It's Our First Mother's Day Without Mom

It's hard, writes Jason Tippetts, but 'it is not my place to ignore (milestones) because they are hard'
By Polly Davis Doig,  Newser Staff
Posted May 10, 2015 11:25 AM CDT
It's Our First Mother's Day Without Mom
Jason and Kara Tippetts   (YouTube)

Mother's Day usually marks a round of cards, flowers, and breakfasts in bed for moms new and longtime alike. But for Jason Tippetts and his four kids, it marks "a great sense of dread and loss," a raw reminder that less than two months ago his wife Kara died after a two-and-a-half-year struggle with cancer. "I have been initiated into a club for whom this day causes more hurt than joy," he writes in the Washington Post. "We enter this Mother’s Day as a family of five and not six. It’s as if we’re in a play where the lead actor is missing but the play goes on, as if the story still makes sense in their absence." Because, Tippetts writes, "it is not my place to ignore (milestones) because they are hard," his family will stick to their traditions.

"I want my kids to enter into the celebration of this day, to remember the life their mom lived and the character traits she desired to foster in them: kindness, compassion and love." So the Tippetts family will eat together, they'll do some of Kara's favorite things, and yes, they'll go to church and see other families and their mothers. "Many of these activities will be done with tears in my eyes and streaming down my cheeks. But to stop celebrating this day, though it might be easier, would be running from the love that created our family." Click for Tippetts' full column. Kara Tippetts kept a blog here. (More Mother's Day stories.)

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