Go Jingle Yourself: The First Holidays After a Loved One Dies
Go Jingle Yourself: The First Holidays After a Loved One Dies
Admitting that it's going to suck is the first step.
No one prepares you for your first holidays after someone close to you dies. Like all things grief, there’s no brochure, hotline or website that explains the absolute depression of that first Christmas, Hanukkah or Flag Day; at best, you get some tips for coping and grieving to get through it.
I don’t exactly remember the first Thanksgiving after my mother died. I believe that my aunt Carolyn and uncle Greg were still living in Syracuse and my aunt Marietta was around. I would imagine that the six of us (they plus my father, sister, and me) gathered at my aunt Carolyn’s house for a scaled-down version of the traditional large gathering1.
No, the first holiday that really sucked was Christmas, specifically Dec. 24, 1997. I remember clearly that my father, sister and I went to my aunt Marietta’s for dinner (I’m guessing my aunt Carolyn and uncle Greg went to Vegas for the holiday; they had built a retirement home there.). It was just the four of us and it was fucking depressing. No one talked. The only noise was silverware clanking against the plates and bowls. My aunt didn’t decorate for the holiday, and my sister and I were at the stage of cash gifting (she was 16, I was 20), so there weren’t any wrapped presents around. In retrospect, the only gift I may have asked for would have been a meteor to strike my aunt’s dining room and put us all out of our individual and collective miseries.
It’s not like there was some sort of superfluous effort to overcompensate for the lack of people in the room or make up for the fact that my mother wasn’t there. My aunt typically went minimalistic when decorating. I don’t think any of us were necessarily up for a holiday celebration, yet we all felt the obligation to sit around and eat pasta together. Also, no one in my immediate family had the fight in us to decline my aunt’s invitation to dinner. If left to the three of us, I think we might have ordered pizza and stayed home until midnight mass.
At this point, I was still a semi-practicing Catholic. I would go to the occasional mass at my Catholic college, usually to appease my girlfriend2, but I wasn’t much for the formalities and commitment to a weekly service. But, I loved going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. There were the goofy little traditions at the former St. Joseph’s The Worker Roman Catholic Church in Liverpool3: mass beginning in near darkness with the same short, bald man with the booming voice reading the proclamation of Christ’s birth year after year, the absurd number of altar servers4 leading the processional, Santa’s visit after communion to take a knee before delivering presents. It was the only time each year when the music was on-key and worthwhile.
I remember walking in that night in 1997 and getting a lot of looks from people; the sort of pitied, sad looks from other parishioners that knew she died. There were hugs from high school friends and condolences from people I knew growing up , but there wasn’t a lot of joy.
It didn’t get better the next day. We went to dinner (for the first time in as long as I can remember) to my father’s side of the family, where we had yet more pasta. All I really remember from that day was that the strongest thing they had to drink was Arbor Mist, the 1990s equivalent of Herb Ertlinger’s fruit wine. None of us wanted to be there, but we weren’t really in a position to say no because it came from a place of caring. Left to our own devices, I probably would have slept all day.
Traditions, schmaditions
All of this brings me to an article I read in The Atlantic called The First Holiday Without a Loved One. The author’s thesis is out in the open early here:
Behind all the presents and the abundance of food and drinks, the holidays are fundamentally about spending time with family and friends. But after the death of a loved one, a season of indulgent celebration can feel perverse to the bereaved. While the logistics of holiday travel, meals, and gifts can be tricky for just about anyone to navigate, grieving people may also grapple with an array of unfamiliar emotions and unenviable practical considerations, whether it’s the anxiety of gathering in a different place, whether to decorate the home as in previous years, or, simply, how to get through it all without their loved one around.
The author, Mikala Jamison, speaks to a number of people who talk about how they ignored traditions because they didn’t feel it was right or because they just weren’t up to it. Many filled their time with other activities to ignore the grief. This, of course, flies in the face of what therapists and grief experts recommend:
Mari Itzkowitz, a clinical therapist at the Center for Loss and Renewal in Alexandria, Virginia, says that talking about loved ones is key. “Light a candle, say the names, bring the people into the room,” Itzkowitz told me. “You’re the one to bring it in, you’re the one to bring it up, which then gives people permission to celebrate the joy.” In other words, “you’re allowed to feel really bad.”
The ability to communicate our emotions openly and clearly, happy or sad, is one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human. It's less human to exclude from discussion those people who have been important in our lives. Being afraid of sad feelings can deprive us of the treasure trove of memories attached to relationships with people who have died. Overcoming this fear, especially at holiday time, allows us to claim the full memory of the person we’re missing. People are surprised to discover that even though there may be some sadness, there may be plenty of joy as well.
However you're feeling this holiday season—happy, sad, or happy-sad—just know you are not alone. Hang in there: Take things one minute at a time and open yourself up to the possibility of joy. Remember why you celebrate whatever it is you celebrate, honor your loved one's memory, love others, and let others love you.
Sometimes families — both parents and children — feel they need to put on a brave face when they are feeling sad. But it is okay to feel sad and show grief. “As a rule of thumb, avoidance is a bad idea because it makes us feel worse in the medium and long term,” notes Jamie Howard, PhD, a clinicial psychologist and director of the Trauma and Resilience Program at the Child Mind Institute, “Our emotions don’t really respond well to being closeted. They find a way out.” Hiding your own grief can also make your children feel like the sadness they may be feeling is bad.
We did none of that back in ‘97, which prolonged things through socially painful gatherings that came from a good place but felt perfunctory all the same. It’s a tug-of-war between what is deemed healthy by professionals and your strong desire to crawl into the corner of a dark closet for the day(s).
Let the suck begin…
This fall begins the first march into the holidays without my father-in-law around, so it feels as if I’ve been subtweeting my wife with this entire entry. She’s going to read this, so I will offer some assurances to her:
It’s going to suck. It’s going to suck for you. It’s going to suck for your mother. There will be a gap in the meal where your father won’t be there to make the same joke about us cooking too much food (something about feeding the third infantry). We’ll be opening presents at Christmas and he won’t be there to make the same tired crack about how he spent a lot of time picking out the gifts that we bought for ourselves. It won’t be the same.
It’s going to suck, a lot. Our kids are going to feel it, namely the older one. Like you, they are navigating their first holidays without him, so it’s going to weigh on them. You have to make the promise to give the oldest, and yourself, some metaphorical room.
It’s going to suck a ton, but I promise you, it gets a little bit better every year, not because you forget or ignore, but because your life grows around the memories.
Christmas 1997 was the last holiday we spent as an immediate or semi-extended family. By fall 1998, my uncle Greg was dead from liver and colon cancer and my aunt activated their retirement plan by relocating to Las Vegas. My father, sister, aunt Marietta and I were annexed by my eventual in-laws and their family5 for the major holidays. These were loud occasions, awash in large quantities of food, booze, strays and a sense of belonging, very much like our own family’s holidays.
Symmetry, eh?
So, now what?
What is the answer to the first holidays? Balancing the suck with the joy.
Resist the urge to fall into a bottle. Or whatever your escape of choice is. As you’ve rightfully gleaned, alcohol was the numbing agent for many of life’s uphill climbs over the years. It’s an easy place to go, right? Things get hard and you don’t like how you feel, so you grab the first thing in reach to change your condition. I speak here from experience: all you’re doing is delaying things. You’re pushing reality and recovery down the road. You will bounce back, but you have to start from the bottom. Plus, holiday hangovers really suck.
Give yourself grace and space. Space and grace are big here. There will be a moment where the hole in your life becomes larger than the entire room you’re sitting in. That time when a parent would say grace or fall asleep and shake the bookshelves by snoring. Or maybe it will be because you or another relative has to step in to take on a task that your loved one once did. Give yourself the patience to feel the emotions and take the time you need to cope with them. If that means taking 15 minutes of alone time, so be it. If you need to kick everyone out of the kitchen and wash dishes by yourself or go for a walk, then do it.
Feel what you want to feel. Accept the fact that it’s going to suck. If you want to feel sad, be sad. No one is going to blame you.
Don’t abandon your traditions. A sense of normalcy is important during trying times and holiday traditions provide that. You might not be able to replace Grandpa dressing up as Santa Claus for all of the kids, but you also shouldn’t abandon Christmas altogether. The important thing is to not force anything out of a sense of obligation, whether it’s cookie decorating or an elaborate meal. It’s okay if you don’t feel like decorating, but you shouldn’t isolate yourself and turn away from the holiday either. Whatever you decide, do it because you want to and because you are able.
In fact, try starting a new one. There’s nothing to say that you can’t embark on a new holiday journey. Like I said, we got pulled into my wife’s family for our second Christmas, which meant a whole different routine from timing to food to faces around the table. Maybe you change up the menu or who hosts. You’re not erasing the memory of someone; you’re starting something new.
Don’t feel guilty for smiling. You’re allowed to be happy and mournful at the same time. It seems contradictory, but it’s possible for you to miss the person who has died but enjoy yourself in the moment all at the same time. Again, you get to feel what you want to feel. Just don’t fall into a guilt cycle of self-flagellation because you found that you’re enjoying yourself, even for the most fleeting of moments.
Make it a point to check in with yourself. Take the time during the day to do assess your condition. It’s as simple as asking yourself if you’re holding up okay and taking a deep breath.
Be ready to talk. Book your therapy appointment for Dec. 26 NOW. You might as well do it before your shrink’s schedule fills in. You’re going to have a lot of feelings to process.
Final thoughts on finality…
It’s coming on Christmas. They’re cutting down trees. They’re putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace. Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on.
— Joni Mitchell, River
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My cousins — who used to spend the holidays trying to get me drunk — were living elsewhere and stopped coming home for holidays. They would regularly invite stray friends of theirs with nowhere else to go to the festivities, but with no cousins, there were no friends. My grandmother was well into the throws of Alzheimer’s and spent her holidays at the nursing home, wheelchair-bound and unable to feed herself without assistance.
Now wife, who was still trying to attend mass weekly.
Like many parishes in my diocese, it’s since been combined for the purposes of staffing and financial survival. Oh well.
I always served midnight mass and, as the tallest kid, would end up leading the procession. I was a big deal.
By this point in our relationship, I’m pretty sure everyone thought that we would get married and this would be a permanent arrangement.