was too emotional to speak, the crowd started chanting, “We want Lou, we want Lou.” His manager gave him a nudge and Lou stumbled to the microphone and said, "For the past two weeks, you have been reading about a bad break," his voice raspy with emotion, "yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth." He thanked his teammates and said, "When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know.”

Olga was never nudged to the mic. She never addressed a crowd. The closest we got was the Alpaca question. But did she share Lou Gehrig’s gratitude? Probably not on that clam chowder day, but I think she eventually did. Once the acceptance period of mourning had arrived, I think she settled in. I think she became grateful for a full life. Sure, she wished for more than the seventy-five-years she got, but that ain’t too bad.

Was Lou Gehrig really lucky? I guess so, if you look at it in a certain way. Was Olga? Yeah, I think so. And I think she showed a little of it that night.

ALS is humbling. Live is humbling. As much as we try to control, the Bible still rings true with “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong…but time and chance happen to them all.” Lou Gehrig new that. And I think Olga did too.