A Sandwich Killed My Mom

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The last time I talked to my mother, she laughed over the phone from her kitchen in South Carolina, saying she had to hang up to go to the bathroom — a running joke between us. (We both have tiny bladders.) It was July 28, 2024 — a Sunday morning — and I was lolling in bed in my sun-filled apartment in Astoria when I decided to call her to say hi. My sister Ellen, who lives in upstate New York, had the same instinct the next morning. When they talked, my mother mentioned to her that she felt funny — an unusual admission, given how rarely she complained. A lifelong Catholic and daughter of immigrants, she was always insistent that she didn’t want to “bother” anyone. Ellen suggested she go to the doctor that afternoon.

When my mother didn’t show up for her weekly mahjong game on Tuesday evening, her friends in the 55-and-over community where she lived in Bluffton went to her house and found her unconscious and unresponsive on the kitchen floor. They called an ambulance.

That night, Ellen and I had several inscrutable phone calls with the hospital where she wound up. Her doctors and nurses kept telling us she was very sick, but they didn’t know why. By 6 a.m., I was on my way to La Guardia with a one-way ticket to see her.

I arrived at the hospital around noon, dragging an old roller suitcase behind me. When I turned the corner to my mom’s room and saw a breakfast tray, for a moment, I thought, Great, she’s eating! But as I stepped farther into the room, I saw my mom unconscious and struggling to breathe; her body was stiff. That’s when I knew she was near the end. None of the physicians managing her care had figured out what was ravaging her body. It was as if she had been invaded by an alien force.

Over the next four hours, Ellen and I stood next to her bed, stroked her arm, and watched her die. She took her last breath at 5 p.m., less than 24 hours after she was supposed to be playing mahjong.

One by one, Ellen and I called her friends and family to break the news. It was excruciating telling them that we didn’t know why she had died. People would ask, “Did she bump her head when she fell?” No, I would say. “Then why? How?” She and I had been so close. How could I have not even the faintest idea as to what had happened to her?

In the days and weeks after my mother’s death, I waded through the mind-numbing paperwork that follows a loved one’s passing. At night, I barely slept. In bed, memories would flit around my mind like fireflies trying to get my attention. Grieving my mother was different from grieving my sister, a year older than me, who had died two years earlier following a long battle with cancer. We had watched disease slowly eat away at Alycia’s body for 11 years. But life had faded from my vibrant and healthy mother in a matter of hours — her skin rapidly turned waxy and her limbs suddenly became limp — like a time lapse in a horror movie. The memory of her final moments looped on replay in mind.

Then, one afternoon at the end of August, my phone rang with a South Carolina area code. I answered, thinking it was one of my mom’s friends calling with condolences. Instead, the South Carolina Health Department told me that listeria was found in my mom’s blood sample. I stopped in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, then stumbled home, Googling “listeria” on the way. The Boar’s Head recall filled the search results. That was the night I learned about the Virginia factory that the company had just closed — the mold and mildew, and the flies, ants, beetles, and cockroaches. I read about meat left on the floor and puddles of slime.

If I had to describe my mother’s parenting style in a word — at least when it came to me — I might say indulgent. In my earliest memory of her, she stands at the stove on a dark, cold morning, stirring chocolate into hot milk and sprinkling cinnamon sugar onto toast, the way her own mother had for her. We were a family who unapologetically enjoyed sweets.

When I was in elementary school, my mom and I liked to go to Bloomingdale’s and browse the floors as if we were in a gallery. I remember reaching out to touch everything — the designer dresses, the vases, the jewelry — and her hand on my shoulder with a gentle reminder: “Just look.” After each trip, I would go home and sketch the objects in my own room — a chair, a little vase, a dish — and embellish them with colored patterns, dreaming of becoming some sort of designer when I grew up. One afternoon, we went to the home department not just to look, but to buy. Dishes. My mother let me choose. I scrutinized every china pattern before my eyes landed on a set of deep-blue, glazed plates, each piece slightly imperfect, as if they were handmade. Afterward, we carried heavy bags to Serendipity and ordered ice cream sundaes. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered. Dessert for lunch was our secret.

Throughout my childhood, my mother collected cookbooks. My sisters and my father devoured the elaborate meals she prepared while I, the pickiest eater in the family, sat mute at the table, not taking a bite. My father sometimes made me sit there long after everyone else had finished and the plates were cleared, staring into a serving of beef bourguignon that seemed to be congealing into an even less appetizing substance. I remember my mother returning to the table to check on me, and presenting me with a peanut butter sandwich on white bread.  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

My mom actually told me about the sandwich that killed her. The memory of the conversation drifted into my head that first night after the health department called. At first, I wondered if my brain was inventing the discussion — crafting a puzzle piece that would fit and fill in that elusive how and why. But over the following days, I studied my phone records and found the call on July 17. My mom had called me out of the blue to confirm a plan she and my sister Ellen had hatched to put me on the deed to her house. I don’t know what made her mention the liverwurst she’d picked up for lunch that day. But she told me that she hadn’t had it in years and that I’d liked it as a child. I could picture the meat’s greasy sheen and faint beige color and could almost taste the metallic tang that seemed to seep from it. “Ew, Mom. Liverwurst?” I said. She responded with a defensive tone, and immediately, I felt a little bad for judging her, “Liverwurst was a delicacy back when I was growing up in the city,” she said. I laughed. Our conversation turned back to the house. I told her that she would live to be 100 — after all, she was in perfect health — and that we could talk more about my inheritance in ten years or so, when she was ready to move out.

Now the musky flavor of puréed meat clung to the back of my throat, making me nauseated. I trudged through each day in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, trying to forget my concerns about the sandwich and “get on with it all,” as my mother would have advised. But at a certain point, I could no longer ignore my anguish: I contacted a lawyer who was handling some of the listeria cases I had read about in the news. He explained that we could find out whether the strain in my mom’s blood sample was a match for the Boar’s Head recall. Documents were signed, my mom’s health records were scoured, and blood samples were analyzed. In early November 2024, we learned that the listeria sample from my mother was a match.

A few weeks later, I flew to South Carolina to pay the utility bills and have an exterminator come to my mother’s house. Tentatively, feeling as if I were violating her privacy, I rummaged through her kitchen drawer in search of a pen so I could take some notes on what to keep and toss. There, as if my mom had sent me to look for it, lay a receipt from the local Publix: BH Liverwurst, $4.44.

I pressed my head to the kitchen counter, inches from where my mother had collapsed, and wept.

My relationship with food has changed. My heart races a little all the time.

At home, I pick at my meals and linger at the table too long, almost the way I did as a child. The food doesn’t so much disgust me as perplex me. Silently, I question it: Where are you from? Where have you been? What have you been through? Are you safe? Can I believe what I see?  

I unpack groceries from all the usual sources — a corner shop, the supermarket, a farm stand, a delivery service — and examine each item on high alert. I have always been a conscientious consumer (in part from having worked in women’s magazines and passively absorbing dozens of “healthy eating” stories) and try to balance organic and locally grown with cost and value. But now, navigating the aisles or scrolling options online is fraught. Simple choices — eggs, lettuce, a cut of meat — have become complicated. Which brand? Which label? What’s really in it? I used to like trying new recipes — the chopping and putting together of ingredients relaxed me. Now I frequently lose my place in the middle of the instructions. I’ll forget crucial ingredients and scrub vegetables too long and too hard, and I have to swat away catastrophic thoughts about dirty food as the process unfurls. Everywhere I go, these thoughts wind their way into my inner monologue. I’m not phobic of eating, but I sense a creeping paranoia.

I see a change in my college-age daughter, too. Recently, she called me from Trader Joe’s in Boston: “I’m looking for eggs and not seeing them. Is there a recall? Should I not buy them?” And from her dorm room: “My roommate is eating a sandwich. I asked her what kind of ham it is, and she thinks it’s Boar’s Head. Should I tell her to throw it out?” And on a Sunday morning: “I just ate frozen waffles. Should I not have?” I’m trying to coach her to tune into her body and be mindful of what she is eating but not get crazy about it. I remind her that Grammy died from eating a sandwich but that, fortunately, it doesn’t happen every day. (“At least, I hope not,” I manage to stop myself from adding.) “We still live in a culture with checks and balances, and all the noise around these food recalls is good, because at least someone is bringing these issues to our attention,” I tell her. I realize I have no good answers.

The other day, I wandered the aisles of a local grocery store, looking at labels and expiration dates. I wondered if a sticker that said “biologique” meant that the blueberries I picked up were safer than the other varieties. They didn’t look that great, but I bought them anyway. The next morning, as I tossed them in with my Greek yogurt and a handful of crunchy walnuts, I wondered if the National Organic Program, a federal regulatory program that develops and enforces food standards for organically produced agricultural products sold in the United States, has had its eyes on my blueberries. Has anyone from that faceless bureaucracy charged with safeguarding our food supply ever even glanced at these? The thought felt absurd, yet it lingered.

This fruit should have been a vibrant, juicy gift. Instead, I feared it was a hollow promise wrapped in plastic and marketing buzzwords. I wondered if the soil the berries grew in was fertilized with any contaminants. I worry that food safety might worsen as the budgets for federally funded programs are broadly slashed. Will food safety be our country’s next great casualty? Or maybe it’s already almost gone, gasping for air.

I opened the fridge and stared at the carton containing the rest of the expensive blueberries, and then popped a few more in my mouth.  They offered no burst of sweetness, no tangy pop. Instead, they yielded under my teeth with a disconcerting mushiness. I spat them into my compost container and then tossed in the rest.

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