I took the Instagram app off my phone yesterday. I didn’t delete my account, but I did decide to take a real break. It’s been a long time coming, I suppose. Instagram hasn’t made me feel good about anything in a long time. In fact, for a long time, I envied people who lived without it. For a long time, I’d toyed with leaving but hadn’t, for a multitude of reasons both personal and professional. The final straw, I suppose, has been experiencing the horror show of social media for the past month since the Hamas attacks on October 7th. I couldn’t take it anymore.
About an hour after deleting the app, I received news that I would have normally posted about there. Aubrie Pick, the luminous and lovely photographer of Classic German Baking, died a few days ago after being diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer earlier this year and undergoing Herculean efforts to combat it. Aubrie has a husband named Erik and a young daughter named Romy. I knew things were bad, but her loss is shocking and I am so terribly, awfully sad for them.
Others have spoken far more eloquently about Aubrie’s talent. Personally, I will always remember her kindness and generosity despite the complications that came out of the original photoshoot for Classic German Baking and the fact that she flew back to Berlin several months later to reshoot 11 recipes in one day in my apartment and was nothing but joyful about it. We didn’t have much time together, and I was high on adrenaline and what turned out later to be Influenza B, but I still remember how lovingly she told me about her marriage and her husband. She was smitten and her smile lit up the room.
The last time I wrote to you all, I was by the Baltic Sea, having just delivered the manuscript for Classic German Cooking. A few weeks later, after I had finished testing the final straggler recipes, got rid of every “delicious” in the manuscript and rewrote countless headnotes, my editor sent it back to me with her notes. So I worked on the book some more, also incorporating essential feedback from my friends Maja and Marguerite, then sent it back once more, this time feeling more triumphal than the first time around.
For the boys’ fall break, we flew to Boston to visit my father and stepmother. The weather was gorgeous. We trick-or-treated, carved pumpkins, wandered around the Worcester Art Museum. We went to Rhode Island and Plimoth/Patuxet, watched “Hocus-Pocus” at the local movie theater, played badminton in front of my father’s house in the sunshine. I bought myself a fountain pen, only my second one since 1988, and devoured Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds—her masterpiece, in my opinion. A friend and I saw Jhumpa Lahiri at the Coolidge Theater, then ate hot pot and stayed out so late we worried our families. I cooked this and this and this and this and everything was excellent.
We flew back to Berlin a few days ago. Last night, still jet lagged, the boys couldn’t sleep and they came into my bed, one after the other, padding through the dark rooms. I tried to soothe them without turning the lights on, then gave up and made them hot milk with honey, which they drank propped up against the pillows. It’s okay, I told them, don’t worry. You’ll sleep eventually. We’ll just all be together while we wait. Close your eyes and try to imagine a place that you love and that makes you feel safe, like the house in Urbino or maybe the Highlands in Scotland. The boys listened and then Hugo whispered, But that’s what I feel about being here, at home.
And so I turned the lights off again and felt them warm on either side of me, one sticking his behind out to find my body, the other snaking his foot over to mine. I lay quietly in the dark, as I have done for so many years, and thought about my bedroom in my parents’ house in Waban and about the spongy green moss covering the ground of a Scottish forest and about how much it still hurts to leave Boston for Berlin. And then I listened to their breathing as it slowed and thought about Aubrie and Romy and how lucky I am to feel their warm bodies close to mine, to be able to give them my love, to have my home be their happy place.
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I will be donating 50% of paid subscriptions (new or upgraded) generated from today through Thanksgiving to the fund that was set up for Aubrie’s treatments and that will now be used to pay off their medical bills and her memorial, with any leftover funds going to Romy.
This was beautiful, thank you. I too am thinking about how to step away from certain places on the internet right now. So very sorry for the loss of your friend.
Love you and this beautifully poignant essay/update x