Holidays are always bittersweet for everyone, full of giddiness and stress, excitement and disappointment, joy and sadness. But this bittersweet feeling has now taken on a whole different meaning, it now presents me with a different feeling and experience.

Once grief has touched someone’s life, someone’s family, nothing remains untouched – especially not the holidays.

Holidays are hard for most people without a complete family, but with grief it’s a little different because it’s not like they’re busy at work, or estranged from the family. Instead they’re completely gone and they’re never coming back. All you have left is the precious memories you’ve shared, and a hopeful promise that I will meet you again.

It’s only been over a year since I lost my mother and I still don’t know how to fully explain the intertwining experiences of grieving and celebrating holidays. It’s like they’re now filled with ebbs and flows of so many different emotions, where there are no clear boundaries between where one feeling starts and the others end.

For as long as I can remember the holiday season has always circled around you, my caring mother who loved gift giving, party throwing, and holiday decorating. There wasn’t a single holiday you didn’t have some sort of celebration ready for. But now you’re not here and I can’t tell how I’m supposed to celebrate these joyful days when you’re not here to uphold the traditions I’ve known all my life.

I know everyone tells me I should keep doing all of these traditions, and that you’re with me in spirit. I am now continuing these traditions for the both of us, they tell me. But it’s not the same, and it never will be. It’s just different. Because there will ALWAYS be something, someone, missing from them.

I am not naïve enough to believe that I will never have a good holiday since you have passed away, I just recognize the fact that these holidays will never be or mean the same thing again for me.

Part of me tries so hard to stay chipper and cheerful for you. To live life to the fullest and make the most of the time I have left, the time the world has left me with. This is what I’m supposed to do right? Because the loss of you has shown me how important it is to live as much as you can, and how quickly you can lose everything. So I try to remain positive and excited about all of the celebrations. But part of this is driven by guilt because I now feel like I have to live for you and for me. I feel like I constantly need to be making you proud and doing what’s best for me and my family in your absence.

I just can’t help but feel angry sometimes. Not at you or my family, or even at death because I understand it’s a part of life. But I am angry at time, angry at life, for robbing me and my family of the only parent we’ve ever really known. Angry at the future for not including you, angry for all the future empty holidays and special events. Angry at what I have lost, and what could have been.

I know I should be happy for you that you’re free from this world that is full of suffering - and I am. But I am not. I am so grateful that you are free of pain, free of sadness, and tragedy, and life’s hard times. But I am not happy that you are free of me, of life itself. Or I guess I should say I am not happy that I am free of you, because I am still here and existing; and you are gone, and I will forever be bound to you. But you will no longer be bound to me in the same way, instead I will forever be attached to the ghost of you, endlessly chasing the shadows of your memory.

Somedays I am happy that you passed away when your life was finally in a good place, that you died in a optimistic and happy life-position, and have been freed from the potential of future suffering. But other times I’d wish for nothing more than for you to be back, even if that meant subjecting you to future suffering. More often though I wish that it was me instead of you, so that my sisters could have continued to have grown up with a mother. I know you’d never feel this way, you’d feed me some cliché line about how I have my whole life ahead of me, and you had lived a long enough, happy enough, life. But I often wonder what it would have been like if it was me instead of you. Not that your passing has given me a death wish, I just can’t help but wonder how life would have played out for you, for my sisters.

I will forever be curious about what the future could have been like if you were still here. What you’d be doing right now, what you’d look like. I wonder what you would have gotten me for my twenty-first birthday, or your great nieces first birthday. I still remember when I found your gift for her baby shower all wrapped up and never received; because you never made it to the party that day. I know gifts and material items don’t mean a thing in the grand scheme of things, but I still can’t help and wonder what you would have done for these “missed” holidays. What gifts you would have picked out, how you would have reacted to what I had gotten you, what food you would have made, how many times you would have laughed at the dinner table.

Sometimes when I’m Christmas shopping, I spot something you would have loved and pick it up on instinct to buy it for you. Only to realize that you’re no longer on my gift list anymore. Sometimes it makes me wish I had done more for your birthdays and holidays while you were still here - even though I know gifts never mattered to you. I just so badly wish I had shown you so much more love and appreciate while I had the chance.

In turn I try to make sure the loved ones in my life do feel loved and appreciated. I have always been into gift giving, and party throwing. But now there’s a new force behind that passion. I know what it’s like to feel so empty and alone on holidays, so incomplete. And I never want a single person in the world to feel that way. So I try my best to make everyone else’s holidays wonderful. To make them happy and feel loved, and to never have to question their importance in this world.

That sounds like a great optimistic outlook and all, but really it just amounts to added stress and pressure onto my already emotionally ridden holidays. I want to make sure that I make the most out of my holidays for you, and make sure my loved ones feel loved and happy. But sometimes it causes my expectations of holidays to be too idealistic, and when they cannot live up to my expectations, or when something goes wrong, it causes a great depression within me.

It’s almost like when you get those chocolate Easter bunnies and the outside is always so cute and chipper, but the inside is dark and hollow. I am happy and excited about the holidays, the costumes, candy, baked goods, family dinners, presents, holiday movies, and drinks. Oh, and the beautiful changing seasons. But deep deep inside there’s a hollow sadness. I try and distract myself with holiday activities and surrounding myself with family, to make myself feel engulfed in love and support. I try to busy myself by planning out holiday activities and presents for my loved ones. I try anything.

Anything to make me not focus on the pain in my chest, and the memories dancing in the back of my mind. The pain of my loss, and your absence from my life. No matter how hard I try to make the holidays a wonderful experience, and to feel loved and supported, a part of me will always feel lonely and alone without you here.

I suppose the pain and emptiness will lessen as time goes on and I rebuild my own traditions, and create a new family dynamic. But I am not naïve enough to think that I will someday completely be unaffected by the loss of you, and my grief.

I know that it will get easier with time and that no one will ever take the place of you. I know the memories that we’ve created will always be there, even when you are not.

But this is not what I wanted for myself, or what I saw for myself, my future, my family. This is not how I expected my future holidays to be: the family surrounded around the dinner table laughing, and sharing jokes and stories while passing around the dishes. All the while your place, your laugh, your smiling face, and soft voice are absent from the conversation. The family acutely aware of your absence, unsure if they should call attention to it or let the ghosts be for today.

I can’t tell you what is worse, or better. There is a sense of healing, a sense of you still being there when memories of you are shared, when remarks about you are made. But there is also a painful sadness in the air, and the reminder of what our family once was, and is now missing. A sadness that can be ignored and repressed if no one mentions it. But it’s almost disrespectful to not remind the world of the gracious spirit that you once were; to not carry on your memory and share it with others who never got, and never will have, the chance to meet you.

It's a burden to bare - do I share the memories and all the sadness and nostalgia it brings? Share you with anyone who will listen and let the feelings out freely and proudly? Or stay silent and keep the ghosts and the pain to myself? - because reliving it is just too hard to share today.

I guess it just depends on the day, because if there’s anything I have learned since you’ve been gone is there are good days and there are hard days; and that’s okay. There are days when I need to let the memories out, let the ghost of you free or I might explode. And there are days where I need to forget it all, distract myself, and try to let go and move on, or I might implode. And that’s okay.

Holidays are no longer the same when there’s one less plate at the dinner table – when there’s a constant reminder of your absence in the back of our heads. But I deal with the holidays, step by step, motion by motion, feeling by feeling, day by day, in whatever ways I need to in that moment.

I try and lay my grief aside and enjoy the celebrations in the hopeful promise that we will meet again - that your plate will be placed next to mine again, and the holiday spirits will not be lost in the afterlife.