A few weeks ago, I decided to roast a full duck. I’d never roasted a duck before. I have a pretty good relationship with roasting chicken and a mixed history with roasting a turkey. I love duck, especially Peking duck, which is the style I decided to make, complete with homemade pancakes, quick-pickled daikon, sweet bean sauce, and thinly sliced cucumber sticks. This whole duck would be just for me and my wife, but I had a plan so nothing would go to waste. We’d eat Peking duck with pancakes on the first night, then I’d strip off the rest of the meat, make a broth with the carcass, and concoct a duck noodle soup with the leftovers, which could be eaten over the course of a few days. This one duck would provide many meals for us. But more than that, it would provide a distraction.

A little over a week before I decided to buy an entire frozen duck from the grocery store on a whim and frantically make fridge space for it to defrost over the course of 48 hours, my wife and I said goodbye to our 14-year-old French bulldog Lola. I say ours, but truthfully Lola was hers, my wife having spent 14 years with the sweet pup compared to my five. But Lola was the first dog I ever lived with, and for five years, she was a constant part of my life. I spent all of quarantine with her, took countless naps with her, once watched her jump into a pool in New Orleans not because she was thrill-seeking but because she was protective. She was trying to save me. I was not drowning, but she did not care for me being in any bodies of water or in proximity to danger. We jokingly referred to me as “stepmommy,” but it was really Lola who had the maternal energy in our relationship. She could never stand to see me cry. She was an endless supply of joy on the most difficult days. She didn’t leave my side any time I’d cook, which was often, because I love to cook.

Losing Lola was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through. I’m still parsing the emotional wreckage of it, unsure what to make of my grief which feels so much bigger than five years, even though I know I am lucky for those five years and we are lucky Lola lived to 14 at all, little fighter she was in the face of lifelong chronic illness.

I met her for the first time in a car. My wife picked me up at the Orlando airport so we could begin our long drive out west to Vegas, where we’d live together for what was supposed to be a few months but stretched longer due to the pandemic. There was Lola, sitting in the passenger seat, eager to greet me, because she was eager to greet anyone, would have left with a stranger any time we took her out to bars or to parks, so equal opportunity she was in her unending capacity for love and friendship. She had the coloring of a cow, the body type of a miniature pig, the disposition of a much younger dog (at least back then). I was captivated.

Mere days after that first meeting, I secretly Googled in bed “French bulldog life expectancy.” She was already ten years old, and I was already anticipating grief, a heavy premonition in my chest. But of course, there was no way to prepare for it.

I do know I am lucky for the time I got.

I could write more about Lola, of course, so much more, and I probably will, probably won’t ever stop, because she’s the kind of pet you carry with you forever, even if you only got five years. But you can also read the words of my brilliant wife — my favorite writer and certainly Lola’s, too —in her Substack and on Instagram.

I’m a slob in the kitchen. I’m a slob in most domains of my life but especially in the kitchen. I’ve always known this, but living with Lola made me forget just how bad I can be. I’m a tornado of a chef.

We liked to joke she needed a job, but she already had one. Aside from keeping us happy and well loved even in the scariest of times, she served a very straightforward and invaluable household role: She cleaned up my messes in the kitchen. Nary a crumb nor splash of sauce nor loose noodle nor chunk of cheese ever got past that dog. She patrolled the kitchen day in out, licking the floor, the parts of the cabinet she could reach, my feet. That dog would eat a rock if it was in her path during one of her “cleaning” rituals, which sounds a lot nicer than compulsive slurpfests.

Her transformation into a living Roomba had its downsides. On more than one occasion, she poisoned herself in the backyard by eating something she wasn’t supposed to, a rogue oak leaf, an acorn. Or a mysterious mushroom, as she did once during our anniversary trip in North Carolina. She was a diva who could make any event about herself, and I find that aspirational (we’re both Geminis). After she passed, we threw a small celebration of her life outside at our home, inviting friends who knew her over to enjoy a menu inspired by her favorite foods: a snack platter of cheez-its, blueberries, sliced cucumber, and chips; bacon-infused old fashioneds in honor of the bacon bits we gifted her off our plates on lazy weekend mornings; and a massive order of chicken tenders from Publix that would have elicited her most manipulative begging face. She was a silent and still beggar, knew all it took was that one look to make us crumble. We held the party on our anniversary weekend. It felt fitting to let her upstage us one last time.

So, no, it was not always technically ideal how thorough she was in her scouring of the kitchen for scraps, how passionate she was for the culinary arts. Once, before I knew her, she got into a cabinet and ate from a bag of flour. It couldn’t have even tasted good! That wouldn’t have stopped her though. Food was food, and the more forbidden, the more desirable it became.

She was occasionally a victim of my slobbery: On more than one occasion, I stained her white coat with a spill. Tomato sauce, coffee. The worst of all was the turmeric, which left a golden spot on her hip for weeks. I tripped over her more than once while cooking, but she never yelped or ran away, just kept trotting along underfoot, thrilled to be the world’s worst sous chef.

On Easter, my wife makes the meal. I am the primary cook in our household and very happily so, but there are a few recipes from my wife’s family that I love for her to make on certain occasions. We’re not religious, but we grew up in church, her in an evangelical environment that has led to her estrangement from the family those recipes come from, so we’ve queered Easter through the years. And on Easter, my wife makes a ham casserole. The first year she made it for me was in our tiny galley kitchen in Miami. I sat on the balcony having a mimosa and watching the ocean. She called for me, and I rushed to the kitchen, eager to help.

“Can you…do something about the dog?” she asked.

There was Lola, practically sitting on her feet and being a general nuisance as my wife attempted to stir a giant mixing bowl. I just laughed.

“No, I can’t stop her from that. Nothing can.”

She was, indeed, relentless. She was, I realize, the only one in my life who loves being in the kitchen as much as I do.

Her eyesight and hearing had pretty much gone in her last stretch of life, but this, I swear, heightened her sense of smell. She’d show up in front of the oven mere seconds after slabs of bacon hit the rack. I started joking she could smell when I merely thought about chicken.

She didn’t need her eyes or her ears to keep “cleaning” the kitchen every time I cooked. She moved slower, but the enthusiasm was still there. She wouldn’t let her age get in the way of her passions, and I hope I can channel the same one day.

Now, I slice cucumber and have to remember to use it all, not to save a few slices for her. Now, I toss my yogurt cup when I’m done without her licking it clean. Now, the kitchen is littered with crumbs, my wife forced to vacuum more often, but it’s impossible to stay on top of it completely, slob that I am. We knew she was “cleaning” the floors, but we didn’t know quite the extent of it until she was gone. The crumbs keep showing up, lurking in corners a vacuum struggles to reach, because a Dyson can’t hold a candle to the sudden contortionist abilities Lola developed in the kitchen. The mess of our kitchen floors is like our grief for her. Just when we think we’ve gotten things clean and in order, it gets all fucked up again.

On the first morning after the duck had defrosted, I woke up at 6 a.m. to prepare it. I pat the bird dry, salted it, set it on a wire racked-sheet pan to rest for an hour. I poured boiling water over its skin, which instantly puckered. I brushed it with a mixture of sugar, hot water, vinegar, and shaoxing wine. It went into the fridge and came out an hour later for another coat of that sweet and sour mix. I logged into work and tried not to think about Lola, which was impossible.

For the first time in my life, the kitchen felt like a lonely place. Following her death, our friends sent us so many gifts: flowers, a cactus, a donation to an animal shelter in her name. We got deliveries almost every day for weeks. My parents were coincidentally in town for our first grief week, and they were shocked. “Lola was like a celebrity,” my mom said after another knock on the door. She was! My wife had turned her into a beloved pet in the writing community and online. Our friends knew how much she meant to us.

Many sent us food. We got a charcuterie plate; a whole range of sweet and salty snacks; rugelach and babka straight from NYC; cookies somehow delivered warm; an entire package of meats, cheeses, and fresh bread from Zingerman’s, the famous deli from my college town. I was grateful for these gifts, because I wasn’t cooking much. The kitchen didn’t feel right with only one heartbeat in it. I burst into tears thinking about the fact that Lola never got a nibble of Zingerman’s cheese in her life, an absurd thing to cry about, yes, but the grief was strange and wild. As it always is.

Tackling the Peking duck was supposed to snap me out of it or at least be enough of an undertaking to distract me for a bit. It worked and it didn’t. It’s a complicated process (I mean grief, but I also mean cooking). After work, I took the bird out to rest again, stuffed it with green onions and garlic. I made a rich and fatty duck gravy with its giblets and neck to save for later in the week.

The roasted duck turned out perfect, with crispy skin and juicy meat. The homemade pancakes filled the kitchen with that warm toasted flour smell. We filled them with oily pieces of duck, sauce, cucumbers, and pickled daikon stained yellow with a dash of turmeric. I was happy with how it turned out, sad there was no one to offer a pinch of duck to (our cat loathes people food, which I know is technically a blessing).

Most of all, I know Lola would have been there for every step of it, all the hours it took to prepare and perfect this meal. She would have just been happy to be there, the way dogs are.

A writer friend who had lost an elderly pug earlier in the year told me she, too, missed the little sounds of her dog in the kitchen, that constant presence. She said she dried the sympathy flowers friends sent her and hung them in the kitchen, so I’m working on the same. I’ve hung photos of her above the stove, too, all of them of her with food. I have so many photos of Lola and food, almost as many as my wife has of me with food. There are times when I’m cooking corn chowder or late-night ramen or clam pasta and my brain thinks it sees her and I step around an invisible obstacle as if by muscle memory.

The kitchen will never feel quite the same. I’m acquiescing as best I can to that. It means she left her mark on it, filled it with her love and her steady, easy company. I know I can cook without her beneath me; it’s just that I don’t want to. The kitchen is a mess, but maybe that’s how it should be. We are, too.

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