Getting Through Mother's Day When Your Mom's No Longer Around

If you watch television, go on the Internet, or are just engaged in the world, you know that it's Mother's Day season. It probably feels pretty innocuous to many of you, if not completely annoying. I know it did for me—until my mom died suddenly in January of 2014. Then Mother's Day changed forever.

The Mother's Day Industrial Complex is vast and all-consuming from April to early May each year. Every commercial. Every email from a brand. Every gift guide on your favorite website. Every special episode of TV. (Hell, even The Handmaid's Tale was maternally themed last week.) They all just become painful triggers after your mom dies, reminders of a relationship that you can no longer celebrate the way you'd like to. My first motherless Mother's Day came just a few short months after losing my mom, and I wasn't ready for it in any way. I was still wracked with a grief I wasn't sure would ever lessen and trying to figure out how to get through my day-to-day life. How was I going to cope on a day dedicated to moms?

Turns out my lifeline came via a Modern Loss article written by Kate Spencer called "How I'm Making Mother's Day My Bitch." I felt like she could see into my broken heart when she wrote, "The world became a sea of moms who weren’t mine, and I drowned in sadness every time." That's the thing about the motherless; they get each other in very unique way—even if they've never met. Spencer literally wrote the book on it—The Dead Moms' Club. "Losing your mother, especially when you're youngish, is a unique and isolating experience," Spencer tells me. "There's not a larger conversation around mother or parent loss for young adults, so even though it's not uncommon, it still feels like you're alone. Finding others who get it is such an incredible comfort. Also, culturally we don't talk much about death, dying, or grief. So having a space where others share that experience is so valuable. I've found such solace in others who have been through it."

Mother's Day without a mom brings up emotions that are at once simple yet also as complex and layered as the mother-daughter relationship itself—and they can shift from year to year. You may be able to anticipate the holiday, but you can never be sure how you'll react. "It seems silly and overly simple, but I just miss her," Spencer says. "[Mother's Day] is just a reminder of how unfair it still feels to me that she's not here. Especially now that I have two daughters who she never met. We'd be celebrating her as their grandmother, and knowing that we never got to have that experience together is especially tough for me to swallow."

Writer Elizabeth Holmes, who lost her mother almost 14 years ago when she was 24, agrees, "The hardest part for me about Mother’s Day, and the weeks leading up to it, is the constant reminder that my mom is not here. Even all these years later, and as a mom myself, I struggle mightily with the day. I have a deep-seated envy of women who still have their mothers in their lives." Holmes says that her own infertility struggles made the day even worse. "Desperately wanting to be a mother while missing my own mother was an intense kind of pain—a hollowness, even—that still haunts me." It's something I can relate to, that double whammy of emotion. While I've not struggled with infertility, I also never thought I'd be 42 and childless, but that's how life has panned out for me. I'd do just about anything to be able to talk to my mom about how that makes me feel and the fact that I can't makes me ache in a unique way on Mother's Day.