Holidays and milestones were hard to celebrate after my husband died. A taco salad helped us break through the pain.

Danny, my husband of 17 years, died three days before Valentine’s Day.

I felt sick at the store displays I saw. It felt cruel to see people celebrating love when I had just lost mine. My then 9-year-old, though, had seen how her dad treated me during his life. She pulled our family friends aside — friends who were there to mourn with us — and she asked them to take her to the store so she could buy flowers for me. Even in his absence, she said, she wanted me to know I was loved.

Our daughter’s birthday was the next event on the calendar, followed immediately by Mother’s Day, and then our wedding anniversary. Our local Waikiki friends put on a birthday beach bash for Serafina, piled high with food, hugs, and smiles. It almost made her forget that “he promised to make it to my 10^th birthday,” she told me after.

Days later, on what would have been our wedding anniversary, I walked to the ocean and scattered flower petals in the waves, the salt in my tears which were indistinguishable from the salt in the air. I came home, baked an angel food cake, and watched one of our favorite movies, “The Princess Bride”.

Later that year, on Danny’s birthday, I baked his favorite black-bottomed cupcakes. Our tradition. I took some to a local bar to share and downed a few shots of Jameson in his honor.

We didn’t celebrate. We commemorated. We wallowed. We wondered if it would always be like this, heaviness accompanying what had previously been joyful.

I wanted my daughter to remember her dad, but I didn’t want every memory to be marked by mourning

Together, my daughter and I walked through several years of sad rituals. Cupcakes for his birthday. Not putting the Christmas tree up until after his birthday. “Deadpool,” and whiskey on the anniversary of his death. Angel food for our wedding anniversary.

Finally, after seven years of missing him, we turned a corner. In December 2025, the two of us decided that Danny would not have wanted us to live like this. He had never been someone who was stuck in the past. He was curious, and goofy, and full of joyful gestures, and I thought we should be, too

A potential new tradition took hold

Serafina was in her senior year of high school. She had friends and big milestones to look forward to. We had moved to Seattle a year earlier, leaving the Waikiki apartment where Danny died and sad memories lived.

This year, we decided, it was time to remember the hopeful energy we both loved. We decided we’d make a birthday dinner from a collection of his family’s recipes. Serafina chose the family taco salad, which bears little resemblance to either tacos or salad. As we crushed the Doritos and poured the condensed cheese soup “dressing,” we laughed. This is exactly how we wanted to remember him — nontraditional, not tethered to any notion of the “right” way to do things, and maybe a little bit addicted to junk food.

While mourning is important, I think it’s also a little self-indulgent. It focuses on our feelings of what’s missing rather than on celebrating what we loved about the ones we’ve lost. When we dug into that taco salad, we found ourselves talking about the perspective Danny had brought to our lives. The surprises. The wonder. It was a tribute to the person and what he had contributed to our lives, and that’s something worth celebrating.