A taco salad became a way to grieve

Three days before Valentine’s Day, Danny—Lisa Sparrell’s husband of 17 years—died. Holidays and milestones turned into something harder to reach for, until a new tradition built from his family’s recipes, topped off with Serafina’s taco salad, helped them move

Three days before Valentine’s Day, Danny—her husband of 17 years—died.

For Lisa, walking through store displays felt physically wrong. The bright, public romance around her made everything inside her tighten. It was hard to watch other people celebrate love when her own had just been taken.

Then Serafina, her then 9-year-old daughter, did something that landed differently than grief usually does.

She had seen how her dad treated Lisa during Danny’s life. And when friends came over to mourn with them. Serafina pulled the family friends aside and asked them to take her to the store so she could buy flowers for her mother. Even in his absence, Serafina told her, she wanted Lisa to know she was loved.

The calendar kept coming. Her daughter’s birthday arrived next, followed immediately by Mother’s Day, and then the couple’s wedding anniversary. In Waikiki, friends stepped in with a birthday beach bash for Serafina—piled high with food, hugs, and smiles. Lisa says it almost made her forget that Danny had promised he would make it to Serafina’s 10th birthday.

On what would have been the wedding anniversary, Lisa walked to the ocean and scattered flower petals in the waves. She described the salt in her tears as indistinguishable from the salt in the air. Back home, she baked an angel food cake and watched one of their favorite movies, “The Princess Bride.”.

Danny’s birthday brought the next tradition, and the next kind of ache. Lisa baked his favorite black-bottomed cupcakes—our tradition, she writes—and took some to a local bar to share. She downed a few shots of Jameson in his honor.

In those years, Lisa says they didn’t celebrate. They commemorated. They wallowed. They wondered whether heaviness would always follow what had once been joyful.

She also wrestled with a quieter fear: she wanted Serafina to remember her dad. but she didn’t want every memory to be marked by mourning. So they kept to rituals—cupcakes for Danny’s birthday. not putting the Christmas tree up until after Danny’s birthday. “Deadpool” and whiskey on the anniversary of his death. angel food for their wedding anniversary.

For a while, the pattern held. But in December 2025, after seven years of missing him, Lisa and Serafina turned a corner.

They decided Danny would not have wanted them to live like this. Lisa describes him as someone curious, goofy, and full of joyful gestures—and she believed they should keep that energy alive, too.

Serafina was now in her senior year of high school. She had friends and big milestones ahead, and Lisa writes that they had moved to Seattle a year earlier, leaving the Waikiki apartment where Danny died and the sad memories that lived there.

This year, they chose to remember the hopeful energy they both loved. They decided to make a birthday dinner from a collection of his family’s recipes. Serafina picked the family taco salad, a dish Lisa says bears little resemblance to either tacos or salad. As they crushed Doritos and poured in condensed cheese soup, they laughed. The details mattered—exactly how nontraditional it was. exactly how it didn’t feel tethered to any “right” way to do things. and exactly how much it was. in Lisa’s words. “a little bit addicted to junk food.”.

Lisa admits mourning is important, but she also calls it a kind of self-indulgence: it can focus on feelings of what’s missing rather than celebrating what they loved about the ones they lost.

When they dug into that taco salad. she writes. they started talking about Danny’s perspective—surprises. wonder. the things he brought into their lives. What they had made together became a tribute to the person Danny was and to what he contributed. And that, Lisa says, is something worth celebrating.

One sentence sits behind the whole shift: instead of letting every milestone become another checkpoint for grief, they chose a way to keep his memory alive—by making something that still felt like him.

Danny Lisa Sparrell Serafina grief mourning traditions taco salad Valentine’s Day wedding anniversary angel food cake black-bottomed cupcakes Jameson Waikiki Seattle