Grieving Your Way Through the Holidays

For many of us, this season is far from “the most wonderful time of the year.” The holiday season, with its festive gatherings of family and friends, its insistent jubilance and cheer and sparkle, its expense and its busyness and its darkness—well, it is really hard.

This season can be especially hard if you are grieving. Grief can make it hard to feel joy, to feel like celebrating or socializing. Grief can make us feel somehow apart from the world, cut-off from others, and isolated from ourselves. Grief can also be exhausting, emotionally and physically. You may notice you wake up in the middle of the night, heart stirring. You may feel mentally foggy or distractible. You may find you have no appetite for the candies and cookies, or you may find you eat them all and still feel hungry. You may feel numb, or irritable, or heavily sad. You may wonder if there is something wrong with you, and when this feeling will go away. The holiday season can intensify existing grief and resurface older grief that you thought you’d put behind you. Maybe you are grieving the loss of a family member, and wondering what to do about their empty chair at the holiday dinner table. Maybe you are wrestling with the secondary losses of their death—the loss of financial stability, secure housing, relationships with extended family, a sense of physical safety, a source of laughter and delight. Longing may expand until it feels like it takes up all the space in your heart. If your loved one died by suicide, homicide, overdose…you may suffer even more deeply because of the silence that tends to settle over stigmatized topics like mental illness, violence and addiction. Or maybe you are grieving what therapists call “living losses”—the loss of a job, the loss of a homeland, the loss of a friendship, the loss of health, the loss of a marriage, the loss of dreams, the loss of faith. These losses are ones we don’t often recognize as reasons to grieve, but they are real losses and real sources of emotional pain. They change us. We carry them with us. They can feel especially heavy as the year comes to an end and we become aware of what has changed with the passing of time—and what hasn’t.

Grief is, despite what the world may tell us about it, quite normal, quite natural, quite necessary. It is a core experience of humanness, and it can be a source of transformation. If you are more alone in your grief than you would like to be, please reach out. Many of us at The Family Development Center focus on supporting clients through grief and loss—in this tender time, and into the new year, too.

Amy Griffiths-Tori (Bio)