Photo: totalAldo/Flickr

I’ve never been good at responding to tragedy. When it happens to me, I ignore the rumbling in my stomach – who can eat when the world is falling down around you? But when bad things happen to others, people whom I deeply love, my first instinct is to feed – even if they don’t want food, even if taking care of themselves feels irrelevant to them. I cook because I want to fill up the hole in their hearts with something warm and homemade and loving.

But there’s also something more innate at work – productivity in the face of complete helplessness. “We like lists because we don’t want to die,” Umberto Eco said, and lists of ingredients are no different. Cooking is a kind of order in a world that’s unfair and disordered – you put batter in the oven and you get a cake.

As I said, I’ve never been good at responding to tragedy. But there are lots of people out there who share my instinct at what to do next. After Jennifer Perillo – of the well-known food blog In Jennie’s Kitchen – posted that her husband had died of a serious heart attack, she encouraged her readers to cook. She published a recipe for one of her husband’s favorites: creamy peanut butter pie. And all around the food blogosphere, people baked a pie for Mikey.

I hope that in the wake of his death, these pies bring comfort. I hope they bring people together in love. I hope we all take the time to appreciate those people who really matter because, as Jennifer put it so eloquently, “today is the only guarantee we can count on.”

I’ll bake a pie, but I know there’s a hole in the world, and nothing can fill it. Rest in peace, Mikey.