Hot Fudge Sauce and Talking to the Dead

When I’m making my great-grandmother Dorcas’s hot fudge recipe, I feel connected to her in a way I usually don’t. I never knew her; she died when my mom was only nine years old. But I do know a few stories about her, though. Unlike the grandmother cliché, she was a notoriously bad cook. Dorcas could also be delightfully vindictive: she got her colorblind husband—who was the town’s mayor and only doctor—a pink Cadillac after she found out he was cheating. Great-Grandpa Sam went to his grave thinking his car was tan. She had a reputation for being a very strong woman; my Grandpa John would affectionately call his mother domineering. In fact, Great-Grandpa Sam only felt strong enough to divorce Dorcas after she’d suffered a stroke. Awful, I know, but it shows just how strong-willed she was. Or maybe it shows how weak my great-grandfather was. 

 I also know that Dorcas was very dear to both my grandfather and his brother, so much so that both men asked their kids to name a granddaughter after their mom (out of the three great-grandkids, all were daughters, and none ended up being named for her. I think she’d understand). And despite her terrible cooking, she was famous for her hot fudge sauce. I don’t know where Dorcas got her recipe, whether she developed it herself or cut it out of a magazine in the 50s, and then everyone forgot where it came from. Either way, it’s hers now, and it’s one of the few family recipes I’ve got. 

In my household, Dorcas is often overshadowed by my mom’s other set of grandparents, the Lubinskis. Great-Grandpa Arthur was this strapping hero who escaped the Nazis in Belgium, and Great-Grandma Roma had to raise their children in a rundown French farmhouse while waiting for it to be safe enough to emigrate to America. When you Google the Lubinskis, you get articles about Arthur’s engineering work and Roma's work as a French language and culture teacher. When you google Dorcas Byland, you get two results: a scanned newspaper clipping announcing her marriage, and my mom’s blog post about her grandmother’s hot fudge recipe.

The fact that Dorcas is obscure to me and to most of the world doesn’t mean she wasn’t special. She was a person just lost to time, like many others. And it’s very easy for me to make up a personality for her so that we can have conversations inside my head. So when I make her hot fudge sauce and I feel that connection to Dorcas, I can’t help but wonder two different things; am I communicating with my great-grandmother in some arcane and supposedly impossible way? Or am I fooling myself into feeling an ancestral connection that cannot exist? 

My first impulse is to dismiss my feeling of connection as just wishful thinking. It fades into the background noise of my humanity, noise that is full of instances of pattern recognition that I'm sure aren’t ghosts. I’m an atheist, and just as I don’t believe in a heaven or hell, I also don't believe in souls trapped between worlds. Of the atheists I have known, most were comforted, or at least bolstered, by their convictions in science and rationality, but I am not one of them. I really, really want there to be something greater than ourselves out there watching over us. I want to summon the spirits of the dead and hear their stories. I want Great-Grandma Dorcas to stand with me at the stove as I melt butter, chocolate, sugar, and evaporated milk together into the fudge sauce that tastes so much like home. But I don’t believe these things are possible, and I’ve never taken comfort in them. I’m open to being wrong about it, but I find the proof most people give to be of poor quality.

So I started looking for an answer that could bridge the gap between my atheism and the feeling of my great-grandmother’s hand on my shoulder as I stirred the slowly melting squares of chocolate in the double boiler. I didn’t want the feeling of being watched over to be a mere illusion.

 I recently read something that suggests maybe there is something to my feelings, after all. At the beginning of her essay “Real (and) Imaginal Relationships with the Dead,” Kathryn J. Norlock states “Real relationships are not limited to those of reciprocity between the living.” Norlock’s paper introduced me to the idea of imaginal relationships, which, let’s be frank, are imaginary friendships with dead loved ones. However, there have been several studies that show that these imaginal relationships have real psychological benefits for people seeking comfort, specifically people dealing with overwhelming grief. Later, Norlock states: “I argue that ongoing activities of remembering and imagination inform the real relationship; in short, just because a relationship with the dead is imaginal, doesn’t mean it isn’t very real.” 

So it might seem that I have an answer based on Norlock’s arguments; Great-Grandma Dorcas is in my head, which is a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. I want more than “it’s all in your mind;” I want the fantastic reality I grew up reading in books.

So now, I believe my job is this: I must come to terms with the idea that I am probably just imagining my great-grandmother. That’s something that makes me feel deeply lonely, and how do I get over that loneliness? 

I don’t have an answer yet, and I don’t know that I ever will. Maybe the best I can do is remember my mom’s stories of my great-grandmother, and pretend Dorcas is there beside me when I make one of her recipes. When I was a kid, I played on the hill beside my house, pretending I was part of some grand adventure. Now, I use my writing as a playground for pretending aliens, monsters, and superheroes exist. Given my powers of imagination, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to tell Great-Grandma Dorcas about my day while I’m pouring a can of evaporated milk into the double boiler.