By Patsy Kelly and Trina Meek
The holidays are nearly ending; it is time for a review. Holidays are never easy, even for non-grieving folks—they can stress us out. For grievers, holidays can be more to be avoided than enjoyed. But we go through them, partially because loved ones beg and prod us. (We may feel we are letting someone down if we don’t.) We sit at the dinner tables, stiffly and resolutely. We smile occasionally, and then we escape at the earliest convenience.
It sounds gruesome, true. Sometimes, there is no getting around it. The first Christmas after a loved one dies does not offer much in the way of comfort. We try, however. We make an effort to engage in someone’s delight at the lights. We share someone’s fondness for remembered music. We appreciate another’s traditional meal.
But wait—it’s also time to do something for ourselves. It is time to add our own spaces in between the traditions, music and shared delights.
“I remember,” we interject, “how my loved one especially enjoyed …,” and then we tell a story. Or we recount a favorite time when our loved one was present in the room, how [s]he would have laughed at that joke. We bring them back, in a way. We are telling the people in the room that we want to talk about our person, at least a little. We don’t want to tiptoe around their name, afraid of making someone uncomfortable.
Finally, there are the alone times. Oh, they are long. There comes an immense loneliness that can’t be avoided. Grief offers us the loneliness to consider, to feel, but not to be engulfed. So, we accept what surrounds us and look deep into that dark space.
As grievers we are aware of not only the lights and the shiny ornaments, but also of the dark spaces between those things. The dark spaces hold their own mysteries and their own lessons. They are sacred to the heart buffeted by pain and loss. The light sitting next to the darkness reminds us that life is here, sitting next to our grief. Healing is here, in the space between the light and the darkness.
We hear the sounds of the season around us. We smile. Still, our smile comes not from the celebrations, but from a courageous gaze deep into the darkness and into the in between spaces where we can see the light.
For information on the grief group, please email griefgroup.jax@gmail.com.
