Five Tips to Get Through the Holidays

Dec 10, 2024 | Community, Family, Grief

The holidays can be a difficult time for many people, for many reasons. There are the expectations — to participate fully, to spend profligately, to performatively have a good time. But the holidays can also be a wonderful, emotionally fulfilling period of quality time spent with loved ones and opportunities to treat yourself. 

Grieving, of course, complicates both the good and the bad of the holiday season. Grief does not go away at this time of year and can, in fact, be heightened; holiday traditions may trigger specific memories of your lost loved one, which can be painful, bittersweet, wonderful — or all three, or some other combination of emotions. What’s important to remember at this time of year (and always) is that grief and bereavement look different for different people at different times. People often talk about “firsts” after a death, such as the first birthday, the first back-to-school season, or the first Christmas without your loved one, because these are moments when the loss can feel especially acute. But even if you’ve already experienced a holiday season (or multiple) since your loved one died, grief is not linear, and you may be dreading this holiday season more than you expected, because you know during this period that the deceased’s absence will be painfully obvious.

According to Mary-Frances O’Connor, a psychologist and author of The Grieving Brain, our traditions are encoded in our brains, and when we come upon one that has been so drastically altered by the irrevocable absence of a loved one, “we can’t function in the world in the same way.” 

“Suddenly, every plan that is in place has a hole in it where that person should be,” she told Washington Post columnist Steven Petrow last November, which means our “internal map of the world no longer matches up with the world itself.” 

Regardless of where you are in your grief journey, there are ways you can make this holiday season easier on yourself. Below, we share five ways to help you make it through the holidays. 

#1. First and foremost, give yourself grace. 

Do not be hard on yourself. You may have expectations for how you will react throughout the season, but you might end up feeling totally differently; let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling. Acknowledge your pain. 

“Grief is very tiring and — even under the best of circumstances — holidays are very taxing,” William G. Hoy, a professor of medical humanities at Baylor University, explained in a blog post published by the university last year. Listening to yourself when you need to rest and recuperate is hugely important. 

Remember that grief comes in waves, and you may feel multiple different emotions throughout the course of the season, for different reasons.

Megan Devine, an author and grief advocate, reminds us that we can feel multiple, seemingly conflicting emotions at once. “Gratitude and grief don’t cancel each other out, they sit side by side,” she wrote in a blog post about handling Thanksgiving as a grieving person. 

Balance out listening to and making space for your emotions.

#2. Don’t isolate yourself. 

It’s important to keep track of your social battery and not put yourself in situations where you will be overwhelmed. Interacting with your support system and feeling lifted is an important and you deserve it. 

“Being in community with others is very beneficial for your mental health,” Candi Cann, a Baylor religion professor who researches death and dying, said.

Keeping yourself from doing the things you love and being with the people you love may make a bad mental health situation even worse. 

To make the best out of these situations and make sure your cup is filled when you do attend social gatherings.

#3. Tell others what you need. 

This is important to remember year-round, but especially during what’s often a very busy and emotionally loaded time. Your loved one may be even more in your thoughts than usual; your grief may feel near; or your emotions might shift in any number of other ways. And even if you feel you are usually proactive about telling your support system what you need, the busy-ness of the season — and others’ own emotional shifts during the holidays — means you may need to vocalize your needs more often, in clearer terms, or otherwise differently. 

If you don’t have the energy or emotional bandwidth to talk specifically with everyone you love about how they can support you this time of year, Megan Devine has compiled a list of 10 tips for supporting a grieving person that you can share to make sure you’re getting what you need. 

#4. Make new traditions

So many of our holiday traditions are place- and event-based, and that can be too hard to stomach when you’re grieving. 

Creating a new tradition can be a meaningful solution. That might mean celebrating with different people this year, or traveling to a different place, or even just attending a new holiday event you never went to before. 

You need to be able to grieve on your own terms, and if you don’t feel you can do that in your typical holiday situation, give yourself permission to change the program. This can also be freeing: When you’re doing something new, you can’t compare it to previous years. 

A new tradition doesn’t mean leaving the person you lost behind, either. There are so many ways you can include their memory, depending on what you choose to do. You can play their favorite song, drink their favorite drink, make the joke they always made… Doing something new doesn’t mean forgetting your loved one; it merely gives you room to breathe. 

#5. Share stories about your loved one. 

Even though you may be doing something entirely different this year, holding your loved one in your heart — and the hearts of those around you — keeps their memory alive and helps keep them a part of the holiday. 

In her blog about how to support a grieving person during the holidays, Devine writes that people should not “be afraid to share memories about [the deceased]. Use their name in conversation” — and that goes just as well for you, the grieving person. They are still a big part of your life, and there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable talking about them. 

Sometimes, it might make you emotional to tell these stories, but that’s okay! Ultimately, talking about a person you lost with other loved ones — especially if it’s a recollection the others haven’t heard before — is a meaningful way to connect, acknowledge the loss, and still hold the memories dear. 

Resources

Visit our Bookshop page to  purchase Mary-Frances O’Connor’s book, The Grieving Brain, and Megan Devine’s book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK.

Grief, Bereavement, and Chosen Families in the LGBTQIA+ Community

Sep 13, 2024 | Community, Family, Grief

By Nora Biette-Timons

Earlier this summer, throughout the month of June, we celebrated the joy of queerness, the joy of embracing one’s authentic self and sexuality. We hold this love and delight in our hearts throughout the year—but we also remember that public Pride celebrations did not come easily: Queer existence has a painful history, and the fights for equality and recognition are far from over.

Throughout these fights, queer widows and widowers have told stories of the saddest moments of their Flives: They were even more helpless than straight people facing the loss of a spouse, because as their partners were dying, they had no legal rights to make decisions. They were helpless in the face of death, as we all are, but also in the face of discrimination, which was legal until all too recently.

Though queer acceptance has come a long way in the past 25 years, and the scale of these problems has lessened — sometimes significantly — after the Supreme Court upheld Obergefell in 2015, they do still exist. Social and cultural attitudes remain prejudiced, and, as a result, many bereaved queer people experience disenfranchised grief; “grief that is not seen as legitimate or meaningful by society or others in their social network,” says Dr. Kailey Roberts, a psychology professor whose research specializes in bereavement and palliative care. This can show up as dead partners being referred to as “friends”; families leaving same-sex partners out of the mourning process because they disapprove; or workplaces not recognizing these kinship ties and refusing to grant time off.

This lack of being seen by and understood exacerbates loss for bereaved LGBTQIA+ individuals, Roberts says. As a man named George Seabold wrote in Gay Widowers: Life After Death of a Partner, an anthology published in 1997 specifically to help bereaved gay men, his grief over the death of his partner was further isolating because, at the time, he was not publicly out.

For many reasons — from historic marginalization to community bonds — the concept of “chosen family” is particularly strong for LGBTQ+ people. As Roberts puts it, “‘family’ includes not only biologically or legally related kin, but also [people] who are highly meaningfully connected and closely involved in each other’s lives but not bio-legally related.” An essay in ColorBloq, an online journal by and for queer and trans people of color, notes that “chosen family” is especially salient for LGBTQ+ people of color, who face disproportionate rates of social and economic isolation. Chosen family, “built on kinship with intentional demonstrations of love, shared history, material and emotional assistance, and enduring solidarity. [It] encompasses a network of social support, intimacy and identity.” These kin relations “are at the center of the activities that sustain a family built on social and cultural connections rather than legal and biological.”

***

Older generations, in particular, carry the scars of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, which was for far too long largely ignored by governments, public health officials, and society writ broadly. While those memories do not exist for younger generations of queer folks, the horror of them has not disappeared. “The collective trauma of the HIV epidemic has been passed down through generations, but we rarely contend with it as a community,” researcher Alexander McClelland writes in Between Certain Death and Possible Future, a collection of essays analyzing the legacy — and current reality — of HIV/AIDS. “The grief and deaths of thousands of gay men, trans women, injection drug users, sex workers, immigrants, people of color, and other marginalized people were not taken seriously then, so how can the grief and fears of subsequent generations be taken seriously now?”

The painful history of HIV/AIDS echoes today as many older queer adults who lost partners and chosen families during the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s enter their later years. The “ongoing societal stigma associated with LGBTQIA+ identities” and the “lack of tailored and affirming resources can contribute to suffering and loss” in this community, Roberts says.

This missing support has real, tangible health effects. Beyond disenfranchised grief, elderly queer patients, on average, face more health issues (mental, physical, and cognitive) and, on top of that, encounter barriers in healthcare settings that sometimes can lead to them avoiding treatment, thus hastening or worsening end-of-life outcomes. An analysis published earlier this year titled “Health disparities among LGBTQ+ older adults: challenges and resources, a systematic review” reported that, in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts, older lesbians and bisexual women have “heightened rates of overweight and cardiovascular disease” and gay and bisexual men have higher rates of angina, cancer, and diabetes.

This report said that evidence overwhelmingly suggests that these health issues are caused by the stigma (including internalized stigma) and isolation older queer people faced throughout their lives—and still face today. These problems can be worsened when they seek healthcare, where heterosexuality is the presumed norm, and doctors are often untrained on the specific issues LGBTQ+ elders face.

Some lawmakers have recognized this reality, and their efforts to solve it are ongoing. Sen. Michael Bennet co-sponsored legislation in 2017 to establish a National Resource Center on LGBT Aging, and in 2021, asked the Department of Health and Human Services for a briefing on the issues facing this population and urged the agency’s leaders to issue culturally competent guidance “to support LGBT older Americans receiving palliative and hospice care.”

***

The lack of full social acceptance and recognition also makes the grieving process more difficult, and forces the bereaved to grieve in private or to mask the full extent of their grief.

But when the death of a queer person is able to be marked and mourned in public, the way the deceased would want, it is something to be celebrated. The funeral for Cecilia Gentili — a trans woman, actress who appeared on “Pose,” sex worker advocate, and stalwart of New York City’s LGBTQ community — was a perfect example of the progress that’s been made, and the hurdles queer folks still face. Gentili died in February at age 52, and her funeral drew more than 1,000 mourners to St. Paul’s Cathedral, the same cathedral where gay activists once staged protests against the Catholic Church. While planning the service, her family kept her full identity “under wraps,” according to the New York Times, out of concern that the archdiocese would object to holding a funeral for a trans woman (and the archdiocese did indeed condemn the funeral after the fact). But the memorial itself celebrated Gentili’s true self, out in the open: Her family and chosen family attended — many in outfits described as more likely to be found at a fashion show than a funeral and it functioned, as the Times put it, as “a celebration of her life and an exuberant piece of political theater.”