Someone I knew who always brightened my path -- and that of everyone he met -- passed away a couple months ago. His name was Jon. He was sunshine. It made sense then when I found out after he died that one of his favorite flowers was the sunflower. I'm pretty sure they bowed to him whenever he passed them in his travels.
The person for whom his soul shined the brightest was his wife, Mo. So when he died unexpectedly, suddenly, at far too young an age, it was most jarring for those of us who loved how they loved each other. The solar system was thrown off its axis. All hell broke loose in all of our hearts for her enormous loss.
A gathering was set for just several days after he died, so that everyone could somehow join hearts and heads together to try to rearrange the solar system in order to move forward.
It rained all through the night and day leading up to the event. And then, just before the memorial began, the clouds parted and His Sunshineness came out to make his presence known. Many of us took it as a clear sign of Jon tapping us all on the shoulder in his elf-ish way: I. Am. Here.
Jon was famous for something other than his sunshine spirit, something tangible, edible. People begged him to make his famous cheesecake. So I asked Mo if I could make several for the gathering. She led me to the fridge where she revealed all the main ingredients sitting waiting for me. Jon had been scheduled to make one for a friend the day he died.
Mo gave me his recipe with the warning "I'm sorry but they just won't be as good as Jon's because he made them with so much love." So I mustered all the love in my heart to do his cheesecake recipe justice. But my heart was less full of love than angst. I was not only worried that they wouldn't be as tasty as his but I was also concerned they might make people miss him even more. I was getting far too serious about the whole process. Jon would have jumped up and down in the kitchen waving his hands encouraging me to lighten up about the whole thing in a playful sing-song: "Let's have fun baking!" he would have screamed.
And "scream" he did -- with the symbol you see in the photograph above that I took just after I pulled the third cheesecake from the oven.
Why the Pi symbol, you ask? A few days before I baked the cheesecakes, I saw a cartoon on Instagram:
Setting: a couple's therapist's office.
The patient couple: the number 4 and the symbol Pi.
The complaint: 4 is bitching that Pi "goes on an on..."
The cartoon stayed with me for days and I remembered the punchline as "He goes on and on FOREVER."
So when I pulled the third cheesecake out of the oven (with a witness at my side who can attest to my not having manipulated it in any way) and saw the above perfectly etched Pi symbol, I had to bow like every loyal sunflower to the Mighty Sunshine Jon. "Yep," he would have said "I will go on and on forever, so stop your fretting and get back to the fun part!"
If you have lost someone you loved dearly, take a moment this Pi Day to give yourself the gift of make believe: pretend you pulled this cheesecake out of the oven yourself and got this reminder from them.
Happy Pi Love Day, Superheroes!
