The surest signs of marital stability in my childhood home were my mother’s cooking and my father’s appetite.

They had an arranged marriage -- meeting and speaking to one another for the first time on their wedding day. For the past 52 years of marriage, food has been their most fluent love language.

My parents share an authentic Pakistani palate, while ours grew more Americanized over the years. Most Sunday mornings, my mom made rose-pink Kashmiri chai with flaky puff pastries that resembled the bakarkhani they enjoyed growing up. While my mom cooked traditional meals for us, my dad would get us breakfast sandwiches from McDonald’s or take us out for pizza as a treat.

We internalized the message that feeding someone is an act of love, and that eating involves more than getting sustenance. It’s a way of showing affection, giving respect, sharing joy and connecting with people and memories. These ideas are ingrained in our culture. In Asian households, we greet family with the question: Have you eaten?

So, even though my father has spent the past two months going from the hospital to inpatient rehab to a skilled nursing facility, my mom has been the guardian of his meals and snacks. She’s kept a close eye on whether he finishes his protein shakes or if he needs more homemade food brought to him.

She usually spends several hours with him every day at the skilled nursing facility.

That abruptly changed recently when my mom contracted pneumonia, which landed her in the hospital for three days. Her doctors told her she needed time to recover and instructed her to stop going to the nursing facility for at least a week.

Prior to this, she had been bringing my father his lunch and dinner every day. Her absence may have provoked a decline in his appetite. Even when my siblings took food to him -- food that my mom had prepared -- he only ate a few bites.

Last week, my mom told me that my dad hasn’t felt like eating much lately. She said the side effects of some of his medications have altered the taste of certain foods, creating a sour flavor. I could tell it upset her.

Hearing this affected me more than I expected.

My father has endured many indignities and pains over the past few years as his Parkinson’s has worsened. We still don’t know whether he will be able to come home anytime soon. He needs to regain some of the strength and stamina he’s lost from being mostly bed-bound.

But how will he get stronger if he isn’t eating enough?

I discovered a body of research on how to encourage eating and increase appetite for elderly folks whose eating habits have changed. Experts say to offer nutrient-dense foods, and to find ways to make mealtimes more enjoyable.

Last year, I got in an argument with my father because I said he was eating too many desserts and too much sugar. I told him it would only worsen his health issues. He did not appreciate his daughter telling him what he should or should not eat.

Now, I feel like offering him whatever dessert he wants.

I inherited my love of food from my father. I wonder if we’ve lost that connection. I’ve already felt like I’ve been losing him slowly, piece by piece, over the past five years. First, our phone calls dwindled. Then, our in-person conversations changed. His moods became more unpredictable. In the past few months, he’s lost his mobility.

I don’t want him to lose the pleasure that comes from eating foods he has enjoyed his entire life.

The day my mom was discharged from the hospital, she made sure my sister took one of my father's favorite sandwiches to him. Exactly one week later, she was back at his bedside -- homemade meals in hand.

Her food is love.

When our children were young, many of our vacations involved piling into our Prius and driving 750 miles to visit my family in Texas. Our fancier trips took us to theme parks or beaches in Florida or national parks in the West.

I didn’t grow up in a family that took vacations -- not the weeklong getaway kind. There were too many of us, my parents worked all the time, and I’m sure they couldn’t afford it. But we had the endless days of summer with our cousins, hanging out at the pool and making our own neighborhood adventures. We walked to the nearby grocery store, attempted to make homemade pizza, rode our bikes for miles and picked wild blackberries.

Our imaginations made going nowhere feel special.

When we had children of our own, I wanted to give them experiences that captured those feelings of joy and possibility. My son recently told me that I don’t plan family vacations; I plan family adventures. This is a diplomatic way of saying that our trips end up heavy on exertion and light on relaxation.

In my defense, doing something together that has an element of daring and provokes wonder at the world’s beauty is my definition of fun. If it takes some effort to find it, it makes the discovery even more memorable.

When you have young adult children, busy with their summer internships, friends and conflicting school schedules, you never know when you will get a chance for a family vacation. But the stars and our schedules aligned last month so we could all visit our daughter, who was finishing her semester in Paris.

We had less than a week, and I wanted us all to experience something new together. My research led me to Jungfraujoch, a mountain pass in the Bernese Alps with the highest train station in Europe. It’s part of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there from Paris would require some effort. We would take a Eurail train from Paris to Basel, Switzerland, and then to Interlaken, which takes about seven hours. From there, it would take one more train to a gondola, then yet another train ride up to Junfraujoch -- around two more hours of travel.

My husband was skeptical of the idea of traveling 20 hours round-trip over the course of three days just to spend two hours on a snow-covered mountain in the Alps.

It will be worth it, I promised. Privately, I hoped it would be.

When the train brought us into the mountainous Bernese Oberland region of central Switzerland, it felt like we were riding into a storybook. The sky was foggy as we passed emerald-colored lakes, bubbling rivers, clusters of chalets, ice-capped mountains, dense forests and glaciers. The scenery had a mystical feeling. What was it like to live enveloped by so much natural beauty?

I wanted to memorize the landscape and the look of awe on our children's faces when they saw the Alps for the first time.

We stayed the first night in the resort town of Interlaken, surprised by the number of Indian restaurants in a tourist town with 23,000 residents. We found ourselves eating in a small pizzeria run by a Syrian immigrant. I pointed out that we were eating an Italian dish with Turkish gyros served by a Syrian to Pakistani-Americans in Switzerland.

The next day, we trekked up the mountain to our Jungfraujoch destination. There were areas for panoramic views, a terrace to walk on the largest glacier in Europe, a path to hike in the snow and an ice palace filled with ice sculptures.

On our return, we accidentally took the wrong train and had to double back to catch the correct one. We missed our connection in Basel and had to reroute. I believe it took us 11 different trains to get from Wengen to Paris over the course of a very long day.

As much as we will remember the stunning landscapes of Switzerland, we will also remember running to catch our train and the leisurely lunch we ended up having at a cafe in Basel. Isn’t that part of what travel teaches us? Learn to pivot; be flexible; enjoy the moment in front of you.

I surveyed my family later about the adventure and the journey it required.

Unanimously, they said it was worth it.

Ashley Sykes, 26, told her mom she was going upstairs to lie down.

Her mom, Carla Jacks-Simms, 55, decided to check on her after several hours. She worried about her eldest daughter, who had struggled with Type 1 diabetes for most of her life.

Jacks-Simms discovered Sykes’ lifeless body in her bed. A diabetic coma had killed her.

That was in 2016. Jacks-Simms keeps her daughter’s ashes in an urn on a shelf in the front room of the house she’s lived in for the past 20 years.

“I guard it with my life,” she said.

She raised seven children on the first floor of this two-family flat in north St. Louis. Another of her daughters, and her own five young children, moved in next door. Jacks-Simms makes sure her grandkids get to the bus stop in the morning and home from school when their mom is at work.

On May 16, a mile-long EF3 tornado struck St. Louis. When Jacks-Simms' home lost power and she heard a window break, she ran to the basement to take shelter.

When she came out, her street looked like a scene from a horror movie. The house across the street from her was now a pile of rubble.

“Oh my (expletive) God!” she screamed. “I know people live there! Where are they?!” Everyone was yelling and trying to find each other. The roof from her next-door neighbor’s house was torn off and had crushed the truck parked in front of her home. Powerful winds blew out the windows in her house. Glass and debris filled the rooms.

The streets were littered with downed power lines, poles and large trees.

“It felt like a bomb had been dropped, and we didn’t win,” she said. “I really feel for those in war-torn countries now.”

She thanked God that her neighbors had not been home when their house collapsed. Another neighbor, who used to walk up and down the street daily, was found dead in his home.

When Jacks-Simms' daughter got home from work, they started walking through the unpassable street to try to get to her children, who had been stuck on school buses for hours. They didn't have power, gas or water for days. Young men in the neighborhood started clearing out the trees blocking the road. Her family boarded up their own broken windows.

“Who else was going to help us?” she said.

The first few nights, she stayed outside on the porch, guarding whatever might be salvageable in the house. She’s never had renter’s insurance, and had to throw away all the food in the fridge. She’s been getting by on hot dogs handed out by volunteers in the area. She needs someone to haul away her soaked mattresses, ruined furniture and clothing.

“I worked so hard for my little stuff,” she said.

She works as a caregiver, even though she’s recovering from major surgery herself after a car accident in December. But she hasn’t been able to work since the storm damaged her home.

Jacks-Simms often sits on her porch, counting her blessings and thanking the Lord. Sometimes she goes inside the house and takes naps on a chair. She doesn’t want to leave Lucy, her beloved Chihuahua, behind, and is looking for a place to stay where her dog would be welcomed.

Four days after the tornado, when another dangerous storm rolled in, she relented and stayed the night at a friend’s house. That night, part of her roof collapsed, and water collected in the rooms.

She knows she will have to find somewhere to stay while her landlord repairs the house. She and her displaced neighbors lack so many resources. She needs help finding affordable housing, money for a deposit, furniture, clothing, toiletries and pet supplies.

Even Lucy’s doggie bed got water-damaged.

The thing that’s been bothering her, she said, is the people driving by to film content and take photos for their social media accounts.

“We don’t want to be on your TikToks,” she said. “We’re just sitting here protecting our stuff.”

Come help remove debris from the street, she said. But don’t come gawk at their misery.

Jacks-Simms has already dealt with her biggest losses: her daughter’s death in 2016, then her father's death three years ago. She will find a way forward again.

Her motto remains, “Everything’s going to be OK. We’re going to be where we need to be.” And her faith in God sustains her.

For proof, she looks no further than her living room.

In a home shaken and fractured by two powerful storms, her daughter’s urn stood untouched.