Yvette

Asked for five words, Yvette chose Fantabulous, friendly, happy, easy going and curious. In November 2020 she lived in a desert city in the Southwest with one of her daughters and two grandchildren, a year and a half after leaving the Midwest she still calls home. The move was for the children: I left a job that I love to come to a job that is just ok knowing that they would be ok. Money is what stresses her most: how am I going to pay this.

Her food world is practical and generous. She cooks about 70% of the household’s meals and shares the big monthly shop with her daughter. Breakfast is yogurt because it helps control my pressure; dinner all depends on what everyone wants to eat or what’s available to cook. She calls herself Carnivore, happy, seafood, moderate and semi healthy, goes to the meat first at a buffet, and keeps a private weakness for two small, fiery candies. One grandson will eat almost nothing, and she feels horrible when everyone eats but him. The whole family gathers at the table only at Holidays, get togethers and unfortunately funerals.

She did not simply agree that food shapes health: we have been eating the same food since forever. She takes a blood-pressure pill every day and says her health has no control over my life. She says the same of her mother, who lives with several chronic conditions and will not let it control her. One reading is that this is less denial than a family idiom: a refusal to be run by illness. Asked whether she would go vegan, she said no. Then, when the moderator raised reversing chronic illness: If it was a matter of life and death.. I am vegan!

Her lifeline turns on her body. A car accident led, a year later, to the discovery of a tumor and two aneurysms. Brain surgeries followed within weeks of each other. She tells it with comedy, and with faith: she believes the accident was planned from above, since without it the aneurysms would have stayed hidden. The scar on her forehead took longer: I finally realized that I didn’t have to be here. Before the surgery, at her grandfather’s funeral, a choir sang that it was all in God’s hands. She cried, and After that, I let go.

Her superpower is the face she shows others: I can’t say that I have superpowers because inside I might be screaming, but I have a great poker face. She sees the same face in her mother, who lost two brothers and her husband in one year and handled it like a boss! Her daughter once told her she had never seen her cry. Yvette’s answer: I don’t want you to feel my pain. One reading is that strength here is a form of care, carried at some cost. Yvette frames it as love. Her 2 a.m. person is her mother: when you get older you realize she was actually right.

The pandemic touched her quietly: a follow-up check-up she was due could not happen. On Day 5 she first said she would change nothing about how she eats, I guess if I could change anything it would be the prices. Then she settled on less fried food and an air fryer, and added: The only thing standing in my way is myself. The fear under the poker face she names only once, about the surgery: I was very scared but could not show it.