Have yourself a merry little Christmas? No thanks

All is not merry and bright this Christmas. Not for my family. All is mostly sad and dim because we are missing our girl, my daughter, Kate Grace, who died last April at the age of 27 from breast cancer.

Those who have experienced this kind of loss know that grief doesn’t take a holiday. There’s no time off for good behavior. Grief finds you wherever you are, at your desk, sitting at a stoplight; it even chases you in dreams.

I carry grief everywhere I go and on most days I‘m successful at keeping it under wraps, hiding it from co-workers and baristas who often ask how my day is goin’.

“It sucks,” I want to say. It sucks today. It sucked yesterday. In fact, it’s been sucking for the last eight months. It’s ironic, too, because the day Kate was diagnosed, February 17, 2017, she made her family and friends vow there would be no bad days. “We have to find the good,” she said, “no matter what.”

We all kept the “No Bad Days” promise, but she led the effort. Through biopsies and scans, through long days of chemo, radiation and surgeries, Kate made us list off the positives like each one was worth a thousand bucks. It confirmed the old adage, “Seek and ye shall find.”

Friends and family made it easier. Throughout Kate’s entire cancer journey, they stood by with encouraging words and “atta girl”s. Her sister Caroline and best friend MacKenzie moved in with her. MacKenzie even put off graduate school so she could devote more time to Kate.

After her double mastectomy, Kate’s great aunts decided to knit her a pair of boobs, one of the aunts being far more generous with the yarn. Kate laughed and said “thanks for the mammories,” but never wore them; neither did she wear a wig after her hair fell out.

Kate ultimately decided that hair and breasts weren’t necessary for a happy life. On social media, she posted this: “I am still learning to ignore the stares, awkward personal questions from strangers, and the hilarious commentary from curious kids, but being bald has given me strength. It has taught me that my outward appearance is so secondary to what is inside me.”

And what was inside her was so good. So here’s the part where I want to shake my fist at the sky and shout, “Why? Why didn’t my daughter get to live?”

But if Kate never asked that question, I won’t either. Kate was the first to tell you how much she hated cancer. The life extending treatment was brutal even on the best days, but she told me that cancer also gave her a gift, saying, “I never knew how much I was loved.”

At the age of 27, Kate faced death with unwavering courage. Tears fell, yes, on many occasions, but she walked as if she had an army of 10,000 at her back. And when she could walk no more, when cancer sapped her strength, she eased into a humility that can only be described as angelic.

Kate’s prescription for “No Bad Days” wasn’t a pithy slogan. It was a disciplined practice tested by an immense amount of suffering. It carried her through cancer, and I believe she’d want it to carry all of us who loved her through grief.

It’s hard to see any gifts in this sadness right now, even at Christmas when we’re told to let our hearts be light, but I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t acknowledge how grateful I am that I got to be Kate’s mom. That privilege is worth this heavy grief I’ll carry ‘til my very last day.

Karen Irwin is an editorial writer for the News Tribune. Reach her at karen.irwin@thenewstribune.com