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The first Christmas without a loved one feels like stepping into a strange, hollow version of what the holidays once were. The absence of my mom transformed the familiar season of joy into a season of aching. At the same time, motherhood with young children creates a peculiar kind of present-tense nostalgia, where you long for the moment even as it is happening. Balancing my children’s wonder with my grief is a delicate dance. Sometimes I want to savour every minute. Somedays I just wish it was over.
This is a guide for navigating both loss and life during the holidays – my guide for mourning my mother, one year at a time.
The first year without her
In the first year, host as much as you possibly can. It helps pass the days.
Invite friends for brunch, then more friends for dinner – even on a Monday. After they leave, take it all out on the kitchen with a scrubbing sponge and some bleach, then do it again the next day.
Don’t dare look at her recipes.
On Christmas Eve, make tacos or something that she never served, but pull yourself together for a post-dinner snowy sled ride around the block to give your kids some semblance that you’re actually here and actively participating in the festivities.
Put them to bed, kiss their little faces for an achingly long time then make cinnamon rolls to rise overnight before collapsing into a puddle of despair.
Year Two
In the second year, rifle through her butter-stained index cards in the recipe box at the back of the cupboard. Take a moment to thank yourself that you held onto these. Decide to tackle a few of the greatest hits: cheese ball and almond sugar cookies. Don’t get out her cookie cutters yet. Maybe another year.
Decorate the Christmas tree with the kids in the only manner that you were raised to be acceptable: to her favourite Fleetwood Mac album.
Put the kids to bed marvelling with your husband how much they have grown since she last saw them, and wouldn’t she just adore their spunkiness?
Gnaw on some carrots and chuck the nubs in the backyard for “evidence” and then do what you couldn’t do last year – look at photos of her from Christmases when you and your brother were the same age as your children are now. Shake your head at the genetic wonder that is three generations of the same precise nose profile and cowlick. Concede that you simply can’t know your own mothering without the memory of hers.
Have a chuckle that she’d think your hipster oat-nog is disgusting then eat a whole bunch of cheese ball right out of the fridge in the dark, before falling into a heap. Miss her in the marrow of your bones.
Year Three
Count over and over again and could it possibly be three years? Say a silent prayer for the doctors and nurses who cared for her. How many holidays did they miss with their own families to look after strangers? Send some extra love to the angels who cared for her when she spent one Christmas in the ICU. That was a doozy.
Have a good laugh at remembering the first time your now husband came for Christmas dinner, how she wore a new red dress and after two (!) glasses of wine she made an excellent toast to welcome him to the family. Remember how, later, washing up, she told you he is handsome. Reflect on what a pity she can’t see that he’s even more handsome now.
Laugh about how that same Christmas she somehow got it in her head that he loves Black Forest ham and Black Forest cake, both of which he politely moved around on his plate, and would do so regularly for the next eight years because he was too polite to tell her he doesn’t like Black Forest anything.
Go hard on the decorations. Buy extra lights. Let the kids have advent calendars. Bake after the kids go to sleep and try to time travel back to baking with her. What did she wear when she was puttering around in the kitchen? Was it tea or coffee in her mug? Pull out all her cookie cutters and run your hands over her beautiful handwriting in her recipes. On the first night that it snows, slip on her gloves and pretend you’re holding her hand as you walk down the street.
Karen Cleveland lives in Toronto.
