Happy Holidays?

This is the season when I say, “Merry Christmas” to almost everyone. Recent newspaper commentaries have made me more aware of my impact, and I wonder if I should be saying, “Happy Holidays” instead.

I asked some people this week about their holiday plans. One woman hesitantly said she has no plans. Her family doesn’t celebrate Christmas anymore since their mother died. She has 7 siblings, and no plans to spend the holiday with any of them. She was disappointed that they hadn’t at least exchanged names so there would be a gift to open. Then she said brightly, “I can go visit my friend Susie if I want” and told me how grateful she is that she has a cat and a dog to keep her company.

Another woman simply responded to my greeting with, “We don’t celebrate Christmas, but I will be visiting my godchild’s family and some cousins, and that will be fun.”

Christmas and Hanukkah are religious celebrations that bring us together with friends and family. Or not. Holidays often remind us what we have lost. A cheery “Merry Christmas” might not have the positive effect we intend.

I remember meeting a woman and her daughter in a grief group. Their husband/father had passed away the previous Christmas and these two women were making travel plans. They decided to skip Christmas this year. They were going to some place warm to sit on the beach and pretend it wasn’t Christmas.

A man sat in my office lamenting his father’s death. “Christmas at our house was always a difficult time. Now that Dad is gone, I’ll never get to have the Christmas I wanted. Of course, we never did while he was alive either. “ Then he seemed to brighten as he realized that now that Dad was gone, maybe, just maybe, his family could finally have a happy Christmas gathering after all.

What is this holiday season bringing to you? Family? Friends? Tradition? Loneliness? Hope?

What are you celebrating? What are you missing? What would you like to experience this holiday season? We invite your holiday reflections.

Remembering

As we approach this time of year, with Christmas for some and the natural rhythm of the calendar year's close for us all, it's a natural time for reflection and remembering about our past, as well as exploring our hopes for the future. In my own process of reflection this year, I'm finding that as I journey further from when my mom died in July 2003, my memories of her are changing.

As is true for many women, my relationship with my mom was complex. My mom was difficult in a number of ways - even after years in recovery from alcoholism, she continued to struggle with chronic depression, and could be narcisstic, long-winded, unorganized, and neurotic.

But she was more than her struggles, as we all are. She was an amazing person who lived an interesting life, full of many tales. She could be a great listener, was curious about people, loved words, stories and books, and had a great sense of humor. While she wasn't a cook, she made a great potato salad. Most important to me, I never doubted that she loved me deeply. I miss these things about her, even now, nearly 2 1/2 years after she died.

What I'm realizing is that here too, as in other parts of life, I get to choose: what I want to remember about my mom, what stories I want to tell about her, what I would like others (particularly my children) to understand about her. While there were parts of her life that were very sad and tragic, she wasn't a tragedy herself: she was a survivor, and a fierce one at that. As time passes, it's her warm and generous characteristics that I want to carry forward, rather than harboring and holding on to the more difficult aspects of who she was.

So, this holiday season I will light a candle for my mom, sing loudly in church on Christmas Eve, make a welcoming home for friends and family, and be thankful for the many gifts and lessons my mom gave and taught me.

What are you choosing to remember this season?
What do you want others to know about the person you lost?

Holiday Rituals

It’s December already! Christmas is coming!

When I was growing up, the holidays started the week before Thanksgiving when we cleaned the silver and china. Later I realize it was fall house cleaning, but this frenzied activity was triggered not by autumn, but an upcoming holiday gathering at our house. We’d clean everything in the china cabinet, wash all the good dishes, polish the furniture, wash the linens and vacuum all the corners. Then we’d get out the cookie recipes and begin baking.

That holiday ritual still lives in my memory and my spirit. When holidays approach, I want to wash dishes, polish the silver and bake cookies.

Ritual has a power that reaches from the past to the present and extends a hand into the future. It provides continuity and predictability. And, it connects me to my mother who passed from this earth 10 years ago.

Mom seems more present at this time of the year. Christmas and Mom were always inextricably connected. When I was a kid my job was to wrap the gifts, even the ones for me. Mom would put on the LP of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas", bring this mountain of gifts to me, and say, “Don’t open this one.” I remember wrapping right up to Christmas Eve!

When I grew up, Mom and I created another tradition -– we’d spend a whole day shopping together. My favorite now is the lefse making that we learned from my grandmother. This weekend I will be with my sister, daughter, granddaughter and nieces making enough lefse for Christmas Eve and each of our families.

Holiday rituals uplift the values of family, community, tradition, music and church, and even the simple rituals of cleaning, baking, shopping and wrapping all connect me to something bigger than my life.

What holiday traditions have become ritual for you? Which ones do you look forward to? What new rituals can you create to bring meaning and joy to your holiday season? We’d love to hear about your holiday rituals.

Sharing your story

I just finished reading Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking", the account of the year after the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.

Reading it? Excuse me: I meant devouring.

It's a remarkable memoir, clear and spot-on in its description of many common experiences of those in grief: a sense of confusion, trying to make sense of the loss, attempting to piece the story of a life, the starts and fits of putting the pieces of one's own life back together.

So much of what Didion writes in her book struck a chord in me, and my own memories of the year after a death in my family - the death of my mother. The title and key theme - a year of magical thinking - reminded me of my own convoluted thought processes during the year after my mom died. Like Didion, my own magical thinking wasn't isolated to the first couple of months after the death. The weeks before and after my birthday - 11 months after my mom died - I kept checking the mailbox for the birthday card I expected from her. And how rude of her not to call!

The expectation in this culture is that that one should 'get over' grief quickly and neatly. My experience is that grief is anything but timely or tidy: it will find you at inconvenient times as much as it will at times that you expect it (or not, then to surprise you later). It is easy to be isolated in our grieving, but yet the hope and the healing occurs for many of us as we connect and tell our story.

Each story is as unique as the writer and the experience. Joan Didion and C.S. Lewis are well-known as writers but we all have our tale. Jory DesJardins, in her brilliant blog Pause, wrote recently about the death of her father, Joel. Ann O'Fallon and Margaret Vaillancourt have edited an amazing book, Kiss Me Goodnight, full of stories and poems from women who lost their moms at a young age.

You don't have to be a published author to have a story to tell. How will you tell share yours? What's possible for you at this point in your grieving process when you tell your story? We invite you to share your story here too.