Ice cream choices at Kendal today, by author

June 24, 2026

Today our family eats ice cream in your honor. When we became a couple, you were just nineteen, and me, not quite seventeen. I discovered right away that ice cream was your favorite sweet- except for the one summer when you worked in a Baskin Robbins ice cream store. After all you could eat for free, your young body finally rebelled. It took a short while before the “frozen dairy delight”, as we called it forever after we met, to reassert itself as your favorite food.

As the years went by, no matter who had ever shared a meal with you would have known that ice cream was on your menu. From the early days of eating an entire pint of Hagen Dås together (how exotic that tasted after years of boxed quarts of Lady Borden’s), to sniffing out Boston’s finest Brigham’s ice cream, to making our own hand cranked versions with cream separated straight from the Jersey cow’s milk in Vermont, to your discovery of gelato in Italy, to all the brands that had proliferated as we aged, ice cream was a constant love.

One night, home on Hospice care in the last few days of your life, you were barely conscious. After months of chemo and stem cell infusions, you had a “death rehearsal”, spiking a fever and gasping for breath. The night nurse and I thought this was it. But after sitting you up, pounding on your back to dislodge phlegm, and bringing down the fever with cold wash cloths on your forehead and under your armpits, you relaxed and fell back into a quieter sleep.

In the morning, the nurse spoke with me, and we agreed that you were out of the danger zone. You opened your eyes and said very clearly, “Is there an ice cream zone?” We laughed and you smiled, knowing it was a joke. We gave you all the ice cream you eat for breakfast.

When my grandson was four years old, eating ice cream on your birthday with his family at the picnic table outside, he got up and put a spoonful of his ice cream on the grass for you, the Grandpa Richard that he had never met. Your ashes have long since washed down the country stream to the Atlantic, but this spontaneous gesture sweetened the day for us all.

At your memorial, all three hundred folks agreed that it was the perfect choice to serve them four kinds of ice cream. What else would you have wanted to share with those who loved you?

We celebrate your birthday as sweet memories of you melt in our mouths.