Grief and Holidays: 10 Key Individual Experiences

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I am no stranger to loss and grief. Since I was three, my world has been punctuated by disappearances of people, places, and pets dear to me. Until adulthood, all the losses were sudden, inexplicable, and their toll unrecognized by others who knew me. I carried the sadness and emptiness inside and made sense of the shifts in whatever age-related ways were available to me.

Later, after I believed I could control my life, death continued to surprise me — my second child, born prematurely, died on her second day of life, and my third baby, whose congenital deformity left him with no hope of survival, gasped through only five hours of breath. My young second husband’s sudden fatal heart attack left me and my children devastated. I learned I could not run the show.

Later, watching health changes or signs of terminal aging in others prepared me for losses of grandparents and eventually parents. At two points, I seemed to suffer floods of losses. In 2013, my best friend, an uncle whose marriage was my ideal, two of my most loved mentors, a 50-something woman who had once been my undergraduate student, and another who had completed our doctoral program, married, then born a child at 40. This past year brought the deaths of others who had marked my life: another dear friend, my longtime personal lawyer, the daughter of my deceased closest friend (whom I had known and loved all her life), my dissertation advisor, my son-in-law’s father, a former lover. The context of my own life plus constraints to avoid Covid-19 led me to miss shiva and memorial services as well as chances to quietly comfort those to whom the deceased had been closest. I was forced to “move on," to manage daily life.

As always, holidays, events, milestones echoing memories of shared moments or anticipation of now-cancelled future ones brought painful and sometimes complex feelings again front and center. A missing chair at the table mirrored the emptiness in my heart.

Through my own experiences, those of others I have loved, or people whom I have counseled as they have dealt with loss, I am convinced that:

1. Each individual needs to find their own path through the mourning process. Encounters with cognitive dissonance and sharp and jarring emotions can be sudden and unpredictable.
2. A person's go-to process becomes refined and redefined with each successive loss.
3. Allowing images, memories, or artifacts associated with the one who died to float into their consciousness can help a person access feelings of connection and their range of emotions in response to loss.
4. Grief can teach us that we naturally and easily hold simultaneously different and complex emotions. They can vary in intensity and duration as well as their predominating positive or negative tone.
5. To the extent that a relationship was ambivalent, the unresolved conflicts, understandings (and misunderstandings), unexpressed anger, forgiveness, or guilt can still be addressed through honest internal work, expressive or creative activities, dialogue with helpful people, or therapy.
6. Taking full responsibility for your own behaviors in the relationship can permit the bonds to deepen after death rather than to fade with time.
7. Sharing experiences with others who had their own relationships with the loved one can help expand your appreciation of the gifts the person brought to the world and help put any limitations into a larger perspective.
8. A focus on the legacy the person leaves can help underscore ways you touched each other’s lives and ways of being that you might hope to pass along to others. Ways that they annoyed you can also be gifts, helping you choose what not to do: All lessons deserve gratitude.
9. Take a moment to appreciate the historical moments and the cultures in which the person lived. What did their world look like when they were born, learned to read, came of age, grew into adulthood, identified life partners and/or life work? What qualities allowed their lives to be so valuable to you and to others?
10. Approaching grief from a “diagnostic” perspective focuses on discreet clusters of conditions and symptoms. Although their existence is supported by science, and the DSM-5-TR assigns reimbursable codes for both “prolonged grief” and more immediate grief reactions (see reference below), in any individual’s experience the qualities of moments of grief, emotions associated with them and their flow, imagery and paths to comfort, remain unique. While an intellectual approach may buy some distance from the raw pain of loss (or rage at abandonment), only the hard work of making space for it, feeling it, and gently letting it go will abet transformation into the softened responses possible with time. Can you bring the best that they brought you forward in your own life, sharing its brightness with others who may one day be celebrating the same holidays, events, or milestones in your absence?

Think about someone who is now missing from your world. How did that person naturally express their love — and what form of love did they most appreciate from you? Are there ways that you can honor their roles in your life by finding an expression of giving or receiving love that your relationship to them exemplified? Or that you imagine would have pleased them had you thought of it when they were around? Can you make a miniature miracle this holiday season by expanding your repertoire of ways of showing your love or allowing yourself to receive it from someone else?

Copyright 2022 @ Roni Beth Tower.