My mother’s last grocery list included food she could no longer eat

Dear Delyara, My mother died from pancreatic cancer, and today I found her final grocery list inside a cookbook. Milk. Bananas. Chicken thighs. Coffee. Strawberry jam. Bread. By the time she wrote it, she could barely eat more than a few spoonfuls of soup. I know because I was the person begging her to take another bite. I keep wondering why she wrote food she had no chance of eating. Perhaps habit. Perhaps optimism. Perhaps the list was from earlier than I remember. At the bottom, she wrote “cookies for Danny,” my son. He was five then. He is eleven now and does not remember that Grandma always kept chocolate cookies in the cupboard even though she hated chocolate herself. I showed him the list. He looked at it for two seconds and said, “Her handwriting was weird.” I wanted to tell him to look harder, as if attention could restore memory he was too young to form. Instead, I folded it and put it back. Tonight, I made chicken thighs and toast with strawberry jam, a ridiculous combination, simply because all of it was on the page. I ate alone. The list felt less like groceries and more like evidence that even while dying, my mother was still planning to feed people after her own body had stopped allowing her to be fed.