Doing this feels like performing an autopsy on my own heart while the medical examiner asks for my high school transcripts. I am sitting at a kitchen table that isn’t mine, staring at a spreadsheet that shouldn’t exist, trying to remember if I had 39 or 49 gallons of premium stabilizer in the walk-in before the world turned into a kiln. My stomach is a hollow, angry knot because I decided, in a fit of misplaced discipline, to start a diet at exactly 4:00 PM today. It is now 9:19 PM, and the lack of glucose is making the insurance adjuster’s latest email feel less like a professional inquiry and more like a targeted psychological strike.

We are taught to believe that insurance is a financial safety net, a simple transaction where premiums paid equal protection received. But when the smoke clears, you realize it’s actually a performance. It is a grueling, multi-act play where you, the victim, must audition for the role of ‘Person Who Actually Owned Things.’ If you cannot prove the existence of your life with a paper trail that survived the very fire that took the paper, you are treated with a polite, institutionalized skepticism. I am Miles P., and for 19 years, I have built flavor profiles that made grown men cry-Salty Midnight, Lavender Fog, Burnt Honey. Now, I am a data entry clerk for my own tragedy. I have to relive the moment the compressor failed, the moment the smell of scorched sugar replaced the scent of cream, every time I scroll down to line item 129.

The Value of Touch Over the Cloud

I made a mistake. A massive, stupid, human mistake. I kept my physical inventory logs in a leather-bound journal on top of the desk in the shop. I liked the tactile feel of the paper; I liked the way the ink would smudge when my hands were cold from the freezer. I thought the cloud was for people who didn’t trust their own hands. Now, those hands are shaking because I’m trying to reconstruct 19 years of growth from a 49-page bank statement that only shows totals, not the soul of the purchases. The insurance company doesn’t care that the $2,499 I spent in March of 2019 was for a specialized centrifuge that allowed me to extract the essence of wild basil. To them, it’s just a number that needs a corresponding piece of paper that no longer exists.

My diet-induced hunger is sharpening the edges of this frustration. I find myself fixating on a single lost item: a small, hand-cranked salt grinder I bought in a market in France 9 years ago. It cost maybe $49. In the grand scheme of a $599,999 claim, it is a rounding error. But the adjuster is pushing back on the ‘valuation’ of the ‘culinary tools’ category. He sees a $49 plastic grinder from a big-box store. I see the specific mineral bite of the Fleur de Sel that made my caramel famous. To prove its value, I have to go back into the mental wreckage, find the memory of that day in Provence, and then find a way to translate that emotional weight into a PDF that an algorithm can digest.

The Cruelty of Calculated Exhaustion

This is the emotional labor of loss. It is the work of being the primary investigator of your own disaster. You are the lead witness, the forensic specialist, and the grieving family all at once. The system demands that you be cold, calculated, and organized at the exact moment your nervous system is screaming for rest. If you miss a zero, you lose a thousand. If you forget a model number, you lose the functionality of your entire kitchen. It’s a game of high-stakes Tetris where the pieces are made of ash. I spent 49 minutes today arguing about the replacement cost of food-grade buckets. Buckets. I have lost my livelihood, my creative outlet, and my sense of security, and I am spending the limited remains of my cognitive energy defending the price of plastic pails.

It occurs to me, as I stare at the blinking cursor on line 189, that we shouldn’t have to do this alone. There is a fundamental cruelty in asking someone to count their dead dreams while they are still mourning them. I realize now that my insistence on doing it myself-my pride in ‘knowing my shop better than anyone’-is actually a form of self-sabotage. I am too close to the heat. I am still smelling the smoke. When the weight of the documentation started to feel like it was crushing my ribs, I finally understood why people hire professionals like National Public Adjusting to step into the line of fire. They don’t have the emotional attachment to the salt grinder. They don’t feel the pang of loss when they look at the line item for the 29-quart mixer. They have the distance I lack, the distance that allows them to treat the insurance company like the bureaucracy it is, rather than the personal antagonist I’ve made it in my head.

The Regression to Reconstruct

I’m looking at a photo of the shop from 9 months ago. It was a Saturday. There were 59 people in line, a record for a rainy afternoon. I can see the batch freezer in the background, its stainless steel surface gleaming. It looks so permanent. It looks like it could never be reduced to a line on a spreadsheet. My hunger is peaking now, a sharp reminder that I am still here, even if my shop isn’t. I find myself wondering if the insurance adjuster has a favorite flavor of ice cream. Does he know the difference between a cheap extract and a slow-steeped bean? Or is everything to him just a depreciation schedule? I want to tell him that you can’t depreciate the 19 years I spent learning how to make water and fat play nice together. You can’t put a ‘replacement cost’ on the intuition I used to know exactly when the ribbons of fudge were thick enough.

There is a contradiction in this process that I can’t quite resolve. To get the money to move forward, I have to spend all my time looking backward. I have to inhabit the ruin. I have to stay in the fire long after the flames are out. The administrative burden is a form of secondary punishment for the crime of being a victim. It’s as if the world says, ‘I’m sorry your life burned down; now, please provide three quotes for the rubble.’ I keep thinking about the turkey sandwich I can’t have because of this diet, and how it’s a tiny, controlled version of the loss I’m experiencing everywhere else. I am denying myself something I want to prove I have control over something. But I don’t. Not this.

I think about the 149 hand-written recipe cards that are now just carbon. I can remember most of them-the ratios are burned into my brain-but the insurance company doesn’t pay for what’s in your head. They pay for what you can prove was on the paper. So I sit here, typing out descriptions of ‘Custom Formulation Cards’ and assigning them a ‘replacement value’ that feels insulting.

The Turning Point: Choosing to Delegate the Ashes

If I had known that the aftermath of the fire would be harder than the fire itself, would I have done anything differently? I probably would have bought a fireproof safe for the journal. I would have taken more photos of the equipment tags. But even then, the emotional toll would remain. The act of proving you lost something is a constant reminder that it is gone. It’s like poking a wound to see if it still hurts, and then having to describe the exact shade of red to a stranger who is checking their watch.

I’ve reached line 219 on the spreadsheet. My eyes are blurring, and the diet is officially a failure because I just found a bag of pretzels in the pantry. As I crunch on them, I feel a strange sense of defiance. I am eating. I am alive. And tomorrow, I will find someone to help me carry this list, because I am tired of being the only one who knows what these ashes used to be.