Six Sets of Dentures

‘’This is my father’s sixth set of dentures,’’ the woman said.

“Then why did you bring it here?” the therapist asked. He knew the story. He had been seeing the woman for about two years, ever since her father died, and had gotten to know her deeply.

Her father, who had spent his entire life as a food connoisseur, was a local celebrity. He died at the age of ninety. He had his first set of dentures made when he was fifty, and over the years, he had five more sets made for himself, each one a year apart. The therapist knew him and liked him too, and used to listen to his advice when he was alive. He had a refined palate, and over the years, he had also developed himself considerably in terms of food culture.

“This was the set of dentures my father used exclusively for eating pizza. I feel like I’ve developed a very deep emotional attachment to these dentures, unlike the others, doctor.”

Her father had a method like this, though his followers didn’t know much about it. The therapist had learned about it from the woman after her father died.

He had different sets of dentures for different types of food. For example, he would eat seafood with one set, pastries with another, and red meat with yet another. He had a small waist bag, and whenever he was invited somewhere for a meal, he would put six different sets of dentures in it and take them with him. Whenever the food changed, he would discreetly go to the bathroom or use some other excuse to leave the table, quickly change his dentures, and return to the table a short while later. He had become an expert at changing his dentures quickly.

“Why does he do something like that?” the therapist had asked when he first heard the story.

The answer was very simple: having multiple sets of dentures made him happy. He saw them as parts of his body, and he enjoyed giving each of them special attention and appreciating what made each one unique, just like a father who regularly buys his children their favorite foods and chocolates.

Just like a father who could tell his twins apart despite them looking identical, and knew both of them very well, he never confused his dentures with one another. What’s more, he hadn’t put any markings on them. Even so, he knew them all, knew what he had eaten with each one, and knew which foods each set of dentures liked.

“But this makes absolutely no sense, and it’s impossible,” the therapist had said as he listened to the story about the woman’s father. “I mean, as a psychologist, I can say with confidence that he must have had soup at least twenty times with the set of dentures he used to eat fish. I’m certain of it.”

“Absolutely. My father didn’t love us—I mean me and my other two sisters, all three of us. And he felt justified in not loving us. In his eyes, we weren’t children worthy of him. Cooking, world cuisine, desserts—in short, none of us had any interest in anything related to food. We ate whatever was given to us, or whatever random dish had been decided on for that particular meal. This drove my father crazy, and he was always ashamed of us.”

The therapist rolled his eyes.

“It’s very complicated. You developed a food-related trauma because of your father, your father developed a trauma that made him withdraw from his children and redirect his love toward an object, and so on and so forth. Your traumas have gotten all mixed up. They’ve really turned into one big mess. I think it’s best if we don’t get into any of that. Let’s focus on grief.”

And today, when the woman brought a set of dentures to the session, the therapist had worried that they would end up getting into the subject of her father’s obsession with dentures. To be honest, her father’s obsession with dentures had definitely played a role in her grief lasting this long, but the therapist didn’t pay much attention to it. He approached her grief superficially and, every time, gave her the same generic advice: get rid of your father’s belongings, accept that he is dead, and so on.

Acceptance. What a wonderful piece of advice. This suggestion, whose physical execution no one really knew how to explain, had become a cliché among almost everyone with even the slightest interest in psychology. But acceptance wasn’t an action like eating or putting on slippers; it couldn’t really be explained step by step. If you told someone to put on their slippers, you could describe the action to them by saying, ‘Take your socks off, put your foot into the opening of the slipper, now push your foot forward.’ But because acceptance couldn’t be described as a series of actions, it remained a rather weak suggestion. Acceptance was a phenomenon whose exact process was unknown, and which could happen spontaneously, or even by accident.

‘’Hmm, you’ve developed an emotional attachment to the set of dentures your father used only for eating pizza. We can’t be sure that he actually used them only for pizza, but anyway. We talked about this in the very first sessions: your father couldn’t actually tell which food he ate with which set of dentures. Anyway. Here’s what I think: let’s imagine the dentures as your father’s children. And since he ate only pizza with this particular set, let’s assume that he treated this child differently from the others. In that case, we could say that you believe your father singled you out from the other children, and that even though he didn’t love any of you, he loved you more than the others. It’s that simple.’’

For the first time, the woman found the therapist’s words (who had been constantly going on about “acceptance, acceptance”) to actually make sense.

“I’ll take the dentures.”

“What?”

“I said the dentures. Give them to me.”

The woman, finding the therapist’s last words surprisingly logical, handed him the dentures for a moment, trusting that he might actually solve the problem.

The therapist quickly stood up, threw the dentures onto the floor, and began stomping on them with his left foot. He kept kicking and stomping on the dentures.

“How can you not love your daughters for such a ridiculous reason! You bastard! Do your daughters have to be interested in food just because you are?! Everyone has different interests! Did you ever stop to think about what your daughters might be interested in, what they enjoy, what their hobbies are, huh?! What kind of art are they drawn to? Are they interested in technology? What are they interested in? Did you ever think about any of that?! You piece of shit who thinks he’s some kind of food connoisseur, I watched every damn program you were on! You have a fucking terrible palate!”

The woman watched the therapist screaming at the top of his lungs, frozen in shock. But she couldn’t intervene. Maybe she didn’t want to.

The therapist suddenly stopped. He went over to the dustpan and brush sitting in the corner of his office, with no clear reason why they were there, and swept up the pieces of the dentures from the floor. Then he went over and threw them in the trash.

“That’s it. The dentures are dead. Your father is dead.”