The Eggo Waffle Theory of Grief

 

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

“Don’t wake me before 7:00 am.”

That was DeAnne’s rule.

We spent scores of weekends at her condo, sleeping on the hide-a-bed couch and watching movies that may or may not have been “parent approved.” DeAnne, my aunt, could never stay up as late as we could, even when we were young.

I can’t tell you how many times we watched Top Gun or the original Adventures in Babysitting after she’d gone to bed.

And we knew DeAnne wouldn’t be up and ready to make breakfast until 7:00 am.

I’ve been an early riser for more than forty years. I remember waking up and lying there beside one or more of my brothers, listening to the clock tick as the minutes passed while I waited for permission to wake her up.

The day she taught me how to use the toaster oven felt like liberation.

I could finally quietly slip out of bed and make two or three Eggo waffles while everyone else slept.

I was probably fifteen or sixteen the last time I spent a weekend at DeAnne’s house but I can’t see an Eggo waffle at the grocery store without remembering the not-really-that-comfortable hide-a-bed, the fun, the time in the condo complex swimming pool, walks to 7-Eleven, and the love.

DeAnne’s gone now. She passed away a few days ago. I lived by her side in the hospital for nearly six days. The night before she passed, I knew her time was drawing close. For nearly eight hours, I sat by her bed, holding her hand, reading to her, and singing.

2:30 am came and I slept for about ninety minutes.

I woke and she was still with us.

Sunday morning; Mother’s Day.

DeAnne was never a biological mother but that didn’t make her any less of a mother to her extended family.

DeAnne slipped from this life into the next at 2:22 pm on Mother’s Day. My three brothers, my oldest sister-in-law, my wife, my daughter, and DeAnne’s sister were in that room. That sterile hospital room became a sacred space for a few minutes as she took her last breath and was gone.

In the midst of planning DeAnne’s funeral and cleaning up the condo that holds so many memories, I keep thinking about Eggo waffles.

That sounds ridiculous even as I write it.

Grief does weird things with memory. You expect your mind to hold onto the big moments like final conversations, the hospital room, the last breath, and the sacred silence after someone leaves.

It does those things, but it also drifts back to toaster ovens, hide-a-beds, blue-bagged VCRs from Blockbuster, and waffles.

To the exhilaration of waking up and toasting my own waffles before my brothers could eat them all.

Maybe grief works that way because love also works that way.

Life isn’t really built from milestones and grand moments. Those are important, but when someone’s gone, you discover it was mostly built from ordinary Tuesdays talking to your aunt about Larkin lunches, strange little rituals, and toaster waffles before 7:00 in the morning.

Maybe that’s the Eggo Waffle Theory of Grief.

You think you’re grieving the ending.

But maybe you’re really grieving the thousands of little moments you never realized you were collecting.

The waffles were never really about waffles.