The Holidays
The holidays may not seem so merry if someone you care about or love has died and you are in the midst of grieving the loss of that person and the loss of the life you had together. Grieving at this time of year can make us feel so alone especially when everyone else around us appears to be going about their lives with a “merry” outlook on life. It may even feel like others have family or close relationships around them, family reunions to attend, moments of celebration to experience while we experience the feeling of being completely alone and an overwhelming sadness. Grief can make us feel as though everything around us such as the sun shining or the snow falling should come to an abrupt halt just as our lives did when the person we love died. We may wonder how everything else around us can appear so untouched by what has happened to our lives, to our hearts. And sometimes we wonder how we will go on with our lives without that person. Death changes us – changes our lives – and we are never the same again. What we feel at this time is the healing pain of grief. Death forces to the edge of our understanding of life – causes us to face the loss of all we have ever known about our lives with that person or persons in it. It forces us to realize that nothing is for certain and all we really have is this moment to live.
Memories
We all have a mental scrapbook we add to during our lifetime. That scrapbook is a place of reminisce – a place we return to in our minds when we want to relive the memories we’ve made with the person(s) we love. It consoles us and brings us pain as we reminisce about the things we had and the things we will not have again. Those memories help us realize that the person we love who died is still a part of us and we can return to those memories throughout our lifetime. The pain we feel is in honor of our love for the person who died so when you feel like crying please remember you are giving yet another gift of yourself. Please allow yourself to feel whatever you feel and know that you will have a kaleidoscope of feelings as you experience the different stages of grief. You may feel angry, resentful, extremely sad and alone, relieved in some ways, etc. and the only way through this is to allow yourself to feel and find ways to get those feelings outside of your body. That might be through confiding in a trusted friend, writing in a journal, dedicating something in your life to the person you love who died, going to a special place, etc.
You need to do what is right for you when it comes to grieving and getting through the holiday season. When making plans, please ask yourself if the commitments you are making are being made because others want you to and you feel obligated or are you making decisions based on how you feel and what you need right now? Sometimes this may seem like a tightrope act – balancing the needs of others with your own needs. Give yourself permission to say no to some things and strive for a balance between doing things for and with others and doing things for yourself. Perhaps this is not like you. Perhaps in the past you went along with everything despite how you felt. You may find that death also helps you realize everything you are made of and the things that you need the most. What makes you feel good about yourself? What makes you feel true to yourself? Give yourself permission to do things for yourself without guilt. Feeling good in the midst of feeling bad is sometimes accompanied by misplaced guilt or the feeling of having betrayed the person who died. Please know that this is what many people feel when they are grieving. Many people ask themselves the what if questions, what if I had done this, or not done that or been there or not been there, or said this or not said that. There was likely nothing you could do to prevent what happened. It is important to not judge yourself and allow yourself to have the myriad of emotions that grief causes you to experience in order to let those things go. If you also allow yourself to have good feelings too, you will experience more moments of respite from the pain of grief. Avoiding the pain of grief only makes it surface later and usually in much more destructive ways.
You may end up being surprised by things you think of or experience that not only help you in the present moment but also lend themselves to becoming new holiday traditions. Those new traditions can help carry you through the years to come. Decide what is most meaningful and honor yourself in the process of honoring the person who died.
Please remember that allowing someone to do something nice for you or reaching out to someone can give you a moment’s respite from the all-encompassing pain you may feel. It’s those little moments that help build a bridge for us to walk across in order to get through the holiday season and beyond.
As mentioned before, you may find it helpful to keep a journal like a trusted friend you can confide in. It can also be a good way to preserve some of the memories you treasure. You may also find that it helps you realize all of the things you have or have experienced in your life rather than what you have lost.
Benefits of Holiday Rituals While Grieving
You may want to continue a holiday tradition that you and your loved one did together in the past or you may want to create a new tradition in honor of that person. Here are some of the benefits of doing so.
1: Provides you with a way to reminisce about the person who died and be able to express your feelings and thoughts about that person.
2: Provides a way for you to express yourself without feeling judged.
3: Can help you deal with the need to be “in control of your feelings” at times when you don’t want to just let go completely. A ritual helps “contain” grief because it has a beginning and an ending. Sometimes just knowing this gives you the permission you need to have a good cry and say what you need to say without feeling like you are always falling apart at the seams in the presence of others. Not all of us want to pour our hearts and souls out to everyone we meet. We want to be able to go without the waterproof mascara for a day.
4: Can help you feel more in control of the grief process instead of a victim to it.
5: Offers a way to honor and preserve memories of the person who died and potentially create new family traditions.
6: Creating your own ritual or memorial for the person who died is very symbolic of the relationship you had as well as powerful to healing your inner being.
Examples of Rituals/Memory Preservation
1: Write a poem or journal entry that commits memories of that person to paper. Those pages will bring you as well as others much comfort as you revisit them.
2: Buy or make a beautiful candle and light it each day through the month of December to mark the presence of the person who died that still lives on in your memory and in your heart.
3: Buy a live tree this year instead of using an artificial one and plant it in the spring as a memorial to the person who died.
4: Reminisce with close friends and family by going through picture albums and take turns sharing special stories about the person who died.
5: Make a donation to a charity that the person who died believed in or a charity you believe in. Perhaps you may think of it as a present from the person who died given through you to others on their behalf.
6: Make or buy a special ornament that memorializes a memory you have with the person who died.
7: Create a journal with the “words of wisdom” you learned from the person who died and share it with someone else.
8: Volunteer for a local charity or organization where you feel your presence is really making a difference. (Again, not all of these things are for everyone. It really depends on where you are at in your grief. Please do what is right for you and know that defining boundaries on how much you extend yourself is healthy.)
9: Place a miniature Christmas tree or holiday wreath at the gravesite of your loved one.
10: If you are entertaining friends or family members, you may want to decide on a buffet line instead of having an empty place at your table if the person who died would have customarily been there.
11: If you are doing the cooking for a dinner party or get together, you may want to decide on having something other than the traditional turkey for instance and go with a ham, roast or chicken as the main dish.
12: If Christmas stockings have been a family tradition and included the person who died, you may want to create a new family tradition. You may want to put a few blank notecards in each family member’s stocking and let each person know they are for writing a note to the person who died. It can be a few words that person used to say that were his/her signature so to speak, a story that person used to tell, a memory you have with that person, something you wish you could say to that person that you didn’t get to say, something you wish you could have done with that person, how much that person is missed, what that person gave to you that you will always have, etc. This can be done throughout the month of December and then on Christmas Eve or a special day/evening, you can sit down as a family and read each card to one another or each person can simply look at them when they want to throughout this month. This could become a new family tradition of putting blank notecards into stockings to not only honor the person who died but honor the living as well. Each person could start writing out the same kinds of things for each person who is still with them. It can bring a family much closer and more focused on what they have as a result of having known the person who died and by having each other rather than complicated grief which is focused only on the loss. The season can be easier to get through when we think of what we appreciate in others. It also helps us realize our true essence and everything that is good in ourselves.
13: Decide to do something special for someone else in the month of December. You might decide to do a little baking for someone or a craft that you are good at but something that tells that person they are thought of too.
14: Pamper yourself with something you have been wanting and think of it as your surprise gift from the person who died. It will always be a reminder that you made it through the first holiday. If you feel some guilt about it, imagine how the person who died would have treated you. If that person spoiled you, wouldn’t he or she want you to feel that again in their memory? If that person did not spoil you, why not start something new? Treat yourself as you would treat your best friend. Now more than any other time you need to be gentle with yourself. If it was not the way you treated yourself or were treated in the past, this will be one of the gifts of grief. And yes, grief does have gifts even though the wrapping is tied with our heartstrings and unwrapping it may make us feel as though our lives have been ripped apart. Know that you will heal and there are people who care about you. Know that you are not alone even if you feel like it. We all go through different things in our lives but here on the digest it doesn’t matter how your pain originated, what matters is that you know this is a place where you are accepted as you are, a haven from the judgments of others, a place where you are cared for unconditionally, a place with people that may even come to feel like family.
The Future
Know that the intensity of pain you feel now will not be with you forever. Over the years there will be many places, aromas, sounds, and sights that instantly take you back in your memory, back in time with the person who died and you will think of him/her. If you allow yourself to grieve which means to be your truest self - to trust yourself – to not hold back from being completely honest - you will be that much closer to understanding more about the enigma of life and of truly recognizing the impact that person had on your life – the good, the bad and the things that will always be a part of you.
Know that every loss has the potential to take us to depths of understanding we have never experienced before. Out of that we may develop new levels of insight and compassion we had never experienced before. We may even view our life’s purpose in a completely different light after having experienced the loss of someone we love. Our lives are usually transformed in some way. The “little things” are likely to be given much more significance than they were before. It is not that we didn't know how to live before - it is that grief can bring forth new levels of awareness and perspectives. It’s the story of our life before us and we don’t know how it ends. We are continually writing it and looking back on all we have learned. Grief can also bring things to the surface that were long buried and forgotten – things that may have stifled us in our lives because we didn’t know how to live with them. Grief has the power to transform people and to bring about changes that no one ever thought possible.
I hope you will allow yourself to be real – to be as true to yourself as you can be – to know that it is the only way to really live. Anything that compromises our truest selves is a death in and of itself to our own lives, our own selves. My wish for you is that you will see the value of each day and the value in each one of us. With love, understanding and compassion.
