I won’t be going home for the holidays this year.
This is the first Christmas season where we aren’t traveling back to Akron, Ohio to celebrate the holiday with our families. After we were married 35 years ago, we gathered at my mother’s house on Christmas Eve and visited Jess’s family on Christmas Day for many years.
The tradition changed over time. After I was ordained, we traveled home the week after Christmas for a family visit. And though we had sold Mom’s house and she had moved into an assisted living facility, my sisters and I still gathered to spend the holiday with her and each other.
This year, the first Christmas after my mom’s death, the family is going in different directions. My sister Jen is visiting us in Philadelphia. My sister Anna is spending the holiday with her grandchildren.
I’m not sure what this will be like for me. When we lose dear friends or family members to death, we often feel them most acutely at the holidays, especially in the first few years when the anniversaries are jarring in their absences and their adaptations. I know this is true for many of you, as well, this holiday season.
The strange and disorienting laws of grief suggest that we don’t have to play by the rules of the holidays. We don’t have to match the feelings or the festivities of Christmas songs and movies. We can seek solitude if that’s where our heart wants to curl up or keep company if that feels right. We can set limits, leave early or cancel plans, swear a little more liberally if that best expresses how we feel. We can let others pray in our stead when our ability to pray or worship puts us a little too close to the hot core of our loss. We can forgive ourselves and our companions in grief when our minds wander, and we forget things or lose things or our energy winds down to nothing.
Grief rarely cooperates with the holidays. But it can invite us to create new traditions, temporary or lasting. It can invite us to seek out rituals that better match our feelings. That’s why I’m looking forward to our candle-lit Blue Christmas Service on Dec. 18, which will include gentle and honest readings, gracious silences, and the simple repetition of Taizé chants. It acknowledges that God’s incarnation as Jesus into the human world of loss means that we can expect God to know us in our pain and grief and to meet us there. And it promises that this journey of living with loss has healing in it and transformation and even joy.
I have found that over the years, grief can sometimes go deeply underground and then well up in areas of my life that I didn’t even know were flood plains until I was underwater. Therapists, grief counselors, compassionate listening programs like Stephen Ministry, and the extra support of recovery groups can be essential for people during the holidays and around important anniversaries, even if they didn’t seem necessary at other times in the year. Parishioner Stephanie Gill offers individual grief support and counseling, and often runs grief groups. You can reach out to her at sgill322@yahoo.com.
Talking to your pastor can help too. If you are anywhere on the road of grief and would like a listening ear or a prayer companion, I’m happy to set up a time to talk and pray. Please let me know. And please pray for me this holiday season as I will pray for you.
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