Grieving my estranged mother while she was still alive taught me how to get through the holidays

• I was estranged from my mother for 11 years before she died.
• Our relationship always gave me feelings of sadness, but they often intensified over the holidays.
• Seeking therapy and embracing my emotions helped the me find joy amid holiday grief.

Tis' the season for joy, making holiday cookies in the comfort of your cozy kitchen, the smell of pine needles and sipping piping hot cocoa. But for many folks who are estranged from loved ones, including me, it's also the season for something a little less merry: grief.

My mother and I were estranged for eleven years. I say were because she is no longer earthside, but somewhere out in the ether, depending on who you ask. Of course, with that loss comes its own kind of bereavement. But before she died in 2019 after a methamphetamine overdose, our estrangement felt something like an eternal sadness, one that can't be taped over and wrapped with a bow — especially around the holiday season.

The months that mark the end of the year, a supposed-to-be-happy shift into a new year are, perhaps, the hardest months when you're estranged from a loved one, a friend or for many people, their entire family. For me, that was certainly the case. My mother, the person we all are connected to deeply in ways we can't always understand, wasn't around. She always loved Christmas time, but Halloween was her favorite, and as our eleven-year estrangement went on, I found myself a little melancholy as the spooky season approached. It went well into December, too.

We missed out on the wrapping of presents together, the jaunt to go look at the holiday lights or even watch silly movies about elves and St. Nick and those Hallmark movies she loved. And with every missed holiday together, it marked something we could never get back. Time. Memories. Joy. Sorrow. Love. This came and went every year.

Finding a way to cope

Amid our estrangement, around year three, I decided to find ways to cope with the sadness. I didn't want to stay stuck in this loop. After all, I wanted to enjoy the holidays, too. We all deserve that. So I set out to do what I knew would help me: I got a therapist booked out, every year, to talk to before the holiday season kicked in. Even if I didn't keep the sessions throughout the months, I found that having someone (a trained professional) to make a plan with — like what to do when I feel depression coming on or what I could do to help myself if I got angry messages from my mother — was a way to protect myself.

I always knew that, around the holidays, each of our feelings would be exacerbated. I'd feel the call to continue to protect myself, and she, a struggling addict, would feel the call to reach out to me and reconnect. I'd feel sad to not be able to hug her, and she'd, presumably, feel sad she couldn't hug me, too.

I used to imagine her sitting in her home that I'd never seen or been invited to before, and I'd wonder if she thought about me, or what we'd do if we were together. Over the years, I found that, instead of pushing these thoughts and feelings away, embracing them actually made things easier. We should feel all of our things, and even if they're hard, that is the reality of many folks who are estranged.

Living a joyful life

Making the decision to get professional help, and let myself notice and acknowledge how I felt, gave me permission to live in the duality: I could have complicated emotions and still live my joyful life. Of course, it also helped to confide in trusted friends, indulge in my Granny's Christmas cookies, head to the three-story mall with my little sister to shop for gifts and give myself restful days when I needed them.

Now, even after my mother has passed on, I think the process of grieving her while she was still alive, was somehow, more difficult than grieving her death. That's the thing about estrangement, it forces us to grieve a person who is still living, but who, in some ways, feels dead. Around the holidays, this always leaves me still with a sadness, that I suppose will always be there. But I can continue on.

A few years before my mother's passing, I got a card in the mail a week after Christmas. It was postmarked on December 24th. The address was one of a drug addiction treatment center, where she had checked herself in on Christmas Eve, a time when the holidays must have helped her reevaluate her life. The note simply read, "Merry Christmas, I love you." For the first time, I wholly knew, she felt the hardness of the holidays, too.