A guide to grief at Christmas
From someone who has lost both of their parents
Last year I submitted a poem to a magazine called ‘Merry Christmas to my dead parents’. It wasn’t published and looking back I’m not surprised. It’s hard to capture the nuance of the feelings around Christmas into one poem. I included some of the sad feelings but I also included a line re-interpreting ‘to all a good night’.
No one really wants to speak about death at Christmas. But for many of us, loss is something we can’t shy away from. Especially when traditions have been disrupted. Here’s are some lessons I’ve learned…
Give yourself space to remember them
My own mum loved Christmas and so each year I try to hold space for her traditions. It’s been six years since I lost her, but Christmas is still a time when I miss her. I still have the ornaments from her own Christmas tree and a playlist of her favourite songs.
Each year we buy a new ornament to add to the collection. It’s made my tree incredibly eclectic but it’s also helped me by continuing a tradition that I know she loved.
I try and speak about her every Christmas because I think this can be an act of love itself. I share a similar perspective to that which Andrew Garfield has spoken about in the past. He explained that he hopes his grief stays with him because it is unexpressed love. It’s beautiful and can help us reframe grief. Without it, you wouldn’t be thinking about the person you’ve lost at all. It’s normal to feel it as it is an act of love and celebration.
Communicate your needs
This year I’ve learnt a lesson that grief can still affect us and that is valid. After years it can feel hard to express your needs around it. If you need someone else to meet you where you are with your grief, you are so valid in communicating this. I learnt this year to do this and it’s a lesson I’ll be taking forward.
Have a cry and make a joke if you want to
No one has a right to tell you how to sit in your grief. Crying about it and feeling sad is so valid. So is making a joke. Often people can be uncomfortable about jokes about death and loss but they are so normal and another way of moving forward.
No one really has a right to tell you how you speak about your own trauma and you are entirely entitled to find it funny if you want to. There’s being respectful of those around you, but a joke and laughter can lift a world of pain. That’s not to say I take what happened to me lightly, I don’t. But usually the ones who are there for the jokes about it are also there to listen to the deeper discussions. I’ve learnt that Christmas can be about joy in antithesis of the sadness.
Make a new tradition
Often, friends and partners with their own families go off and this leaves some of us with a sense of loneliness. I resist woe is me, but I still find it difficult.
The only way forward really is forward movement. This means making your own traditions. It’s empowering to build in new ways of doing things. Something that started as a feeling of loneliness has become marred with excitement. We get to choose where to go and what to do.
After the first year of languishing I decided that I had to move forward. I’d go to the supermarket and stack my trolley full of everything my bank allowed and that I desired. I bought myself gifts. I planned in events. Loneliness turned into love. I realised that it isn’t always the family you’re blessed with, but perhaps the family you choose.
You’re never alone
Do know too, that you are also never alone in grief at Christmas. I’m right there with you. Wether you’re estranged, spending it alone or grieving loss, do something for yourself during this time.
Hold yourself in it and do exactly what you want for Christmas. After this, I guarantee you will feel Christmas in new ways.