I started cooking my father’s recipes after years of refusing to enter his kitchen

Dear Delyara, My father died in his restaurant kitchen. For three years afterward, I could not cook anything more complicated than pasta. The smell of garlic in hot oil could take me back instantly. My sister eventually asked if I wanted Dad’s recipe notebook. I said no, then took it anyway. Months later, I tried one sauce. I burned it. The second attempt tasted wrong. Slowly, cooking stopped being a test of whether I could reproduce him and became something my own hands were allowed to learn. Today, I made his Sunday ragu for the whole family. My mother tasted it and said, “Too much wine.” That was exactly what Dad used to say about mine. We laughed. The hobby has not returned the kitchen to innocence. Sometimes I still have to step outside when a smell catches me unexpectedly. But food has become something I can make again, not only the setting where my father stopped breathing.