I’m searching the internet for ways to get through this first festival of lights season without my mother. The articles I read about loss and the holidays offer helpful tips for getting through it. So many helpful suggestions: find meaning in your traditions, ask for help, plan ahead, discover what has most value to you, change it up, keep it the same, leave an empty chair at the table, feel the absence.

This small list hardly scratches the surface. And what I keep thinking is, skip to January!

This is not an option I would actually take, because in some other corner of my being, I want to be with the people I love, I want to watch my grandkids with their eyes lighting up, I want not to lose all the other things I enjoy about celebrating just because I have lost her. I even wish it could be the same as usual, minus my mother, but even in this way, life is not cooperating (and neither is my family). It will be utterly, remarkably and painfully different. There will be no attempt or even option to pretend or assimilate as if she has not died.

How did I manage it when my wife died so many years ago, at almost exactly the same time? I can’t even remember.

So, not knowing exactly what taking care of myself would look like in this moment, I prepare. I ask for everyone’s wish list. I make the house ready and pull the boxes down from the attic (actually, I haven’t done that yet). I try to figure out where we will actually be when. I make lists. And I cry…

Today I pulled up the list from last year, happy for something I don’t have to reinvent, and there, second name from the top, there it was. “Mom.” As it turns out, last year was the last year she will be on my list.

Last year, before her diagnosis, when all she wanted was a family picture. I can’t tell you how glad I am that I drove everyone crazy and begged them to make it happen. There we all are, under the arches at Lake Merritt in our town, Oakland, smiling and happily unaware what the next year would bring.

There are so many things I’m grateful for and I remember them each day. I’m grateful to have a mother I can sincerely mourn. I’m grateful for all the love and support I have in my life, for a wonderful wife, and children, and friends and work I love. But just for today, I’m saying to myself, “Let it stink that your mom died. Don’t make it better. Be grumpy. For one day, don’t try to see the bright side.” Complain a little.

How am I doing?

Cheryl Espinosa-Jones

Cheryl Jones is a grief counselor and the host of Good Grief radio at VoiceAmerica. During her education as a Marriage and Family Therapist, her first wife was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, which was at the time a uniformly terminal illness with a six month to one year prognosis. In the eight years that followed, Cheryl engaged daily in the work of preparing for her death. She was trained during this period by Stephen and Ondrea Levine (Who Dies and Grieving Into Life and Death) and Richard Olney (founder of Self-Acceptance Training). After her wife’s death, Cheryl immersed herself in her own multifaceted grief, startled by frequent moments of joy.! ! Along with her private therapy practice, Cheryl is Manager of Professional Education at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland, CA. She has trained extensively with Erving Polster, leader in the field of gestalt therapy and author of Everybody’s Life is Worth a Novel. Previously, she was Clinical Director at the Alternative Family Project, which served the therapeutic needs of LGBTQ families in San Francisco. She also wrote a column for the San Francisco Bay Times called Motherlines and ran Considering Parenthood groups for the LGBT community. Website: www.weatheringgrief.com Good Grief host page: www.voiceamerica.com/show/2264/good-grief

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