Grief Cake

Sometime in the last year I got this idea to write a book. (This idea should fall into a category of ‘something will most likely never happen, but the idea of it gets me excited.’ But hey at least it’s getting a blog post!) I thought about this months after Josiah died. What inspired this idea actually came from a time a grieving, a time when I was angry grieving.               When I get angry about things, I tend to pile. I pile every reason why it’s not fair, why it’s not my fault, why it’s just me that this happens to, and why I don’t want to have to deal with it and then I pile on top of that a list of that of all the things that have gone wrong in my life. This is probably not the most mature or even helpful way to deal with anger, in fact it’s a bit on the dramatic side, but I get it all out – and after that, something happens.

What happens is I have gotten out all of my griefs and angers, and then – I can start to deal with them.

On this particular day, I was angry grieving, and thinking it is ridiculous. It is ridiculous to have just turned 25 and have endured the loss of my child and my parent. I’m sure at the time I also had more things on my list that I was grieving, but those were the biggies. So that inspired the idea for a book Grief Cake.

Really all I had for it is an idea and a title. The piling that I do is the mixing of the ingredients to make the cake. After that angry, griefy batter has all the ingredients thrown into the bowl, you start to mix. In that mixing, you do the work, or the ‘grief work’ as they call it in books I’ve read. It is not something you can phone in, tragically there is no kitchen aide mixer for grief cake (but if the book doesn’t work out, I need to invent that!) But anyway - you must do the work, process it, and keep stirring, even when your arm gets tired. Otherwise, the cake will be lumpy and won’t turn out. After you have mixed, processed, and done the work, you can start to bake. In the baking, you don’t always feel like your grief work is doing something (maybe if I knew more about making cakes I could put in some good analogies about the baking process, but while I don’t know cake, I do know grief.) You can’t tell until a point down the road that the grief cake has baked, I wish it was only 30 minutes like cake baking, but that is generally not the case, and I don’t know of any toothpick tricks for grief cake either. But at some point, you start to see things differently, feelings change or your way dealing with the feelings change, you start having more better days than worse or you learn and grow from that cake you were forced to bake – and unlike normal cake, grief cake doesn’t cause your waist to grow, but it causes your worldview to grow, the way you understand God, love, life, death, and finding peace to grow.

(This is my mixing)

So here is why I decided to write this today. Last week would have been my son, Josiah’s, first birthday. I did not know what to do for this day. I didn’t know if we were celebrating or mourning, so the one thing I wanted to do was bake a cake. Leading up to the day, I said ‘I’ll probably make a cake and whatever else we feel like doing that day.’ I even bought a little fancy frosting thing to pipe decorations on the cake. As the day came and passed, we never really knew what we’d feel like doing, so we didn’t. I said throughout the day ‘maybe I’ll make a cake’. It didn’t happen. So I waited. Yesterday, almost a week after, I decided to bake the cake. It was a slow moving process. The box sat on the counter for a while, then I put the dry mix in the bowl but found other things to do, so that sat for another long while, and finally I decided to bake the cake. Today, I was going to decorate it. As the day was almost over, I finally decided to do it. I had this grand idea of what this cake would look like in my head. I even was thinking how maybe decorating cakes for my kids can be a tradition that we do every year and thought of how cute they would be. I was excited as the frosting was turning out to colors that I liked. I am not a fan of pastels and didn’t want the pale baby blue color for the cake. After putting the blue on and figuring out how to get the green frosting into the piping bag, I had to figure out what to write one the cake. This turned out to be more difficult than getting myself to bake it.

I don’t like saying that it’s Josiah’s birthday because it doesn’t feel that way. I say he was born a year ago, or something along those lines. I think because he was not alive at his birth, I do not consider it his birthday, but when he was born. To me, somehow these things are different. So I did not want to write “happy birthday”. I have an odd, probably inappropriate sense of humor. It is part of how I process my grief. I don’t think it’s avoidance, because I say exactly what I’m thinking and sometimes it’s just so sad or depressing sounding and my brain just comes up with jokes as I deal with them – maybe that is avoidance, but I don’t think so, but anyway, they are the sprinkles in my grief cake. So I told Josh maybe I should write something like ‘Fact: You were born a year ago.’ Or ‘Put in a good word with God for me’ and ‘Good thing they say heaven doesn’t have time, because we are a week late on your birthday cake’ But I found it’s actually very difficult to use a piping bag and write on a cake so I went with what I did not want to and wrote “happy birthday Josiah”

To my disappointment, cake décor is not one of my gifts! The cake looked nothing like the cake in my head. But I guess that fits, this 1^st birthday is nothing like the one I expected and wanted it to be – he is not here. His birth or being born, was not as I wanted, though it was amazing to see him and hold him, I wanted and planned in my head for a whole life of joy and happiness that he was there for, not the 24 hours of holding him which he was not there for.

Life does not go as we expect, planned or always wanted. When you find yourself in that place – it is time to bake a cake.

(Take this note as a copyright to my Grief Cake book idea!)