When My Son Died, We Went Ice Skating

From tragedy, our family’s favorite holiday tradition was born.

The days after Thanksgiving were quietly agonizing. No one really mentioned what was on their minds, at least not to me, but it was felt heavily throughout the family.

Our usual family tradition had been to take a ride up to the local Home Depot the day after Thanksgiving. We’d pick out a tree, my youngest son would stick his bare ass in one of the holes of the photo stand-in scene for the family picture, and then we’d decorate the following day. But this year, everyone was at a standstill, and mainly waiting on me to decide our next move.

Although I was the biggest wreck, it was still my call and mood that determined the fate of this holiday season. This was the first Christmas since the accident — and we were all dreading it.

I didn’t want it to be that way. I would have preferred someone else in the family take over the decision making and just let me wallow in my pain, but nobody else had it in them either. It was up to me; the person who had been in charge of all the traditions and orchestrator of the holiday spirit for as long as my kids had been alive. They didn’t know how to handle it without me.

We’d had our normal share of adversity during holidays within the family. The usual ex drama over alimony and custody disputes, but we’d since gotten past that and had grown as a unified blend of past and present. This year, however, was devastatingly different.

Ben, my twenty-one-year-old son, had died the previous summer in a vehicle accident, and we were all half-heartedly surviving.

Weeks had passed since that first Thanksgiving when we had our usual big family dinner, only this time, with my son’s framed picture in an empty seat at the table. We made a plate of his favorite sides that sat untouched in his place— a reminder of the void, yet an honor to his memory. He was still part of the family.

We muddled through, but Christmas was going to be different.

Traditionally, when our family would decorate the tree, each child would hang their own hand-made and personalized ornaments and stockings as they were unboxed. This year, nobody was ready to deal with the decision of who would hang Ben’s.

There was also the annual tradition of shopping for a new ornament for each of the kids to put in their stockings. Would I be able to handle the task without becoming a wailing mess on the floor of the Christmas section in Target?

Most of us had been operating on auto-pilot throughout the first weeks of December — mindlessly going through the motions of participating in holiday activities. While some family members continued their obligatory rituals of shopping, I took full advantage of Amazon Prime. The obliviousness to my agony from the holiday crowds was way more than I could handle.

One week before Christmas, we finally put up the tree. As expected, the moment was somber, with the occasional bout of laughter as someone recalled a memory of one of Ben’s goofy antics. We tried our best to make it as festive as possible through the tears, as the kids took turns hanging the last of their deceased brother’s holiday contributions.

When Christmas morning arrived, I was unable to get out of bed. My husband and the other children who were between the ages of twenty-six and fifteen, patiently waited for me to stir. I listened to their quiet conversations downstairs in the kitchen, as they wondered if I would have the emotional and mental fortitude to make it through this first Christmas without my oldest son.

I eventually worked up the strength to make it downstairs.

After a morning of the usual unwrapping of gifts and our traditional Christmas brunch, we cleaned up and retreated to our respective rooms to decompress and anxiously await the ending of the holiday in which we had begrudgingly forced ourselves to take part, more so for the comfort of those outside the immediate family.

We just had to make it through a few more hours.

Early in the evening, my oldest daughter entered my room after speaking with a friend on the phone.

“Mom, Ashley is going ice skating and wants to know if we’d like to join her.”

Ice skating. After several hours of wallowing alone in my grief, tucked away in my room while my husband busied himself with chores and the kids grappled with their own sense of loss, I found myself indulging in the idea. I had already been feeling intense shame and guilt for not having the strength to make a better Christmas for my family.

So, Ben stepped in.

“Why not,” I responded.

We all hopped in our vehicles and drove over to the ice-skating arena which offered open-skating to the public on Christmas day for three hours at night. Surprisingly, the arena was packed. After we each rented our skates, we readied ourselves to enter the crowded rink. I hadn’t skated in decades and some of the others, not at all.

Once there was a clearing in the crowd, I trepidatiously put one foot on the ice while hanging on to the edge of the barrier for dear life. After a few laps of the ice, my muscle memory began to set in and I regained my confidence. A few more laps, and I was feeling the music and back to my cross-over foot technique as I rounded corners.

I was a kid again, and it was time to show up my own.

I began to lap my kids with my hands casually grasped behind my back while bopping to Michael Buble as I skated past. I was in my element. In those moments on the ice, I was no longer a bereaved mother. Minus our familial roles, the kids and I were just humans, and we were having the time of our lives.

On occasion, when a song played that reminded me of Ben, I would slow down and take in the moment as I held tight to his presence. I knew he was proud of how we’d made it through. Tears fell as I coasted on the ice, but this time…I was smiling.

We skated. We fell. We laughed harder than we had since the day of the accident. We closed the place down.

When we were all in the parking lot after the arena closed, someone suggested getting a bite to eat. There’s only one place to go for a late-night bite on Christmas in North Georgia — Waffle House.

There were eight of us, so we sat at two different booths near each other. My youngest son, who was seventeen at the time and always one for conjuring up uncomfortable surprises, put some money in the jukebox and returned back to the booth. John Denver was his pick (much to my surprise as I didn’t even realize the kids knew who he was).

As Take Me Home, Country Roads began to play, the kids started to sing (another huge surprise). We swayed in our seats and had our own family sing-along — two booths wide. It was a beautiful moment as I watched my kids laugh and belt out the chorus much to the annoyance of the fellow patrons.

We sang anyway.

Despite the circumstances that led us to that moment, it ended as one of the most memorable and best Christmases we had ever experienced.

This Christmas will be our fifth without Ben. Even though the kids have moved out on their own, we always manage to gather Christmas night for our new tradition of ice-skating and Waffle House. Each year our crowd continues to grow as in-laws and friends have chosen to join our festivities.

Since the loss of my son, I’ve learned that for every negative in life, there is a positive of equal magnitude. Although we had suffered an immense tragedy, we were still trying to fit our new life into the old one we had now grown out of. It wasn’t until we let go of the reigns, and let life guide us, were we free to recognize new possibilities.

Due to the pandemic, this past year has been life-changing for us all. We’re unable to participate in most of the holiday traditions that we’ve grown up with, but change can only happen when we’re forced out of our comfort zones.

Although we won’t be doing the large ice-skating event this year, there’s nothing to stop us from having Waffle House delivered.

We’ll just have to use Zoom for our John Denver sing-a-long.