Beyond Grief, Beyond Belief
What The Great British Baking Show Taught Me About Living Through Death
The first time I watched The Great British Baking Show, I was in my hometown of Randolph, Massachusetts — a small, working-class suburb 30 minutes south of Boston with some of the best (and cheapest) pizza and Chinese food I’ve ever eaten. It had been by far the worst summer of my life. My dad had died abruptly from liver cancer. I’d had no idea he was sick until, after a wedding in Mexico, I’d arrived at the house where I’d grown up to find him on the brink of death. He was a shell of himself. He must have lost at least 30 pounds, and his shorts hung so low on his waist that the belt he was using rode up past his zipper, barely keeping his clothes fastened to his body. Before, my dad had a big, round, firm belly. He was strong. I remember hitting his stomach with my tiny fists as a child and laughing about how it felt like a rock. Now, where rock-hard muscle used to be, the skin went slack.
When I was twelve, my dad had added a second floor to our house. It took months—almost a year—to get it done, and he did it almost entirely by himself. The project cut into the coldest months of a harsh New England winter, but he persisted with the work. In my bedroom on the new floor, he lined the arched windows with ornate, hand-cut, delicate cubes of wood. He knew how to make things pretty. He enjoyed painting and some days woke up at four o’clock in the morning to work on something before, for his regular job, he had to fling shingles off a roof for eight hours. He made palettes for his acrylic paints out of pieces of cardboard with tinfoil wrapped around them. He stretched his own canvases and built his own easels. Anything he could jerry-rig, he would. He used the frame of a futon to mount a hanging swing between two trees in our yard. He bought a welding machine so he could take bicycles out of the trash and Frankenstein them together. It was like living with a mad scientist who considered our home his laboratory.
When I found him so gaunt and weak that he could barely walk to the kitchen, I was horrified. All of his little joys had become impossible to maintain on his own. He had to wear tall, tight diabetic socks that gripped his ankles and calves. Car rides made him sick and irritable. He could barely control his bladder. With each day that passed, he ate less and less. He tried smoking weed and it just made him feel “funny”. I tried forcing turkey tail mushroom supplements on him in an act of desperation, but he wasn’t interested and knew before any of us that he was going to die. He accepted it and made peace with it almost immediately. More than anything, I think he just wanted to get it over with. I knew that he did not have long, not only because of how sick he was but because of how miserable it made him.
The trauma was so much bigger than me that I felt swallowed by it. Accepting reality felt like an impossible undertaking. Up until that point, I knew that the tides of one’s life could change unexpectedly, but not like this. I had thought to myself, while I was there in my childhood home with him, that what was happening simply should not have been happening to me. I was 23. This was not what my life was supposed to be like. This was not part of the plan. This was not part of the vision I had of my future.
Iwas an anxious child. When I was a kid, some nights before bed I would think about what would happen to me if one of my parents died. I tried to imagine how it would feel because I wanted to get a sense of how painful it would be. I thought knowing would protect me. But every time I thought about my parents dying, I just felt like I was dying. Some nights I worked myself up so much I’d cry myself to sleep. But most nights, the feeling was so overwhelming that I forced myself to stop almost as soon as I started. I wished away the image with my eyes clenched tight and told myself that my parents weren’t going to die until I was so old that it wouldn’t feel like anything. That summer, I realized that all of the nights I spent telling myself that nothing bad like that would ever happen to me were useless. My dad died, and none of it made any sense.
I felt a complicated sense of relief wash over me after my dad died. But I also felt trapped and confused. I had officially been in my hometown for the longest period of time I’d ever been since leaving when I was 18. I was constantly exhausted. Every day was a blur. I couldn’t think straight. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I couldn’t do so without having awful nightmares. I was either sobbing uncontrollably or dissociating at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. But I had to stay. We had to sell the house immediately while my two siblings and I were, for one rare occasion, all in the same place. Every day, I woke up and tried to do something, but I felt like I had no idea what that something was. I knew things needed to be happening; that we needed to get rid of almost everything on the property (but what?), that some people needed to be contacted (but who?), and that I needed to call a dumpster rental company, which my dad relied on for his thirty-plus years of roofing, to put all of the things in that we needed to get rid of (but why?).
I needed a different kind of relief. The relief of my dad dying was not real relief. The relief of someone being out of their misery is not at all like the relief of taking a hot shower after a long day or getting stoned on the couch and watching TV. My sibling, Kendall, had tried coaxing me into watching The Great British Baking Show a few years before my dad died. They told me it was “a show where everyone was just really nice to each other.” “There are just all these cute British people baking together, calmly. They get like, four hours to bake everything instead of like, twenty minutes. It’s amazing,” they explained. I had once caught a glimpse of the show and all I remembered was Mary Berry’s pretty, crinkled face, bright eyes, and brighter pink lipstick. The show hadn’t interested me much, and I’d felt at the time that, although TV was indeed relieving, and interesting, I just didn’t really need it. But then my dad died.
I learned quickly about all the different ways people learn to cope. My eldest sister, Shae, for example, survived our depressing reality by taking Adderall and ticking off boxes on her to-do list. Kendall and I, on the other hand, sat in the living room — me on my dad’s unattractive maroon recliner from Bob’s Furniture, Kendall on our old couch that smelled like dogs—and watched The Great British Baking Show. We mostly didn’t talk. Sometimes we laughed, or commented, “ooo that’s so good” or “ooo that’s so bad.” When it felt like my world was collapsing, The Great British Baking Show was almost the only thing keeping me tethered to reality—an irony not lost on me. The worst thing that could happen in the bake-off universe was that my favorite contestant could get sent home, or another beloved contestant might cry after a freshly baked pie was accused of the ever-dreaded “soggy bottom”.
Why do I love The Great British Baking Show so much, really? Is it the accents? The elaborate cakes? The epic failures? The oh-so-charming jokes, told by the rotation of increasingly dorky, at times cringe-worthy hosts? Is Noel Fielding, the iconic heterosexual drag vampire and now longest-standing host, what keeps me coming back for more? Is it the music—that kerplunky little tune that plays as the camera pans over a verdant Berkshire countryside? The vision never ceases to provide me with some visceral and immediate sense of peace. One day two close friends from out of town came to see me for my birthday, just twelve days after my dad had passed. We went to the beach and had lobster rolls. When we got back, I put on The Great British Baking Show. It was all I had to offer. We baked a frozen apple pie we‘d bought from the grocery store and ate it while we watched, wishing it tasted half as good as a Swiss roll stuffed with strawberries and bavarois. Somewhere out there, there was meaning. There was life and joy beyond death. I could see it. I could feel it.
The Great British Baking Show, to me, is like the opposite of death. Butterflies flutter across the screen. An opening shot shows a close-up of a squirrel nibbling on an acorn in grass so bright it’s almost neon. Every contestant is a normal person, like some friendly stranger I might idly chat with in line at the grocery store. It is a place where no one is dying and no one has cancer, and it is also a place where, paradoxically, you can feel the full emotional spectrum of everyday, real real-life. The Great British Baking Show reminded me that joy is just as possible as suffering. The editors are, in large part, responsible for this. The energy of the show resists what one typically expects from reality TV. High-intensity, sincerely unbelievable drama is replaced with the organic drama of genuine hardship. It’s part of the show’s genius. What we want from reality TV, really, is to believe that there are lives out there that are just like ours. What we so often get is an image of lives we think are better than our own, or lives that are so much worse than ours that we feel better about ourselves because of it. I believe it is The Great British Baking Show’s tactful way of capturing the mundaneness of each contestant’s life that gives watchers something they didn’t know they were looking for: an opportunity to see people just as they are. Their boring jobs, the things they like to do on the weekend, what their dog’s name is. The contestants aren’t perfect because they’re living unthinkable lives; they’re perfect because they’re just like the rest of us.
The show also provides a sense of camaraderie that adds to its irresistibility. There are always episodes where bakers seem to be hitting stroke after stroke of bad luck: ovens not turned on or set to the wrong temperature, forgotten ingredients resulting in a deflated, chewy lump of bread where a dreamy, golden puff was supposed to be. In these most stressful times, other contestants come to the rescue. They are far less concerned with their success than they are with the well-being of their new friends. Even Noel chips in. He’ll approach them gently, a hand gingerly placed on their back, and offer his condolences. “It’s just cake,” he’ll say. Or if he’s feeling cheeky, “That’s alright, you can throw it at Paul’s face later.” Sometimes Noel’s only duty is to remind the bakers that they can make fun of Paul Hollywood if it will make the tears go away. The fantastical escapism of the Baking Show has two layers to it: I’m completely dislocated from that ugly recliner in my dead dad’s living room and catapulted into a sweet, decadent, British wonderland, where I get to inspect the contestants up close and live out their dreams; and I get to imagine what it would be like if I were one of those contestants.
The show is, in many ways, so far removed from my reality, yet what I believe touches its viewers and keeps them coming back for more is a certain tenderness. The sublimity is palpable. Tears of joy undo all those days in the tent where things have gone awry. The sense of genuine humanity on The Great British Baking Show emerges not only from the love and care the contestants put into their craft, but also from the beautiful relationships they build while doing it.
I returned to my Great British Baking Show obsession when I moved to the East Bay to finish my degree, three and a half years after my dad died. The show has established itself in my life as a permanent creature comfort. It feels, to me, like The Great British Baking Show is a perfect example of how and why television is so magical and entrancing. Losing my dad sent me searching for something to believe in; I wanted to find that there was happiness and peace somewhere out there. I took The Great British Breaking Show with me from my childhood living room in Massachusetts to my new apartment in South Berkeley. Guiseppe, Collection 12’s winner, captured the beauty of The Great British Baking Show in a private moment with the camera after the judges announced his victory. His eyes fluttered and, after a long pause, he sighed and looked at the camera to say what he could only say in Italian. “Da non credere. Da non credere.” It’s unbelievable.
