Holiday grief: Honoring the faithful departed during our holiday celebrations

Editor’s Note: The case examples in this article are composite descriptions of clinical situations, deliberately modified to preserve the privacy of any parties involved. Dr. Gamino is committed to preserving the confidentiality of all his patients.

By Dr. Louis Gamino | Columnist

“No one loved Christmas more than Sammy,” lamented his bereaved mother as her red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. “It will be so sad without him.” My role as a clinical psychologist was to help this mother find a way to handle grief during the holidays.
Sammy was in his 50s when he died of natural causes. He had an intellectual disability and had lived at home his entire life under the watchful care of his mother. For more than half a century, my patient’s life mission was caring for Sammy as well as raising two other children, now married with families of their own. This mother had known sorrow before when her husband died several years earlier. Yet she and Sammy had become primary companions to one another, so his loss felt different and even more profound.
Sammy always delighted in the gift-giving traditions of Christmas and his mother had helped turn that interest into a yearlong project. For each member of the family, they kept a large paper bag to fill with gifts designated for the big Christmas blowout. The nieces and nephews eagerly anticipated what Uncle Sammy came up with each year for their traditional Christmas afternoon gathering.
Now, with Sammy gone, my patient struggled to get through each day, as if there were not enough air in the room to breathe. She felt completely out of step with seasonal celebrations. Every cultural reminder of lavish gift exchanges brought pangs of misery.
Many people with a loved one who died in the previous year experience similar sadness as Christmas approaches. Their world is changed and it can seem empty without their child, spouse, parent or grandparent, sibling, or friend. Any attempt to celebrate takes enormous effort, feels artificial, and can even seem disloyal or disrespectful to the deceased. Instead of celebrating the arrival of the divine in the birth of Jesus, God often seems very far away for grieving individuals.
Grief expert Therese Rando, author of “How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies,” explains why many people who are grieving find holidays so difficult. Annual events that emphasize togetherness and family gatherings — like Thanksgiving, year-end holidays, and the Fourth of July — accentuate the void they already feel. While not a day goes by when they don’t think about their deceased loved one, Christmas holidays bring their emotional emptiness so prominently into the foreground that it can be difficult to notice, or care about, anything else.
What can grieving individuals do to reduce their discomfort, still be emotionally available to surviving family or friends, and not lose sight of the spiritual “reason for the season”? A theory called the dual process model is often helpful in coping with grief. It suggests that bereavement involves grappling with two fundamental, and sometimes competing, realities — grieving the lost loved one and going on with life. For a holiday like Christmas, both elements are important: remembering and honoring the lost loved one while still affirming life. Resilient grievers work at both behaviors and neglect neither.
For example, one family I worked with found a way to incorporate both grieving and celebrating life into their holiday observance. They set the Christmas table to include a bud vase with a single red rose to represent their missing family member. During the pre-meal blessing, they acknowledged their grief over the loved one’s absence. Then, during dinner, each person shared a humorous story or upbeat memory about the missing person, something that made their life richer for having known her. The deceased loved one was not forgotten but rather very much present, both in grief and celebration.
In sessions with Sammy’s mother, we talked about how she could both grieve and continue to celebrate life. She immediately grasped the need to go on with the customary distribution of gifts already collected, just like Sammy would have wanted. But thinking about it made her sadder and the exercise seemed hollow. “What about his stocking?” she asked. “I would hate not to put it up on the mantle but I don’t want an empty stocking hanging there either.”
“Why not fill it?” I suggested. We talked about how magical it would be for everyone to find Sammy’s stocking filled — not with gifts for Sammy, but with gifts from Sammy for every member of the family — an unexpected expression of his over-the-top Christmas enthusiasm. Sammy’s mother embraced the idea. I saw a spark of joy return as she envisioned how the gifts in Sammy’s stocking could be tree ornaments, followed by a new ritual of each person hanging that ornament on the Christmas tree while telling a story about Sammy. “Then he really would be there,” she concluded.
Humans have the ability to convert absence into presence. We can transform an absence cast by the shadow of grief into a symbolic sense of presence by incorporating rituals such as those used by the families described here. Creative rituals recapture some of the essence and energy of the missing loved one through the mechanism of memory.
At Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’s birth as the incarnational presence of God among us — Emmanuel. God, who is real, comes into our lives in a very special way as a newborn infant. Remember the words of 1 John 4:16, “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.” When we invoke the vibrant, living memories of our deceased loved ones, it rekindles our affection and makes them somehow present again, in love. That’s Christmas.

Louis A. Gamino is a clinical psychologist at Baylor Scott White Health and a member of St. Luke Parish in Temple. Find more about him at www.LouisGamino.com.