Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate

I ezperienced a primeval need to bake today. The reason? I was due to visit a relative in hospital. The hospital she was in, was the same hospital as the one my sister spent so long in during her mastectomy, her cancer treatment, and is the place where she died. The day she died I was there for most of the morning making arrangements to have her death certificate completed, to have her body released, and to make funeral arrangements. Let us be very clear about this: I never in a million years could have imagined I would find myself doing this. I went about it so numb I could barely feel my fingers. I imagine that it was shock. I sat in the cafe on the second floor of the hospital, calling the funeral contact, speaking to clergy, liaising with doctors, dialling the morgue. When I had done everything that I needed to do at hospital, I walked, propelling myself automatically to my car, thinking just one thing: I never, ever want to come back here again. I drove away with the very strong sense of leaving a nightmare behind me. Grief takes people in different ways and for me one thing I have never lost is the huge antipathy towards the hospital where I watched my sister slip away. Now I had another relative there, and I suppose I should have worked out that it would have happened - the majority of my relatives live in that area, and that was their local NHS hospital.  So, I needed to go back and yet the idea was horrifying, not least because by some appalling coincidence, my relative was in the same ward as the one my sister had done a stint in. Cruel, to be forced to revisit these memories, but something that I needed to become inured to. So I decided I would need to prepare myself with as much feelgood factor as I could possibly generate in the morning, before setting off to the hospital. I went into the kitchen, opened a recipe book and pored over it. Chocolate. That was the answer. There is just not much more comforting in life, than melting chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of slowly boiling water (why would anyone forego this pleasure by melting chocolate in a microwave oven???), and stirring it slowly while it melts, glistens, and takes on that molten, shiny texture. In the early days after my sister's death I would somtimes come into the kitchen in the early hours, unable to sleep, take out chocolate, and melt it, stirring and staring, feeling the therapeutic effect of it. I would melt it, stare at it, and then go back to bed without making anything with it. Just to do the melting procedure would relieve my head enough to allow me to feel fatigue. Today I melted chocolate, and turned it into chocolate cream pies. They were beautiful, tiny and glistening. I thought about the hospital, took several deep breaths, and took out more chocolate. Melted it, slowly, stared at it, saw my vague reflection in it, and turned it into chocolate oat crunch, to be sprinkled over, well, anything really. I scraped it into a container, sat at the table, and thought about the hospital. Got up, took another bar of chocolate. Melted it again, slowly and mesmerisingly. Turned it into double chocolate fridge cookies. I thought about the hospital. I felt the image of it reduce and insert itself into a manageable corner of my head. That is better, I thought. I looked at the vast array of chocolate bakery goods. I took a few and wrapped them in foil, popped them in my bag. Beats grapes any day, I thought, as I grabbed the car and house keys. It's a win win.