By Lindsey Cornett
@lindseycornett

I wake up in the guest bed in my husband’s childhood home, the navy and white comforter pulled up to my chin to fight off the air conditioner’s chill. I hear my three children in the kitchen, asking my mother-in-law for chocolate milk and pancakes. She cooks them made-to-order pancakes every morning of our stay. I think she’s spoiling them.

 For as long as Evan and I have been married, we’ve lived far from our families. At first, it was just a two-hour drive from Orlando to Tampa, but then we moved to the midwest. Our kids don’t get simple or impromptu sleepovers with their grandparents on Saturday nights, but they do get week-long vacations. When we come, my mother-in-law stocks up on butter and eggs and the griddle is ready to be deployed. Every single morning, pancakes are for breakfast, a joyful feast.

When I make pancakes at home, my kids are sorely disappointed by the uneven color and wonky circles (“circle” is a truly generous description). I can’t compete with Gram, whose cabinet is full of pancake molds—snowmen and reindeer, butterflies and flowers, T-Rex and Darth Vader—and a pancake pen, which she uses to indulge my children’s every whim and obsession. They don’t make it easy for her, requesting semi-trucks and excavators, humpback whales and porcupine puffer fish. She does her very best to draw their requests on her hot nonstick canvas, and if ever a figure falls apart during the flip, she calls it a “demolition derby.” We adults are more than happy to eat the wreckage.

Many mornings, I’ve tried to tell her the pancakes are unnecessary. The fridge and pantry hold a supply of yogurt, fruit, Cheerios, and oatmeal; my kids don’t need the extra sugar from the syrup, anyway. But no matter what time she wakes up, no matter if she’s manning the griddle between work calls, no matter if she was up the night before caring for her own mother or wrapping Christmas presents, she is bound and determined to provide a stack of hot, buttery pancakes (with a side of bacon for my husband).

 ***

I heard Evan coming up the stairs and into our bedroom at home, only a few weeks since we were last in Florida for Christmas. I rolled toward the door and glanced at the clock: 7 a.m. He handed me a cup of hot coffee before climbing into bed. Then, he told me the news: Grandma Shannon, his maternal grandmother, had passed away. Five years after Grandma Shannon’s dementia first manifested, her body forgot how to swallow, and so those years came to their anticipated end. 

By the end of the day, my husband adjusted his work schedule. I wrote a note to my son’s first grade teacher asking for a week of Ian’s math lessons to be sent home. We were on the road to Florida the next night. We have never lived close enough for my children to know her, and my oldest was still a baby when she began to forget things. We knew to expect her passing, but the loss still felt profound.

Before leaving, I cut strips of construction paper and made a paper chain 14 links long. I explained to the kids that I would remove one link for every hour we drove.

“We’ll be at Gram’s house around breakfast time,” I said, and they immediately began yammering loudly about pancakes.

Somewhere in North Florida, three or four links left on our paper chain, our four-year-old, Leo, began insisting he could smell them. 

“I smell Gram’s pancakes, Mama!” He kicked his legs back and forth in excitement and his blue eyes glittered.

“I don’t think so, buddy. We still have a long way to go.”

“No, I do. I smell them. They smell delicious! I’m going to have a semi-truck pancake.” He gazed out the window with a slight smile on his face.

***

Our family of five dressed in all black, we chose a row near the back of the sanctuary for our inevitable exit with a loud or unhappy preschooler. In the many rows in front of us sat the rest of my husband’s extended family—sixty-two of us, if my math was right. My brother-in-law and six other cousins stood behind the pulpit to share their memories of this woman, Brenda Shannon, who was a matriarch in every way.

She was born in 1940, married young, and gave birth to seven children, among whom my mother-in-law is second in line. I married one of her twenty-four grandchildren, and my children were three of her one dozen great-grandkids. There are more statistics, of course, about years spent as a church pianist and pounds of beef roasted for Sunday suppers and carols sung in her home on Christmas Eve. Still, no numbers can convey the warmth I felt every time I stepped through her front door.

One by one, my brother-in-law and one cousin from each of the seven families stood at the pulpit to share their memories. I alternated between wiping my eyes and shushing Leo. I gave Ian my Moleskine, more than willing to sacrifice a few pages if it would keep him quiet.

Suddenly, he learned over to me, tapped my forearm, and quietly spoke into my ear. “Wow! She sounds so nice. Am I part of this family, too?”

I paused for a moment, the weight of his whispered question heavy on my heart. I thought he was absorbed in his drawings of steam engines and tractors, but he was listening to everything being said.

“Yes, buddy,” I said. “This is your family, too.”

A few minutes later, he leaned over again. “I hope someone else will keep making the pancakes, now.”

I hadn’t noticed, but Ian did: all seven cousins had mentioned the pancakes, how they knew they would wake up after every sleepover to stacks smothered in butter and dripping in syrup. It was a smell that lingered all these years later, a sweetness still sitting on their tongues. Ian soaked up each warm word they shared.

When Grandma Shannon’s awareness of the present deteriorated, she seemed transported back to her past, to early motherhood when a gaggle of children demanded her attention and care. She gently chided and cooed at children who were not there. She rocked baby dolls and sang “Jesus Loves Me.” She even administered spankings to anyone she deemed deserving. I wonder if some mornings, she wandered into her now-empty kitchen and smelled pancakes.

Sitting in the church for the funeral, it came upon me in a sudden knowing, like someone throwing open the bedroom curtains to let the sunshine pour over my eyes. I understood my mother-in-law’s pancakes and how the convenience or ease was, to her, irrelevant. This was about remembering, gathering, and loving both her mother and her mother’s great-grandchildren.

A few days later, I said to my husband, “I only just realized that your mom likes to make pancakes for the kids because it’s what Grandma Shannon did for you,” I said.

He looked at me as though this was as obvious a truth as gravity. “Almost everything my mom does, she does because Grandma Shannon did it, too.”

My mind wandered to images and memories of Sunday lunch at Grandma Shannon’s and the way each person got to have precisely the birthday cake they wanted. I remembered the first time my mother-in-law served unsweetened tea at dinner, me being the only person around the table who would drink it. This hospitality was born not from a sense of duty or tradition but a deep desire that each person around the table know they are loved and welcomed: a holy communion.

The pancakes, for both mother and daughter, seem an insistence that no attempt to care is too messy or inconvenient. My mother-in-law, like her mother before her, makes  room around her breakfast table, pulls up a chair and sets down an overflowing plate. My children did not know Grandma Shannon, but they will know her impact and her legacy because it flows through their own grandmother.

Thin batter, hot griddle, butter, syrup: do this in remembrance of love. 

Guest essay written by Lindsey Cornett. Lindsey is a loud talker, obsessive coffee drinker, and lover of the written word who lives in downtown Indianapolis with her scientist husband and three young kids. In both writing and life, she explores the intersections of faith, family, creativity, and freedom from perfectionism. She is a co-founder of The Drafting Desk, editorial team member at Kindred Mom, and contributor to Indianapolis Moms. You can find her on Instagram or at www.lindseycornett.com. 

Photo by Lottie Caiella.