Hello and welcome to Dear grief guide.
A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost, stuck,
heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.
My name is Shelby Fercitya.
I'm a grief coach and author and I'm here to help you create a life you love from the
life lost forced you to live.
Let's get to today's letter.
Dear grief guide.
My husband passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack earlier this year and now the
holidays are approaching fast.
He always make Christmas feel so magical for the kids.
He would put the lights up the day after Thanksgiving and play Christmas music while
we all decorated the tree together.
Every year he'd make the kids hot cocoa and put on old claymation movies while they
open their pajamas on Christmas Eve.
I'm struggling because I don't know how to make the holidays magical without him.
Our kids are five, eight and twelve and they're all grieving in their own ways.
My youngest asks about him constantly while my oldest keeps everything bottled up, preferring
to talk to her friends.
My middle child swings between the two.
I'm grieving too but I don't want to let them down.
I want them to feel some sense of joy but the idea of doing our usual traditions without
him feels unbearable.
I'm stuck between wanting to honor his memory and feeling like I can't live up to the magic
he brought to our family this time of year.
How do I help my kids feel something special and meaningful again when all we feel is this
huge loss?
Thanks for any suggestions or advice you can offer.
Signed No Holiday Spirit.
Hi there, No Holiday Spirit.
I am so glad you wrote me.
And right now too, I think a lot of grieving people wonder whether or not they're crazy
or weird for thinking about the holiday season as early as September, October and my response
is always no, you're not.
I have such a slew of personal grief dates between November and December that these fall
months are a season that I often refer to as the tilt, kind of this irreversible, inescapable
part of the roller coaster of my annual experience with grief where I tilt into metaphorically
and literally a season of darkness and overwhelm.
And that is the holiday season in my own world.
My mother's cancer came back around Thanksgiving time.
We received the prognosis that she was going to die about a week before Christmas and then
she died the day after Christmas.
So this time of year is rife with reminders of grief for me and they're not just limited
to my mother.
My cat who died earlier this year, I adopted him in the month of November.
So I always think of him this time of year and my very best friend who died suddenly from
COVID in 2022 was Jewish.
And so the season of Hanukkah was something we participated in together.
She let me celebrate with her as her roommate when we shared a home together.
And so doing things that honor that holiday without her now feels especially lonely and dark
and empty.
So this I know of what you speak.
I know I just interrupted myself, but I know of what you speak when you look to the holidays
with dread or even just this this held breath anticipation of I don't know what it's going
to be, but I know it's not going to feel good.
And that's a really, really hard way to approach what so often the rest of the world refers
to as the most wonderful time of the year.
So here's what I have for you.
The big thing is I want you to call a family meeting.
Do it as soon as you can.
You can do it right now if you want to as soon as you finish listening to this podcast
episode.
Call a family meeting with your kids.
Everybody in the same room together.
If everybody a piece of paper you could all share one big piece of butcher paper however
you'd like to do it and ask everyone including yourself.
So all four of you should participate in this.
All four of you please define three things that feel like the holidays to you.
So your youngest should define three things.
Your middle child should define three things.
Your oldest child should define three things and you should define three things.
Make them very concrete action items that feel like the holidays.
These could be baking cookies together, caroling in front of the neighbor's house, hanging
stockings, opening pajamas on Christmas Eve, making hot chocolate, watching claymation
movies, whatever it is, everybody gets three.
If you had to pick the three things that feel the most like Christmas to you, what would
they be?
You can set a timer while you do this if you have a family that tends to stray mentally.
You can make it festive by playing Christmas music during this if you like.
But here's the goal of this exercise.
When everybody has their list of three, say we are all grieving this year, the loss of your
husband, the loss of your dad.
In order to decrease the amount of energy that is required of us to get through this season,
we're not going to try and do all the things that we used to do.
We're going to do our favorite things, the things that feel most like Christmas to us.
And regardless of what else happens during the season, regardless of whatever religious
events you get invited to, cookie swaps, pajama parties, movie viewings, Christmas in the
park, the big light show, whatever else you get invited to or is offered to you or comes
across your path in this holiday season, you will prioritize these activities that your
family has listed.
Amongst this list of three, three, three, and three, there's 12 in total.
You might see some overlap.
So maybe two of you named baking cookies together or maybe three of you named making hot chocolate
and opening pajamas on Christmas Eve.
Great.
That narrow sure list down even farther.
But as the parent, as the person who is steering the ship through the holiday season,
your goal is to make sure these 12 or fewer activities get completed because that is the
holidays.
That is the definition for your family.
This year, it can change next year and the year after that, you have permission for this
exercise to evolve.
And everything that is not that is a loving, gentle, protective no.
And something you can do with this list is call on your friends, your family members, other
people in your circles who have said things like, let me know if there's anything I can do.
Because if something on your list happens to be pretty big, like building a snowman out
in the front yard or baking dozens of cookies to mail to friends and family members, you
might need some reinforcements.
You might need somebody to help you pick out pajamas or or rap presents or make a playlist
of Christmas songs.
So anybody, mom, that you can lean out on to help you execute these 12 tasks, do it.
Please.
This is the time of year where people not only expect to be given gifts, but are in an especially
helpful mood to give and to offer of themselves as well, especially, especially if you can
name specific tasks that they can help with.
So if you have a friend who loves shopping more than anything and doesn't mind braving
the Christmas crowns, have them be the person to pick out the pajamas.
They can send you pictures from the store.
They can help you wrap them up.
They can take them to the gift wrap section if neither of you has time to do that.
And if you have a friend who's willing to be the chair of that outsourced task, excellent,
wonderful, fantastic.
If you have a friend or family member who knows your husband's cocoa recipe, ask them
for it.
If you know somebody who has the original claymation movies on VHS and you've got a VHS player, make
it happen.
Or somebody has an Apple Plus or a Hulu or Netflix subscription where you can watch them
as further log in.
What are these tiny, tiny things that you can reach out for as the parent again is the
person steering this ship of a grief and family through the holidays?
How can you lean out on your support network for resources this time of year?
I also, as you're making this list of 12, encourage you during your family meeting.
It doesn't have to be long.
This could take maybe half hour, maybe an hour at the most.
Open up a conversation with your kids and ask them, where do you think you're going
to think Dad should show up in our holiday traditions this year?
You can do something small and subtle, like giving everybody memory stones to carry in
their pockets through the whole month of December.
They can take them to school.
They can put them under their pillow at night.
They can take them to a friend's house for a Christmas sleepover.
They can have something portable that reminds them of him to carry throughout the season.
You can distribute articles of his clothing if you have access to things like that and
maybe the Christmas pajama's this year are dad shirts.
Maybe that's what your family is doing together.
You can do something grander or more visible, like setting a place at the table for him during
a special meal.
You can do something silly or over the top, such as having a stuffed animal or a picture
of your husband, their father, that moves and rotates around the house like a sort of
griefy elf on the shelf or even get something huge like a cardboard cut out to represent
him and put a little Christmas hat on him and offer him gifts or make donations in his
name so that it's more as if he is in the home and he is present while this is happening.
While these may seem ridiculous, there is no wrong way to do the holidays with your
kids after a devastating loss.
That's the thing I really want to relay to you.
This is what I'm trying to help with and to offer you today is this invitation to narrow
down to the things that feel most important and say this is our concrete list that we've
all agreed on.
We're going to try and do these 12 things this year and that will be Christmas for us.
Everything else is maybe and we'll decide, you know, a week in advance on the day, 24
hours in advance if we have the energy for that.
But these 12 things are our priorities as a grieving family.
And then here's how we want to fold dad into all of this.
Making this conscious, literally writing it down, making it real and visualizable and able
to be pinned up on the wall or hung in the refrigerator.
This is a way that as a parent, you can help your kids feel safe and protected and guided
as they are also navigating this holiday season with you.
There will be days when it feels like too much to bear.
There will be days where one of your children is feeling the magic of the season and the
other just wishes that dad was home to celebrate with them.
There will be moments where all of it is all happening at once and all of it where you
will all go to four different corners of the home to process without the sense of community.
That this time of year often brings it is a weirdo time to grief.
The holidays are and it will be different and take different shapes every year.
But to establish this now, especially in your first holiday without him, this sort of prepping
for the grief of the season can become its own tradition that you can all do together
year after year until the kids move out until you feel safe enough to to loosen the reins
until you come up with new traditions that feel more fitting or have folded in old ones
that remind you of your dad but then are created by your family to together.
But this is a wonderful, wonderful batten down the hatches sort of bare bones plan.
For here's how we're going to get through the holidays, here's what's vital to us and
everything else can can fall away, can slip by the wayside.
It's not that it's not important.
It's not that it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't define Christmas for our family this year.
Next year we'll see, after January 1st, we'll see.
You can build snowman a lot of times during the years, as long as there's snow on the ground.
You can dress up in silly pajamas a lot of times a year.
Just taking note of what feels important and significant to you while it may feel and
probably will feel calculated less than magical.
What that does do is make a plan for and make room for things that are magical to appear.
And I know that's going to be something your heart is aching for this year is to feel the
magic.
And so to do the work, no holiday spirit, of laying the foundations, of saying these are
non-negotiables, offers you a baseline of tradition and consistency and family participation, so
that everything else that happens in that, around that, outside of that, whether it's just
to you or as a whole family or to your kids one-on-one or with the support of friends and
family members, everything outside of that will have the potential to feel magical.
And that, in and of itself, can act as a sort of hope and a sort of grief-filled promise
of magic this time of year.
I'm wishing you so much love as you do this exercise with your family.
And in the words of one of my favorite death dolas, Aloha Arthur, feel no pressure to have
a happy holiday.
That's all that's required of you.
Good luck.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of your own grief,
check out my free workshop Grow Through Grave, three ways to stop feeling stuck and start moving
forward.
I'll give you three easy, actionable tools for navigating life after loss and show you
how you can create peace, stability and compassion right there in the middle of grief's confusion
and uncertainty.
You can find the workshop link in the show notes.
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Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence
of Celebio.
Until next time, I see you.
I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world, and I love you, because even
through grief, we are growing.
Music for Dear Grave Guide.