Nursing Home/Elderly Care cooks check-in: Who was your "special request" resident who passed away?

Universal experience for anyone that's worked in elderly care kitchens long enough: You have someone that you do something special for every day.... and then one day you make that special ground-up hamburger patty, and they send it back, and you go "What's the deal?" and they say "John died." Like damn who am I going to grind up hamburgers for anymore.....

I had a guy who always ate the soup de jour with lunch, and was the biggest soup critic.... I bring out the soup going "Yeah he's going to like this one" and he isn't there.... They tell me he has died.... Heartbreaking.

I had a woman who only ever wanted two basted eggs for breakfast, and so I always had to teach the new staff how to make basted eggs....

I had a woman with dementia who pretty much hated everything we cooked, but was always happy with a plain hotdog and would just bark HOT DOG when she didn't like the food, and give you a thumbs-up when you brought her the hot dog.

I had another woman, who was a non-native English speaker with some dementia, and she would say yes when she meant no, and so you kinda just had to figure her out like a puzzle game. I also had a woman with a stroke affecting one arm, so I always had to check that my servers set her table on the right side and unrolled her silverware roll for her. I really miss them.

I've worked in this building for a couple years and people still say things like "Go replace the ketchup on John's table" even if John has been dead for 6 months, because all the staff remember people like that.