Another New Year’s Eve usually means forming a new set of intentions for the coming year, a chance to look ahead and plan for a better year, a chance for a new start. After the loss of a loved one, the New Year brings a more complicated challenge. For a person in grief, it can feel instead like an unwanted push further away from the loved one and into a year you’d prefer not to embrace. After a loss, priorities come into new focus: joining a gym to get fit or starting a diet to lose ten pounds seem trivial in the face of waves of grief. The absence of your loved one crowds out other concerns. As time moves you further away from your loss, you want to concentrate your attention on remembering
Christmas pieces on the emotional side of this season often tip toward Christmas as a trigger for depression, or recommendations to go find someone who is suffering more heartache than you are and help them, which is fine advice, but right now, let’s do something different. Let’s run through a few favorite Christmas movies and see what they might have to do with grief and loss. And with encouraging a few laughs. It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart depicts a small town man who dreamed of a bigger life, but remained home to diligently run the family business while others got the glory in the wider world. Beset with disappointment, he considers suicide, until he learns through a nightmare
There are many things that people fear about grief. One is that they will forget their loved one, the voice, the details of their face, the feel of their hand. They search for ways to overcome the tendency for memory to fade as edges blur. They want to keep the memories even though they risk being overwhelmed with waves of grief. This flies in the face of a refrain that grieving people hear over and over – let go and move on, well-meaning people advise. If you don’t, you might get stuck in grieving for the rest of your life. In fact, some of them have you on the clock. It’s been a year, they say, you should be getting over this by now. The struggle between the griever who refuses to forget v
When hit by a major loss, many people feel cast off into an unfamiliar land. But it may help to know that under the surface, each of us already has a great deal of experience with bouncing back after loss. It started in childhood when we had to move away from friends and school and life as we knew it. Or when our best friend suddenly got a new friend and didn’t want to hang out anymore. Or in high school, when we didn’t make the team. Or didn’t get into the college we wanted. And the likely breakups with romantic partners. Or the thousand and one other disappointments and losses in all the years since. We survived all of them, using grit and whatever else we had at hand. Grief is grief, whet
