After losing her father, Sam Jacobs honors his memory by channeling her grief through baking.
On a Thursday night, a dusting of flour settles across my kitchen and stays until Sunday morning, when I wipe the counters and Swiffer the floor while I wait to pull a crusty sourdough boule from the oven.
I am not a baker. This my ritual of communing with the dead.
Before my dad died by suicide five years ago, the sourdough ritual was his, and I had no idea what it involved. My first attempts were awful. But I stubbornly gnawed at the gummy hockey pucks of my failures because I couldn’t throw them away.
Now as I bake, I talk to my father about different things I wish he knew, and the bread turns out just fine. “Hey,” I whisper and I whisk the leaven. “The kiddos want to be a hummingbird and a cockatoo for Halloween.” “Hey,” I whisper and I shape the dough, “I need you. Why aren’t you here?” I bake this yearning into the loaf with the starter, water, flour and salt.
My diagnosis is complicated grief — a form of intrusive mourning that lasts beyond a year. I appreciate the label’s descriptive logic. Grief is visceral. Hungry. Feral. Like the wild yeast that makes my bread.