PANCAKE DAY AND THE RANDOM THINGS THAT BREAK YOU

A reflection on how grief can spill out of the smallest things, even pancake day.

Today is Shrove Tuesday – pancake day – the small, sweet hinge between ordinary time and Lent. Traditionally, it’s the last day before the fasting season begins, a moment for using up the rich things in the cupboard: eggs, milk, flour, sugar. A clearing-out before the long stretch of restraint. I’m not giving anything up for Lent this year (I haven’t for years), but I’ve always liked the idea of this day as a pause. A softening. A moment to take stock before the world asks something more of you.

What I didn’t expect was that this would be one of the days that undoes me.

In all the reading I’ve done on grief over the past nearly nine months (has it really been nine months?), one thing comes up again and again: it’s rarely the big anniversaries or the obvious milestones that hit the hardest. It’s the tiny, ordinary things, the ones stitched so tightly into the fabric of your life that you don’t even notice them until they’re gone. The things that belonged to you, not to the world.

And today, for me, it’s pancakes.

Someone asked me yesterday if I’d be having pancakes today. A harmless question. A normal question. I managed to finish the conversation with some semblance of composure, but the moment it ended I fell apart. Deep, bewildering sadness. The kind that knocks the breath out of you. And I remember thinking: Really? Pancakes? This is what breaks me?

But of course it is. Because it’s not about pancakes at all.

My husband loved pancake day with a kind of joyful, childlike enthusiasm that always made me smile. He’d talk about it for weeks beforehand. Honestly, all year. He approached it with the significance of the biggest date in the calendar. I’d make a huge vat of batter because I could never make enough to keep up with him. We’d pile the table with toppings of all kinds, but for him, it was always about the golden syrup. A lot of golden syrup. We took pancake day far more seriously than Valentine’s, and that felt exactly right for us.

These are the things I never thought to mark as precious because they simply were. They were the background music of our life together; so familiar, so constant, that I didn’t realise how much love was held in those small, repeated moments until they were suddenly out of reach.

So yes. Pancakes are my trigger. Because they were ours.

And today, I would give anything to be standing in the kitchen with him, flipping batch after batch, laughing at how many we could eat between us, watching the syrup drip down the sides of the plate, the lemon squirt across the table, taking it in turns to cook and eat. I would give anything for that ordinary, silly, perfect chaos.

Grief is strange like this. It sneaks in through the smallest cracks. It reminds you that love lived in the everyday, in the shared habits, the running jokes, the meals made side by side. These aren’t grand gestures; they’re the quiet threads that held our life together. And losing them hurts in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.

So this year, Shrove Tuesday feels less like a clearing-out and more like a holding-on. This isn’t about ‘moving on’, as love isn’t something you can pack away neatly. Holding-on is different. It’s learning to live well even with the sadness still here. Letting the memories breathe. Telling the stories of our life together whenever they rise to the surface, because they matter, and because saying them out loud keeps him close. Never forgotten.

And of course, in true us‑fashion, and as I mentioned on Instagram at the weekend; the thin places in my life mostly show up around food – which will shock precisely no-one. Pancake day is one of those events where everything feels a little closer: the memories, the laughter, the way he’d hover impatiently as the next one cooked. A smell, a taste, a whisk, a flip, and he’s suddenly right there. Not in a haunting way, but in that quiet, steady way love has of leaving traces. It lingers.

And maybe that’s its own kind of Lent for me this year: not giving something up, but paying attention. Making space. Letting the small things matter. Lent is often framed as a season of letting go, but it can also be a season of holding-on – to hope, to memory, to the truth that love doesn’t disappear just because life has changed.

So today, on pancake day, I’m letting myself feel it all. The sweetness, the ache, the remembering. The love that lived in the simplest things – and especially in the mightiest of the sweet treats.

And maybe that’s enough.