As the title says — I miss my mom.
Cancer took her from me, from my family and her friends, on 12/2/2011. It was a horrible several months from diagnosis through chemotherapy and then finding out chemo wasn’t working, then hospice. My mom was technically gone a month before she finally died. Yes, I phrased that way on purpose — at that point, it was a mercy. She didn’t know where she was or who we were for the last couple of weeks. Fuck cancer.
Thanksgiving was my mom’s holiday. We hosted it for as long as I can remember. It used to be my favorite day of the year — turkey is the best protein ever. Deal with it. When I was 10 or so, she added a goose dinner between Christmas and New Years. On top of all that, my parents’s anniversary was 11/24. This really was her time of year.
And then she died. And nothing’s been the same since.
I’ve been trying to write this for over a week and I don’t know how to get past this point. It’s just… nothing is right. I’ve gone away for Thanksgiving (my in-laws live in Tennessee), and I’ve gone to my family’s Thanksgiving. Both are wrong.
Christmas music — barely listen to it anymore. Barely care it’s the season. I like getting together to have some good food with family and friends from now until after New Year’s, but any “holiday” feeling is gone. Hell, my wife and I have hosted the goose dinner for several years (because my parents, in their mid to late 60s couldn’t do it any longer), but I have no “feels” for anything but the “feels” I get from any other dinner party.
I look back at those last two paragraphs and I see myself deflecting. I am not great at dealing with what are considered the more negative emotions. This is my fifth year without my mom, and there’s still a hole in me that I know will never be filled.
Boteveg's Pub 
Oh, sweetie. I know just how you feel.
We always spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with my dad’s youngest sister and her family. My aunt passed away many years ago, and my dad in 2012. The holidays aren’t the same anymore.
I do my best to make them great and memorable for my children. Maybe that’s what my dad was doing all the years without his own mother.
Yes, it’s a strange dichotomy. I feel like something profound is missing, and yet something profound is just learning/getting into what I really liked about November through January.
We lost my mom Nov 14 2011 and you’re right. It will never be the same. I’m told it gets better as time passes. I suppose it does to some degree. It doesn’t hurt as acutely, for me anyway, but I don’t think it will ever go away. I am an unapologetic momma’s boy, so it hit me pretty hard and I seriously doubt I’ll ever “get over it”. Honestly, not sure if I even want to.
Yeah, I don’t expect to get totally over it. And I actually felt I did well the last two years (not good 2012, OK 2013, 2014), but for some reason this year I feel it more acutely.