By Chloe Bennett • January 26, 2026 • Share
Grief pushed me into the kitchen, where I found unexpected comfort in baking pies for strangers. I never imagined that one day, a pie would show up for me and change everything. When I was 16, I watched my entire world literally vanish in smoke. However, the grief I experienced led me to start baking pies for hospice patients and those in need. Little did I know that my selflessness and loving heart would have a major payout.
The tragedy that changed my life forever occurred on one of those freezing January nights, when the cold was so intense that the windows wept. I was curled up in bed with my earbuds in, tuning out the familiar laughter between my parents as they watched television. Then I smelled it, smoke mixing with frost, thick and sharp. I pulled my earbuds out just as the fire alarm screamed.
My dad burst into my room, his boots thudding against the hardwood. He didn’t say anything. He just grabbed me by the arm, dragged me down the stairs barefoot, and pulled me out through the front door into the snow-covered yard in my pajamas.
Then he turned around and ran back inside to get my mom and grandpa. He never came out again, and neither did my mom or my grandpa. The blaze took all of them. They reported that the fire originated from an electrical issue in the kitchen.
The blaze didn’t just take my family. It took the house, the savings, the photos, and the little ceramic horse my mom gave me on my tenth birthday. Everything. Except me. I wasn’t sure I deserved to be the one spared. And after that tragic incident, I stopped living. I was drifting.
I ended up in a community shelter after a local volunteer service helped me get a room. They called it a dorm-style housing program for displaced youth, but it felt more like a halfway world stuck between disaster and a question mark.
I shared a room with another girl who never spoke. There were two bathrooms per floor, and a kitchen shared with about 20 others. But it was warm, safe, and clean. I had a bed, and I was grateful. I could’ve ended up with family, but Aunt Denise, my mom’s older sister and only living relative, said she didn’t have room for me.
‘I’m sorry, sweetie, but there’s no space here,’ she told me over the phone. ‘Your uncle uses the spare room for work. And I’m not giving up my reading nook for a teenager. I’m grieving too, you know.’
She might’ve been grieving, but she was alert enough to take half of the insurance money I received. She said she’d use it to help me out by getting me clothes, therapy, and whatever I needed. Instead, she bought herself romance and detective books, a wine fridge, a new car, and started showing up at her weekly local book club in new outfits and designer hats. She called them her ‘grieving wardrobe’ and said they made her look ‘expensive but in mourning.’
I didn’t argue and was too numb to protest. Besides, I’d already lost the most precious thing—my family. I consoled myself that at least I had a mattress, a mini desk, and quiet hours between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. During the day, I threw myself into school and studied as if my life depended on it, because honestly, it did. I needed scholarships to get into college. I needed a plan to find work and build a life on my own. I needed to matter to someone, even if that someone was just my future self.
But at night, when everyone else in the dorm scrolled through TikTok, played music from their phones, or watched TV in the common room, I took over the kitchen. I baked blueberry, apple, cherry, peach, and strawberry rhubarb pies when I could afford it. I saved up my monthly aid and bought ingredients like flour, fruit, and butter.
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