Mother’s Day - Young, Widowed, and Childless

Mother’s day has brought on a wave of heavy grief that I wasn’t anticipating. I used to think this day was only heavy for those missing a mom, or those who lost babies. Then almost 9 months ago, I became a childless young widow.

The option to be a mom was swooped right out from under me. The day Jason died, so did those hopes and dreams. Being a mother with Jason is gone.

That was our next step, where we were headed. Our plans. Our very real, soon to be plans. We did it all “right” as society says. Get married, then have babies. But then cancer took everything. The plan, the ease of family planning. Doing it all, with Jason.

This day has no longer become a social media feed of my friend’s mothers. It is now my friends becoming mothers. And my heart hurts. It hurts for the version of life I lost when I lost Jason. For how behind and confused I now feel. For being so close to that joy to have it all taken when life also took Jason.

This day is heavy. It brings so many emotions. Sadness, anger, and love.

My mind stews with a lot of anger. Anger I desperately need to move through. Paired with that anger is thankfulness, for my own incredible mother. Anger always consumes, even when thankfulness is there. I wish that wasn’t so, but for now it is that way. Maybe one day, that will be different. I hope it will be.

I am so angry at Jason’s mom. I wish I could tell how much she failed her child as his mother. Failed him his whole life, but especially at the end, and especially through cancer. I disdain her for this. Every day, the way she (and his father) failed Jason, hurt Jason, intentionally, haunts me. Eats at me. Wrecks me. I am working so dang hard to move that anger through. It is hard work. It is hard painful work to move abuse like that through, especially abuse paired with the impossible grief of losing Jason. Most of all, I hate that it consumes me. I hate all that they did and said and took from Jason and from me. I spent this morning writing her a letter that I will never send. Working to get it out of my body, so it will stop consuming my mind. But there are some things that are hard to shake.

Her words to me at the end of Jason’s life haunt me a lot, especially today.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a mother, Lauren.”
She taunted at me over the phone on August 1st, 2025. I choked back the tears, my body was shaking, as I was fighting to save my husband’s life. I had just spent the last 4 weeks next to Jason in the hospital, where we would learn on July 17th, that his cancer was progressing rapidly. Only three weeks earlier his scan showed stability. That was June 29th, and three days before that, June 26th, 2025, we sat in my gynecologists office to have the conversation about starting IVF. Before that it was May, the month that Jason started a clinical trial, the month that we learned natural conception would no longer be an option as soon as the trial started, Jason was signing any of that away with hopes the trial drug would save his life. In April when we learned that Jason’s cancer stopped responding to immunotherapy, we said fuck it, decided that there is no longer any right time to start a family, waiting on life to get good didn’t seem like it was going to happen, and pulled my IUD with the hopes of getting pregnant. Between balancing the right time between the end of immunotherapy and the start of a trial or back up chemotherapy, our window was small. So when my period was late 2 days in May, I took a pregnancy test and it said not pregnant. I sobbed into Jason’s arms and he smiled through his own tears. He said “well, at least now I know you really want to be a mom.”

I never told Jason what his mom said to me that day in early August, he was so sick, and he had no energy. I just told him I had a really bad conversation with his parents and he used all his energy to text them to stay away, that I was saving their son and that alone should keep the quiet. Days later, I cooked him dinner and he wheeled himself over to the dinner table. Between June and July he had lost mobility as the cancer had consumed his groin. He sat across from me at the table and he said “I just really wanted to be a dad.” My heart shattered. I didn’t know what to say, it was the first time he had used past tense, in all our other conversations we always talked about how he wants to be a dad and I want to be a mom. I hadn’t yet accepted that he wasn’t going to make it. I told him it could still happen, we have IVF. I didn’t think he would die less than 10 days later.

I remember after Jason died, someone, compared my desire to be a mom with him and his wife’s early infertility.  He said, he knew what it felt like to be behind all his friends.

That he knows that becoming a mom may now be something I don’t get to as soon as I would’ve hoped.

Having a dead husband that you can’t conceive with, is not and will never be the same as infertility with a healthy, alive spouse. Both are full of grief, but in no way the same.
“A delay” of being a mom, will also never make up for the fact that Jason will never get to be a father to my children. Will never fix that he will never be next to me while I hold a positive pregnancy test, will never get to hold me while I am pregnant and be apart of that beautiful season of life with me.

Who’s to say I will now ever get to be a mom? This jump from my reality to a very far distant and maybe only slightly possible future, is painful.
Why do we do that to people? Why do we assume that just because I have now lost this with Jason, that the possibility of it still existing in the future is comfort?
It isn’t.
It does not matter if I do get the chance to become a mom, because that day, if it comes, it still won’t be with Jason. I will never not mourn that.

I want to be a mom. But more than anything I want to be a mom with Jason by my side. Right now, I get neither. Only one of those two things is only ever possible in the future.

The check here box for “mother’s day is hard for me because I am young widow, I don’t have kids with my now dead husband, and I am deeply mourning the fact that will never happen” doesn’t seem to exist. The depth of this pain and layer of grief seems to get overlooked.

People say things like:
“At least you didn’t have kids.”
“It would’ve been so hard to have been pregnant when he died, you wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“You’ll still get to be a mom one day.”
“It would be so hard to be a single mom right now.”

Whether those things are true or not (and who’s to tell me what’s right, wrong, good or bad in my own grief?) they don’t make grief better, each individuals circumstances only make grief different.

As for my own mom:

She has held me up the last year while I have faced the impossible. I realize most days, she is doing it while navigating her own version of impossible.
She recently told me that when Jason died she lost two people that day.
She lost Jason and she lost of version of me.
She is right, and despite that, she was the one picking me up when I couldn’t get up.
The one making plans when I didn’t have the energy to do what needed to be done.
The one making sure everyone was taken, and continues to make sure I am taken care of.
My mom embodies a version of strength and love that I am inspired by.
My mom is incredible.
I think about how much Jason loved her too. I could list all the incredible things she did for me and for him, it is a very long list, but most importantly she was present and fought like hell for him. For me too.
Jason adored her.
He would always say that marrying me was incredible, but getting my mom too, was an added bonus and he was so lucky.
Through Jason I learned that blood doesn’t always define family. It didn’t for him.
For me, it has only taught me how truly blessed I am with an incredible mom (parents) who truly in life, only want the best for their child, and will go the ends of this earth to do what they can to support me.