The last “normal” Christmas, December 2019, was the last time I saw my grandma. She was years into an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and she had to be moved to an assisted living facility soon after the holidays. COVID made it next to impossible to visit.
Now I’m staring down the reality of a Christmas without her. My grandfather, my mom and my aunt are learning to cope with it too.
We aren’t the only family dealing with grief. Polling from The Economist in mid-October found that one-eighth of U.S. residents lost a family member due to COVID, and one-fifth lost a close friend.
Cali Park, a licensed clinical mental health counselor at Thriveworks in Raleigh, N.C., says death isn’t the only sort of grief people are dealing with: they could be grieving a lost relationship, the end of a friendship or the life plans that have gone off track.
Park’s main advice for someone dealing with loss this holiday season is recognizing the feelings that come along with grief — anger, anxiety, helplessness, etc. — are normal and valid things to feel. Having personal check-ins amongst the holiday hustle will help you digest those feelings.
“It’s even more reason to remember to be kind to yourself and to look after your own needs, whether that’s physical self-care, or emotional self-care, or even spiritual self-care,” she says.
There is a lot during the holidays that you won’t be able to change; I can’t change the absence of my grandma, and I can’t change that I miss her. It is possible, however, to change your holiday traditions to suit your new needs. Instead of the holiday meal at home, you could go out to eat. If being at home is difficult, you could plan a trip.
Joanne Zerdy, a grief worker and the co-founder of Inviting Abundance in Asheville, N.C., suggests “sitting with your grief,” and finding short periods of time in your daily life to meditate on what you’re feeling and how you’re feeling it.
“Some really profound insights can arise about how you are holding (grief) in your body,” she says. “What does it feel like to put in that time journaling, or talking out loud, or crying, or whatever you need to do to process, and then how you feel on the other side of it.”
Both Park and Zerdy recommend acts of service as a way of remembering your loved ones, whether it be spending time volunteering with their favorite nonprofit or making donations in their name.
Zerdy stresses that grief is not confined to ourselves, nor does it have to be a group activity. It is a balancing act intended to help us distribute the weight of trauma.
“That kind of intuitive feeling arises of ‘I really do think I need to do something,’ or ‘No, I’m sick of advice, I really want to just be with myself,’” she says. “I think that we get a lot of insight about our experience when we can do both on our own time.”
If you’re grieving like we are over the holidays, you aren’t alone. We’re all just trying to process it on our own time.
Sara Pequeño is a Raleigh, N.C.-based opinion writer for McClatchy’s North Carolina Opinion Team.
