© Dennett ~ Ben’s Holiday Favorite

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Tears for Breakfast

Dealing with death

Dennett
2 min readDec 15, 2024

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I froze as I walked into the grocery store. Ahead of me was a display table with a pyramid of Panettone boxes. I recalled Ben’s excitement last year — and every year — when he saw a similar table holding boxes of his favorite holiday treat. His face lit up like a Christmas tree. We bought two because they sold out fast.

Ben called Panettone pan dulce — sweet bread. In recent years, we did almost nothing for Christmas except we always bought two boxes of Panettone and a third if they were still in stock the next week. We ate our pan dulce with coffee for breakfast.

I wiped away tears as I put a box of Panettone in my shopping cart. I almost didn’t buy it because I thought the pan dulce would have the sourness of sorrow rather than the cake’s signature sweetness. But since Ben and I had so few holiday traditions in recent years, I wanted to do or have something that reminded me of our Christmases together. I needed to cling to something.

The next morning, my breakfast consisted of the slight bitterness of strong coffee, the sweetness of Ben’s pan dulce, and the salt of many tears.

© Dennett 2024

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Weeds & Wildflowers
Weeds & Wildflowers

Published in Weeds & Wildflowers

Stories of Dennett (Wildflower) & Ben (Weed) & Our Guests

Dennett
Dennett

Written by Dennett

I was always a writer but lived in a bookkeeper’s body before I found Medium and broke free — well, almost. Working to work less and write more.

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