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The holidays are coming and this is the first set of them without a certain beloved someone in your life. You have mourned the passing of a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend or close relative. Someone who used to be a big part of the holiday season died this year. And now the holidays are looming like the crest of a huge ocean wave, threatening to take you and your holiday memories under with it. What do you do? How do you walk that perilous shoreline of grief while everyone around you seems to have an intact family, with everyone alive and happy? And it gets compounded every time you turn on the TV or open a magazine,and see all those other complete family units in technicolor joy, underlining over and over exactly you what you are missing.
Take a deep breath. You are not alone. And there is a way to get through this. It will not be simple, easy or carefree. But you can get through it. And next year will not be as hard as this year. This year, the first year, is the hardest. This year you may be more acutely aware of the person-shaped hole in your holiday. The edges will start to heal, and then you will find ways to move that healing along a bit more every time an occasion comes up.
When you lose someone whom you love, the pain doesn't ever vanish. It can stop being crippling. And it will, if you let it.
Let me share a bit from my own life. My Mom and I were very close. It was a hard-won closeness, so we appreciated it a great deal. Christmas was HER time of year. It was magical for her, and she spent most of the rest of the year planning for it, and deciding how best to keep the ethnic traditions (Polish) of our family. To see her at Christmas was to see pure joy in action. So, the first Christmas without her was awful. It hurt like hell. But I started to learn how to deal with loss and holidays. Here are some ideas from my own experience and the experience of friends. Please, please, chime in with your own, as we can share in order to help folks here.
Here are some hints (in no particular order) about getting through the holidays when grief may be all you see.
1. Do not keep silent.
Find someone or some group with whom you can let down your guard and express your grief. Find those people who will let you cry your eyes out, or who will let you get so angry that you are without that person you loved. Express what is inside. Don't feel that you have to be stoic 24/7.
2. Ask for help.
When my Mom died, I sat down with my father and said "How on earth are we going to get through this Christmas?" And we talked. We made some decisions. We kept some things the same, and changed others. We avoided some things that would hurt. We started some new traditions. Ask your family, your spouse, your children, your pastor for ideas. Involve the family. Help your children tell you what is in their hearts, if they have lost someone.
3. Do what brings genuine comfort, even if it seems odd.
....... a. My mother 's love for Christmas had my father and I bring a decorated tiny Christmas tree to her grave. We set it up with stones so it would not blow down. Mom loved Christmas so much that she would have been delighted that we did that.
....... b. Our tradition is to set an extra chair on Christmas Eve for "the uninvited guest". (Legend has it that Christ walks the streets in the guise of a stranger that night, so if he comes to your door, he should see a place already set.) . We used to always set that up next to Mom, joking that she would be the most enthusiastic companion. The year she passed away, we set up two empty chairs -- one for the guest, one for her. Other family members were
