For most of us, the holidays are a happy joyous time of celebration filled with family, friends, and lots of love. But for those of you who have lost loved ones around December, it can be a depressing, sad, devastating time of year. The memories tend to be overwhelming because nostalgia and family take on more importance at Christmastime. The holiday emphasizes happy recollections of Christmases past and the customs we enjoy keeping. There is comfort in keeping to your Xmas morning same routine every year. It gives a sense of much needed stability and security when suffering a loss. But there can also be extreme sorrow in it if the loved one you shared it with in past years is no longer here this year to share it with you. The custom then is changed if you do the same routine you used to do. You’re forced to do it alone. This takes some adjusting to.
I lost my own mother on December 17th, 2014 about a week before Christmas. None of the holidays since then have been very good, certainly not the same as it was before she passed away. I found I just wasn’t able to get into the happy holiday revelry mood. It’s not really possible to enjoy a holiday at the same time as you are grieving the loss of a loved one. Every year in December I feel her loss more keenly and her memories come back to me more strongly, especially painful memories of the time of her death. The holidays are overshadowed for me by my mother’s death.
It has taken some time, but I’m at the point now where I can get back to enjoying some of the holiday spirit. It is not and will never again be the same as it was with the joy of having my parents here to celebrate with me. But then again, nothing is ever going to be as it was before our loved ones died. Our lives are changed permanently forever. You just have to adjust to the changes. It is a different kind of holiday spirit feeling. One reflecting inevitable change in our lives.
I wish our culture didn’t put so much emphasis on being joyous and celebratory during the holidays. Some of us might prefer a lower key mellower holiday in keeping with our moods and our losses in life. We are made to feel bad if we don’t enter into the spirit of the season. I urge you to keep the holidays in whatever manner works for you. Don’t give into societal pressure to feel any certain way.
If you are grieving a loss in the upcoming Xmas season, try some of the following ideas that might help you to cope. Include your lost loved one in your Xmas rituals and activities. Make them a part of it. Set a place at your holiday dinner table for them complete with a chair and place settings, dishes, cutlery, etc.... Tell stories about them to your family, friends, and guests. Relay past holiday instances and experiences that you remember with them. Take turns going around the table and let each family member tell a story of a memory with the loved one. If you make them a part of your holiday, then it becomes like they are there with you enjoying the celebration alongside you. You bring their presence to the holidays in a special way that nothing else can. Welcome their presence, don’t leave them out. Remember them. It may make you feel better and less separated from them.
Also do the activities that you used to do with your lost loved ones. If you used to put up Xmas lights around the outside of your house with your father or husband, but they passed away, then put them up this year as well. Maybe you have to do it with your brother, sister, or a friend instead, but try to maintain the continuity of the annual custom. Maybe you have special antique tree decorations you pulled out of a box every year with your mother. And the two of you put them up on the tree. If she isn’t here anymore to do that with, then go through the box with your sister, your own daughter, or best friend and put them up. The point is to keep the same activities alive, and perhaps some of the good feelings and memories will carry over. Don’t just stop doing everything you used to enjoy because the person you did it with is gone.
I will say that when the grief or death is new or very recent, this may be harder to do. You may find that the memories associated with these activities are just too painful to deal with. It is very individual, I think, as to how people will feel. But I believe that keeping up with the activities you used to enjoy with your loved ones will help eventually. It’s a way of easing yourself into the loss, and not just cutting off all the activities cold suddenly. Sameness and continuity are helpful in dealing with a loss, especially during the holidays.
The spirit of the season is partly about rituals and customs from the past handed down over time and continued through the years. Don’t let your loss end those special customs. They give some meaning to our lives. Our loved ones wouldn’t want us to lose things that give meaning and comfort to our lives.
My father, in his retirement, had a lovely set of toy Lionel trains he used to enjoy playing with. When he was still alive and here with me, every year at Thanksgiving we would put them up. They were set up in the basement on an old pool table. There was every accessory a model railroader could ever want. We put them up at Thanksgiving and put them away again in their boxes after the New Year. There were seven cars including the engine that could blow steam, a caboose, and a freight car, railroad tracks that you could put together in any configuration you wanted, and a switch that diverted the trains onto a different track through a tunnel. There were also plastic trees and buildings. My father really enjoyed his trains. He had an engineer’s cap he wore while running them. I loved doing this activity with him. We took great care in putting it all together every year and also in taking it down. We would sit down in the basement together for hours running those trains.
But after he died, somehow, I never set up those trains again. To the extent that the physical objects and belongings of a lost loved one reinforce the memories of them, the trains were still special to me as they reminded me of my father and our bonding together over them. The trains were something of his that I cherished. But I guess alone, the activity just didn’t have the same meaning or feeling for me any more that it had in doing it with my father. The joy he took in this activity was transferred to me through him. With him gone, the source of my delight in the trains was also gone. Often I wonder what it would be like to take the time and set up those trains again, after all these years.
I desperately wanted that activity to continue to have the same meaning for me even though my father’s joy at the activity was gone. We can’t recapture those same feelings when doing an activity with a loved one. We can’t really relive and call back into existence past experiences of any kind. But then the idea isn’t to recapture it, but to perhaps discover new feelings for that same activity as the new person you’ve become. We are always in the process of transforming ourselves, especially after a loss. And we should allow activities and customs enjoyed with our lost loved ones to transform right along with us. Make that past activity yours for who you are now. In this way, the activities stay as living growing things in our lives. I believe our loved ones would be pleased with that.
Thanks for reading.
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