I work at a bakery in Amsterdam on Saturdays. One of my favorite jobs is to slice the basque cheesecake. I fill up a metal container with super hot water, place a large butcher's knife inside, grab a cutting board, and retrieve the cheesecake from the walk-in fridge. I center a cake cutter over the center of the cake to perforate small lines along the soft surface before removing the now very hot knife – still slightly wet – from the metal container. And then I begin to slice. 

The nice thing about this particular job is that I’m completing a task, but it’s mostly muscle memory. My mind is free to journey elsewhere, just a bit (there is still a knife in play). During the early fall, my mind is on a single-track journey, down a familiar winding driveway. Always back to my dad, our last month together, and the shape of a new season. Two years without him is an incredibly long time; it’s almost the entire lifespan of Ida, for example, which means she hasn’t known my dad for most of her life. When I think about her having no memory of someone who takes up so much of mine, I am, frankly, in agony. 

I often wish my daughters could experience the second-nature talent and imagination of my dad’s baking. I want them to say, “Can you make me a cake that looks like a bowl of rain!” or something weird that kids say and then get exactly what they asked for. No rules.

My dad always made me a spectacular birthday cake, and made sure it was one I would enjoy. Sometimes I was vegan or gluten-free “for fun” (attention). He would experiment with using tofu as a thickening agent, fold in extra blueberries to add sweetness, variations of flour to make it the perfect density. We’d eat it together and marvel at how he’d achieved such a result, sitting at his table in the living room, up against windows that looked out onto the sea. A thick hedge of honeysuckle lined the gate right outside.   

There is so much about loss that time makes harder. So much about it that makes me afraid I’ll lose any small particle of him that lives inside my head. I want the memories bobbing up near the surface, no matter how many years go by. I want the memory of my dad making my birthday cake to stay comedically close. So close that I bump into it and the cake goes everywhere and the memory is enshrined in puffs of flour wafting through the air. 

I like cake because it’s meant for celebrating. It’s incredibly fun to eat. One of my roles at my dad’s bakery was cake decorator (words only). I had very adult-looking cursive penmanship (thank you, homeschooling!), and I loved being presented with a sheet-cake canvas of rich cream-cheese frosting. I would pipe out “Happy Birthday Mom!” in curly-cued chocolate. I loved even more the ritual of lifting the lid of the cake box when the customer came in to do a final quality check. “Oh, this is perfect.” I assumed of course, that they were speaking exclusively of the acclaimed artiste responsible for the chocolate font, and not the entire cake my dad had made or the delicate flowers and intricate piping my mom had added.


And despite how picturesque and storybookish I make growing up in a bakery sound (it was all that and more), I always wanted to leave. The sign that my shift was over was the sound of reggae music. The NPR station my dad played in the back always switched to reggae around 1:00 pm, and it grooved me right into the afternoon. I still find this music incredibly calming (reggae? For calmness? Groundbreaking). It signals something in my brain that the rest of the day is free. I can take off my apron and eat a cinnamon roll off the clock. 

I come up just short of feeling like his death is “unfair.” I don’t want to undo it, because I could never (ever ever) bear to lose him again. But sometimes I wish I could go back and redo the last month of his life, having already done it once. In the same way becoming a mom again to my youngest daughter was so much more calm – Ida got a very chill parent – I would love to give my dad a very chill grieving daughter. Someone who could face him gently without any cowardice, or hold his hand and talk about the future just because he really wanted there to be one.

I guess what I feel most is a very soft, but unyielding missingness. Something is permanently off, and there is nothing to be done about it. We are apart now. What felt like so much time together in the moment, wasn’t nearly enough it turns out. 


But at least on Saturdays, I get to spend time in a new bakery. I watch other bakers mold and cut dough for bread rounds, I laugh with them about which pans are the worst to wash, I get to slice cake and feel extra close to my dad for 5 hours. And it is a great way to ease the ache.