From the archives: Happy birthdays, sad birthdays and all the stories in between

Making the most out of these bittersweet milestones.

Addie Broyles

May 11, 2022

My grandmother celebrating her 85th birthday in 2015.

I mentioned this earlier this week, but May 11 is a special day in my house.

My beloved maternal grandmother, who died in 2017, was born on this day in 1930.

My closest friend from college, who died in 2006, was born on this day in 1983.

Almost a decade ago, the year that Troy would have turned 30, I wrote on the Wordpress version of The Feminist Kitchen about the bittersweetness that this day has held ever since his death just after we graduated from Mizzou.

I was just 23 years old at the time, and as you’ll read, newly pregnant but totally clueless.

Re-reading this post from TFK archives makes me so happy that my grandmother got to see the beginning of what has become my ancestral healing journey. And it tugs on my heartstrings that Troy died before he got to embark on these additional waves of discovery and exploration.

Being able to hold space for the tension between these feelings is what grief — and May 11 — has gifted me.

I also want to share that three years ago, May 11 gave me Frank.

A chance meeting at an art gallery. A new chapter to the story. Another reminder that the texture that loss adds to our life makes it that much more beautiful.

Originally posted on May 11, 2013:

Today is my grandmother's birthday.

She'll likely be celebrating the day quietly with my parents in Aurora, the Missouri town in which she has lived for more than 60 of her 83 years.

Gaga and Avery in 2011. My grandmother got to meet all four of her great-grandchildren before she died.

Because I spent most of my childhood in Aurora, I've always been close with Gaga, but in recent years, as I've had my own children and started thinking beyond just the span of years that I will enjoy on this planet, she and I have grown even closer. As the matriarch of our family, she is the keeper of many family stories that she inherited from her own relatives, and I've been trying to get her to tell me as many of them as we can squeeze in during each of our visits.

Last Mother's Day, I wrote a blog post about how the community cookbook I was working on for the Austin Food Blogger Alliance aligned with my feminist and genealogical interests.

Fast forward a year to this Mother's Day weekend. Not only do we have an actual cookbook to show for our efforts, at 4 p.m. today, I will be talking about the book with my fellow contributors at BookPeople, Austin's premiere bookstore.

This is the community cookbook that the Austin Food Blogger Alliance published in 2013.

It's a happy coincidence that our event today is on my grandmother's birthday, a fact that I forgot to mention in an interview I did last weekend with Cecilia Nasti, who produces a food segment on the local NPR stations called “Field and Feast.”

Nasti and I spent Sunday morning making Gaga's coffeecake, one of my two recipes in “The Austin Food Blogger Alliance Cookbook” and one that embodies the kind of storytelling through food that I have come to appreciate as my love of family, history, food and journalism have converged in the last few years.

Gaga and I had a cathartic cry over the phone a few weeks ago when she finally got her copy of the book and read the story about our family coming to the U.S. from Sweden in the late 1800s that introduces the coffeecake recipe. I feel so lucky to get to share these moments with her and to have her support as I continue this very personal journey.

But there's a lingering sadness in my heart when it comes time to celebrate her birthday each year.

happytroy — A year before he died, Troy and I met up in Missouri to celebrate our friend Rachel’s wedding. This was the second-to-last time I saw him.

This is Troy.

He would have turned 30 today.

Long before I was a mom, a blogger, a cookbook editor or a food writer, I was a simply a journalism student at Mizzou who was interested in storytelling.

So was Troy.

He'd grown up in a small town in Southwest Missouri not far from my small town, but we didn't meet until we moved to Columbia to go to school.

After our first meeting sometime that freshman year (I think it was a Maneater party, if I remember correctly), we were inseparable, connected by a love of magazines, music, road trips, new experiences, foreign languages and big cities. We traveled to New York, Madison, Austin, San Diego, England, Spain and Italy together, and as we progressed in J-school, we took class after class together, sharing our hopes and dreams of what we might accomplish with the stories we'd one day tell.

After graduation, he moved to Florida for a job he loved at a newspaper in Sarasota, and in June 2006, when I was two months pregnant with Julian and didn't know it yet, he was killed in a freak car accident.

I was so fraught with grief that I didn't realize I was carrying a child for another two months.

Troy and I were inseparable during our college years together.

Becoming a mom and losing my best friend in the same year remains the hardest experience I've ever gone through, and not a day goes by that I don't think about the connection of the two. And with every new experience or growth in my personal and professional life, I mourn the loss of those same experiences for my dearest friend.

It's a sadness that I know I will carry with me until my last day, but in the past seven years, I've tried to honor that grief by thinking about Troy on days like today, when I'm doing something that I know he'd be so incredibly proud of.

Telling stories — and helping other people tell their stories — is something for which so many of us feel a calling, no matter if we recognize it and turn it into a career or if we unknowingly honor that calling by sharing stories over something as simple as a slice of coffeecake and a cup of coffee.

We often like to tell the stories that fill us with pride and joy, but when you really start digging and getting to know a person, stories that aren't so happy inevitably emerge. These are the stories that can put a crack in our voices and an unspeakable pain in our hearts, but they are the stories that also define who we are.

Being a storyteller means embracing all the stories, not just the ones with happy endings.

It’s interesting to think about this idea of happy endings and sad endings all these years later after writing this original post. The truth is that I try not to think about things in binaries any more: Happy and sad. Good and bad. Friend and foe. Right and wrong. Long and short. Enough and not enough.

Embracing the in-between is what I work on now. Not thinking about Troy’s death as a sad ending. Not being so hellbent on everything being happy.

Having said that, I do have some joyous news to share with you all that I will be processing and writing about at some point this summer. And my kids and I are headed to Costa Rica tomorrow for my cousin’s wedding, so I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts to share about the experience of traveling with my kids, mom and sister.

I’m so grateful to have a platform to share them. Thank you so much for subscribing and for your support of this project that started way back in 2010 and has been with me though so many new chapters of the story.

Addie

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