Member-only story
Facing Mother’s Day After Losing A Child
Eight years later
Eight years ago I wrote about how hard it was to face Mother’s Day as a bereaved parent. That essay was published in the Washington Post. My daughter Ana had been gone for less than two months, and I was heading into a year of many “firsts” without her.
Revisiting that essay has made me realize how much my grief has shifted over the past eight years. If I could talk to my newly bereaved self, to the broken mother I was back then, I would tell her that it does get better, that joy does return — bit by painful bit.
I don’t have a time machine, so instead I’ll write to the hardest parts of that essay, to a version of myself that didn’t think she’d survive without Ana.
“I don’t feel much like celebrating Mother’s Day this year. My 15-year-old daughter died 51 days ago, after being plagued by a rare, relentless form of cancer for five years. I’m not sure what the celebration is supposed to look like when I failed at my main task as a mother: Seeing my child safely to adulthood.” — Me, 8 years ago
I felt like a failure in those early months. My child had died because I couldn’t find the right doctor or the right treatment or because we didn’t get the diagnosis soon enough, leaving the tumor plenty of time to grow and spread.
