Sophie LeBourgeois | A&E Editor
December 5, 2024
What do you do when grief doesn’t give you the luxury of joy during the holiday season?
When everyone else’s excitement, no matter how trivial or significant, feels minuscule in comparison to the scale of their mourning. When the world keeps spinning mercilessly, but all that they really need is for everyone else to pause so that they can take a moment to pick up what’s broken.
If you are anything like me, freshly processing death and the whole unwanted Christmas surprise that’s come with it, this holiday season has been especially hard. A holiday I once believed was pure magic I now see as empty, because if it was magic, I’d get the one and only think I want back. Instead I’m feeling his absence all the more, and it makes me angry to think that that’s my reality.
Unfortunately, death is inevitable, and everything on this earth is temporary (yes, all those Christmas presents too). The sooner a person can remind themselves of these things, the easier it becomes to see extreme loss at an early age as a vantage point, they’ve gotten a head start on the pain, and now they can use it to their benefit.
Another harsh reality of loss is that the grief never really goes away. It could be three days, a month, 12 years, 20, and it’s still there. The good-to-bad-day ratios may change, but it is felt nonetheless. What sucks about the holidays is that they become a sort of slap in the face, a wake up call that is unavoidable, every reference, ad, song, and cheerful encounter somehow manages to remind its victims of their perpetual sadness. Shane Kiley, a junior at San Clemente High School who lost his dad to cancer in November of last year, said, “Because I’ve already gone through the holidays without my dad once I kind of know what to expect, but I still feel his absences when I’m being reminded of him all the time.”
An aspect of loss many struggle with is the guilt of feeling happiness and joy so recently after death. It feels wrong to live on without another, and that’s completely normal. Think about it, would that loved one want their family members to be sulking around lifelessly forever? Absolutely not! The best way to honor loved ones this holiday season is to live the way they’d want: full of love and life.
To billions, the sting of death is all too familiar, and as for the grieving process, I’d say not one of those billions has been the same.
There’s no guideline to grief, no handbook that can guarantee you’ll forget that indescribable feeling of loss that leaves you sobbing hysterically throughout the night.
I think lots of us hate that feeling, and so we search instead for a numbness that we mistake for a healed heart in hopes that we’ll no longer cry. Being able to identify whether something is helping you heal or just helping you not to feel does wonders, make sure to get rid of anything that’s doing the latter.
To those able to relate to all this, first of all I am so sorry, and my biggest piece of advice for the holidays is to let yourself feel all the feelings. To those fortunate enough to call grief a foreign friend, I envy you. And to those at that odd stage of grief where any and all advice on how to cope is annoying, I’ve been there, just give it a minute.
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