The first Mother’s Day without my daughter evokes a range of emotions  

And so here it is, Mother’s Day at my door. I’ve known it was coming with every flip of my digital calendar, saw it bearing down with predictable persistence, and still I greet it with dread and sadness and, yes, a strange sense of gratitude. Grief is sneaky that way — snatching with one hand and giving with the other.

This is the first such holiday without my daughter. It marks nine months and two days of assembling a precarious recovery that teeters with every whim and change of weather. A recovery that is truly misnamed because it darts and spins all over the place. Why not use another R-word: rollercoaster?

I don’t know how this house of cards will hold, or if it should. I don’t know anything except that this sorrow is different from others. In mourning my daughter, I prefer to do it alone.

For Mother’s Day I won’t be alone. There will be calls from the three sons who live out of town, a visit from the one who lives 25 minutes away, and chatter and texts from the grandkids. As it should be. But shadowing this celebration, waiting in the wings will be a ghost, and, as I write this, I fear no one will talk about that invisible presence.

Friends and family skirt the subject. They avoid asking about her death. Or about how an ordinary day can so easily turn into a slog without warning or cause. They don’t talk about last summer’s awful realization that the inevitable, the feared, would happen. I understand. Truly I do. It’s hard to know what to say, even harder to console.

How can you describe an aberration in the natural chronology of nature? How can you explain the obvious, that a child should never precede a parent in death?

So I drop her name into random conversations. I tell stories, the good, the bad, and the funny. Words can serve as a lifeline, and I use them as both sword and shield. Strung together, they’ve become the best tool to slow the predictable fading of sound and smell and sight that accompanies death. Stories are my way of making her life — and absence — tangible.

And so, Mother’s Day at my door.

I have lots of practice marking this day, four decades worth, with some years more memorable than others. Last year’s celebration, or lack thereof, certainly falls into that category. Still under pandemic lockdown orders, I spent it alone with The Hubby, fielding calls from the children but also massaging that irritating pebble growing in the pit of my stomach. By then I already knew what she had refused to tell me. Unable to stay sober, she had been dropped from the liver transplant list — our last great hope. I was desperate. I was angry. I was flailing.

Mother’s Day 2021, still flailing, still angry but at least not desperate. A strange kind of peace comes with that subtraction. That’s why I count it as forward movement, however insignificant it may seem to others.

This year more than ever the holiday known for its sap and platitudes has taken on a special significance. I remember my late mother, who exactly 20 years ago spent that Mother’s Day facing the death sentence of advanced pancreatic cancer. She was the same age I am now, which is to say young-ish, full of dreams and desires. Surely, she worried about what she left behind: my father, their five grown children, a collection of other loved ones she had helped raise.

Did my daughter ruminate in a similar manner?

On this Mother’s Day, though, I think most about my motherless granddaughter. About my confusion and helplessness in how to best help her. About her long journey through grief and the permanent scar of irreversible loss at a young age. In that journey we walk parallel paths, fingertips touching across the great chasm. Even so, knowing her pain mirrors my own is small comfort.

On this Mother’s Day the best gift I could receive would be knowing how to make that pain more bearable, less awful.

Ana Veciana-Suarez writes about family and social issues. Email her at avecianasuarez@gmail.com or visit her website anavecianasuarez.com. Follow @AnaVeciana.

This story was originally published May 4, 2021 at 3:15 PM.