cascadia teahouse

Do you remember the first cup of tea you made?

I’m sure I don’t remember the exact first one – memories from our early childhood are often more about things we were told or shown about our childhood than our own first-hand recollections thanks to “infantile amnesia” – but I do remember the sights, sounds, touch, intention, and the checklist in my mind as I made a cup of tea for my mother exactly as she had instructed, back when I was 6 or 7. 

I placed a plain white Corelle mug on the light green formica countertop in the kitchen, pulled a teabag from the lipton teabox, opened the paper container with the cheery red and yellow branding and looped the string through the mug’s handle, securing it with the label. Added the boiling water and waited exactly 3 minutes. I place the teabag in the bowl of a tea spoon and then wrapped the string around it to wring out every last drop of tea. Tossed the tea bag in the trash – Mom hadn’t built composting bins for her garden yet – dried the tea spoon and used it to add one whole teaspoon of granulated white sugar.

Yes, my mother’s family was from the American South. How did you guess? 

I stirred it up, added a splash of milk, and then it was ready for consumption. My mother’s tastes changed with the years, and her palate adjusted to different kinds of teas as she moved from a midwestern small town to mid-sized cities in the Southwestern deserts to the multicultural pacific northwest that became her home.

Sometime in my 30s I started taking her to Afternoon Tea. Her favorites were the Olympic Fairmont hotel and the Queen Mary Tearoom in Seattle; the Fairmont Empress and Buchart Gardens in Victoria BC; and on our big multi-generational trip to Ireland to celebrate together in the last year of her life, the Hardiman in Galway. I also took her to a tea ceremony demonstration at the Seattle Japanese Garden, where she had her first cup of usucha. (I’ll have more to say on that in an upcoming post.)

So in May and June of this year, on in-home hospice care after several years of battling cancer, my mother was no longer drinking Lipton as her morning wake-me-up. I made her final cups of tea using Harney & Sons Fine Teas’ delicious Cherry Blossom green tea, with just a touch of honey for a little sweetness. It was the same tea she chose for our last Mother’s Day Afternoon Tea, which she put on for her mother, with help from yours truly.

Watching someone die over days and weeks, holding their hand as they face fear, forget they’re dying, remember again and seek solace; as they experience pain and delirium, singing songs out of the blue that you’ve never heard, have conversations you’re not privy to and don’t understand, and ask you to recreate flavors and dishes from their childhood that they can’t eat or drink…

It’s a lot.

Almost every caregiver for my mother, except one nurse who did her initial hospice intake, was a woman. It’s not good for our society that we expect only women to do this work; it’s a lie that only women are suited for it, it’s yet another example of time-consuming, emotionally demanding – and sometimes physically demanding – work that we hide away behind closed doors. It’s expensive, even with medicare paying for everything except caregivers, a week of 24/7 care cost $8,500. It is also an honor and a gift, a perspective change that Zen practitioners and Buddhists appreciate as meditating in the charnel ground.