written By Deborah Waffle | Photos provided
[From the 2025 Holiday Magazine]
My Grief Jar: Still Growing After the Loss of My Daughter is available in Kindle format, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon. It is also available at the Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs.
You can contact Deborah Waffle at
When my daughter, Kelsey, passed away suddenly at the age of 29, I certainly wasn’t thinking, I should write a memoir, but just one week after my daughter died, Brody—her young golden retriever— and I were sitting in a dog agility class. I didn’t want to be there. It took every ounce of strength I had not to fall apart. When the trainer asked each of us to introduce ourselves and our dog, I said, “My name is Debbie Waffle, and this is my golden retriever Brody.”
Why would any grieving mother do this?
Kelsey was my firstborn child. By elementary school age, she had wavy blonde hair and eyes so blue that total strangers felt the need to comment on them. She loved school, writing stories, and making any sort of art project at her craft table. However, since birth, Kelsey often had some sort of worrisome medical symptom that interfered with her life. Maybe she had a fever, a UTI, or a stomach virus. Most school-age children experience these illnesses. But with Kelsey, we were constantly at the doctor’s office trying to figure out what was wrong.
Over the years, after seeing dozens of specialists, Kelsey was diagnosed with small fiber neuropathy that affected her autonomic system. As an adult, her chronic pain prevented her from working and left her feeling like her life had no purpose.
I’d always been a reader, but around this time I discovered that memoirs could be inspirational. My favorite memoirs told stories about people who, after experiencing some sort of traumatic struggle, chose—not to give up on life—but to take their lives in new and positive directions. I’d share these stories with Kelsey and tell her, “Someday you’ll find your something good!”
Just a couple of months after Kelsey moved into her own house, I told her, “Dad and I want to get you a puppy.” Kelsey couldn’t believe it. “My own puppy,” she exclaimed. “I wanted a dog, but I never thought I’d get one this soon.” Since dogs had always been a part of our family, I knew a puppy would be a great companion and roommate.
Even before meeting Brody, Kelsey and I talked about him becoming a therapy dog. “That would be the perfect job for me,” Kelsey said. “Then we could visit people who are in pain like me and make them feel better.” We decided that this would be her “something good.”
Brody was signed up for the agility class before Kelsey died. The three of us were supposed to do this together. Each designated dog area had two folding chairs side by side. As I sat there beside my empty chair, I knew that nothing would stop me from becoming a therapy dog team. I wondered if I was strong enough to emulate all the people I’d read about in those memoirs. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be how my grief jar started to grow. Brody would be Kelsey’s last gift to me, and he would give my life a new purpose.
