Not another decapitated gingerbread boy! I was creating more headless cookies than perfectly intact ones, as I repeatedly attempted to free them from my mom’s 30-year-old plastic cookie cutter. The frustration was definitely setting in, and pools of tears started to gather in my eyes. My hands were developing blisters from tapping the cutter on the kitchen counter repetitively, praying each time that a complete cookie would emerge. The cheerful Christmas music I had streaming throughout the house was now starting to really annoy me, and it was not helping to create the festive mood that I had hoped it would. I stared desperately at my cell phone, sprinkled with little puffs of white flour, cradled in the recipe book I had given to my mom countless birthdays ago. All I needed to do was to call her and ask her one question: what was the trick for getting these gingerbread men onto the cookie tray in one piece? But that was impossible. I had to figure it out all on my own. Just as I had to decipher her messy handwriting scribbled on the recipe cards, and simply make a guess when I had a question that I didn’t know the answer to. This was supposed to be therapeutic for me, recreating my mom’s famous Christmas cookies to carry on her tradition, but it was turning into a traumatic experience. This was my new life…Christmas without my mom. Why why why did I not ever bake cookies with my mom as an adult? I should have had her teach me. I thought I would have all the time in the world and she would show me her Yoda baking ways when she was an old lady, ready to pass the baton to the next generation.
Just Skip Christmas
Last year was the first holiday season I had to face without my mom here. She was brutally murdered by my step-dad just 6 months earlier, and I was still in shock, still finding it difficult to carry on without her. At first, I thought I would just try to skip Christmas entirely. No tree, no cookies, no music, no stockings, no Christmas dinner, and no holiday memories in my new home. If I pretended Christmas didn’t exist, then I wouldn’t have to deal with the pain that comes when the holiday traditions I’ve enjoyed for 36 years are suddenly ripped away. Nothing would ever be the same without my mom here to celebrate with. She was the heart of the holidays for me, and she was at the heart of my life.
My Choice, My Turning Point
I had a choice, and this was a turning point in my grief story. I needed to accept the fact that my life had changed, and that I was now an entirely different person. The more that I looked at my life and expected it to be the same as when my mom was alive, I was just delaying the inevitable. I could fight this change with all that I had, and run my life and my spirit into the ground. Or I could stop resisting my heartbreaking circumstances and start creating my new life. Faced with this crossroads, the answer seems obvious. However, to someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one, it is a difficult and complicated journey.
Resisting Acceptance
Creating a new life after such a profound loss means accepting the fact that I no longer have my mom here. Acceptance. That’s a tough one. We resist acceptance and change, because we don’t want it. We want life to be the same, we want our loved one to be on the other end of the phone when we call, we want our holiday traditions to be intact, we want to hear their voice, we want to be able to hug them, and we want to continue making memories with them. It’s this deep desire to keep our old lives that holds us back. However, in order to continue living our lives, we must accept that our world has changed. For a long time, I resisted this, because I felt like it was a betrayal. I thought that if I moved forward, I would be leaving my mom in the past, I would be dishonoring her memory, and I wouldn’t be giving her death the respect it deserved. It wasn’t until I faced my first Christmas without her, that I realized how backwards my thinking really was.
“What would mom want me to do?”
While contemplating my plan to ignore Christmas, I pictured my mom looking down on me. My tree ornaments still in their boxes in the attic, my home devoid of any decorations or holiday cheer, and me actively resisting any Christmas celebrations. I knew exactly how she would react to that. She would be heartbroken. Imagining her being sad, because I was miserable, made me even more upset. That’s the last thing a grieving heart needs: more sadness. I asked myself the one question I now base my entire healing philosophy on: “What would mom want me to do?” Of course, she would want me to bake her cookies, hang my beloved ornaments, adding her dearly loved ornaments to my collection now too. She would enjoy seeing me go to Christmas Eve church service on the beach and sing Christmas carols by candlelight. She would want me to make new traditions, inspired by the old ones that we used to enjoy together.
Honoring Her with My Choices
My mom would want me to live a full and beautiful life, because she worked so hard to give me the life I have now. All of the sacrifices she made, and everything she did to ensure I had the chance to have an amazing life cannot go to waste. Living my new life to the fullest isn’t moving on without her or forgetting her. In fact, it is honoring her as a mother and making her proud to be my mom. I realized that the best way to respect her memory was to live the life she would have wanted for me. Therefore, that is what I try to do each day. It is still excruciatingly painful to be here without her, and I miss her every second. There are definitely days where I just want to pull the covers over my head and shut life out. But I can’t…I have to keep moving forward, for her and for me.
Last Christmas
So last Christmas, that’s what I did. I bravely tackled baking her famous cookies. I think I did a respectable job, because my friends and family all said how they looked and tasted just like hers. Honestly, they will never taste as good as hers; however, just the fact that they resembled hers at all made me very proud, because I knew she would be proud of me. I’m actually excited to get started baking this year’s cookies. I want to make them even better this time around, and now it’s my goal to get them closer to hers each year. The tree and garlands went up too. I took ornaments out of their boxes, one by one, and admired each one as I hung it on the tree. My fiancé Richard watched from across the living room as I did this, wanting to give me space, because tears poured out of my eyes with each box that I opened. Every ornament carries special meaning, as my mom gave one to me as a gift each year since my very first Christmas. Sometimes I called him over and explained a particular ornament’s significance, and he listened with care. I remarked how disheartening it was that she would no longer be adding to my collection. On Christmas morning, Richard gave me an ornament that he created especially for this first Christmas without my mom. It was a glittery sand dollar, and on the back, he wrote out a quote from one of my mom’s journals. I cried tears of joy as I turned it over in my hands and then hung it in a prominent place on our tree. I am really looking forward to getting that one out of its box and hanging it on the tree this year.
Her Legacy lives On
Facing this Christmas is going to be a lot easier than last year, because I have given myself the permission to explore new traditions, while maintaining and continuing some of my mom’s. For those of you who still have loved ones here with you, please make the most out of this holiday season. Cherish the time you spend with them and if there are any traditions, like baking cookies, that you should learn from them, don’t wait…ask them to teach you now. I will continue to try new things for the holidays, until I find what fits for my new life. It’s still going to be a struggle to get through Christmas without her, but all I can hope for is that she will be with me while I bake her cookies and decorate my tree. I will picture her looking down on me and smiling, because she is happy to see her legacy living on through me.