Skip to main content

Week 158: Holding Both: Grief, Joy, and the Holidays







Intro:

The holiday season has a way of magnifying everything—joy, love, chaos, and loss. For anyone navigating grief while trying to stay present for the magic of the moment, this time of year can feel like holding fire in one hand and water in the other. This week, I found myself somewhere in the middle—carving out peace where I could, remembering what was, and making space for what still is.




This Week


This week was gentler than most.


After a month away, I’ve settled back into home—reconnecting with friends, finding energy for the little things: Christmas shopping, baking, decorating the tree. I waited for my son to come home before we put it up.


Each night, my husband and I watched the worst Christmas movies we could find. There’s something oddly comforting in them. Maybe because underneath the laughter, we’re both feeling what’s missing—especially at this time of year. Holidays have a way of highlighting the spaces where someone used to be.


Lil loved the holiday music—swaying, grinning, calling out “Santa!” as if she knew exactly what all the joy was about. I read somewhere that one way to honor those we’ve lost is to say their name out loud when ordering coffee. I’ve started doing that. And when the barista calls out “Lily!”—there it is. Her name in the world again. And it makes me smile every time.


Decorating the tree is always emotional. There’s a ritual to it now—pulling out each ornament, unwrapping not just memories, but whole moments in time. Among them: a tiny homemade ornament from Lily’s first Christmas, painted with her baby handprint, edges slightly faded. Just beside it, we hang a delicate angel—one we chose after she passed.


A beginning. An end. A life in between.


The tree tells our whole story — every beginning, every goodbye.

It holds what we still can’t say out loud some days, and yet it stands there, lit and present, year after year. A witness to all of it.


I’m still deeply involved in my daughter’s mental health, even from afar. Maybe too much, some might say. But I don’t care. She doesn’t seem to resent it, and I know she needs it. I need it, too.


Life feels both full and painfully empty. I keep learning that you can hold both things at once—the joy and the ache, the presence and the absence. This strange, beautiful, bittersweet season we call living.




Conclusion:

If you’re feeling pulled in two directions this season—grateful and grieving, busy and hollow—you’re not alone. This is the tension so many of us carry quietly through December. There’s no right way to move through it, only your way.


For me, it’s saying Lily’s name out loud, hanging her ornaments, and loving the people still here as fiercely as I can.

Because the tree tells our whole story — and I’m still writing it, even now.


Labels:

We’d Love to Hear From You

Share a reflection, a memory, or just say hello below.

Popular posts from this blog

The Version of Me I’m Leaving Behind

​ April found me still reminding myself to pause before I speak. My patience feels thinner these days. But something else has shifted too. My relationship with my mother is ongoing and complicated. Boundaries have helped. It’s getting easier to hold them—which, strangely, makes saying yes feel cleaner too. I even set up a friendship blind date for her and a client, meeting them there to help it along. They both said they were lonely. They both said they wanted connection. Neither followed up. Instead, my mom booked a bus trip with the neighbor she insists she can’t stand. I laughed when she told me—really laughed. Not because it was surprising, but because it wasn’t. She moves toward what’s familiar, even when it doesn’t suit her. I know that pattern. I’ve lived inside a version of it. She either copies my hairstyle and clothes or criticizes them. There’s rarely a middle ground. I’m less affected than I used to be—not because she’s changed, but because I’m starting to see her m...
Read more

Week 152: Bearing Witness: Anne Frank and the Father Who Returned Alone

The third and final reflection on collective and personal grief and on the love that survives when everything else is lost. Bearing Witness: Anne Frank and the Father Who Returned Alone When Otto Frank stepped off the train back into Amsterdam in June 1945, the city he returned to was both familiar and unrecognizable. The canals still shimmered in the summer light, the bells still rang from the Westerkerk, but the laughter of his wife and daughters was gone. The war had ended, but for Otto, the silence had only just begun. For weeks, he searched. He wrote letters, visited refugee centers, and followed every rumor that his daughters, Margot and Anne, might still be alive. In his pocket, he carried hope like a scrap of paper—folded, worn, almost transparent. But each inquiry ended the same way: a shake of the head, a name on a list, a quiet apology. Eventually, the truth reached him—Anne and Margot had not died in Auschwitz as first reported, but in Bergen-Belsen, of typhus, just wee...
Read more

Week 153: Closing the Series & Turning Toward November

As I close this three-part series on grief—its collective echoes, its private chambers, its impossible tenderness—I find myself turning, as I always do this time of year, toward November. It’s the month that holds everything. Lily’s angelversary sits at its center like an ache I can feel before the calendar even flips. First in my dreams, then in my bones. My body always seems to remember before my mind gets the memo. One moment I’m functioning—answering texts, folding laundry. The next I’m swirling: emotional to numb, numb to sobbing on the dining room floor while her favorite pop songs pulse through the speakers, as if she’s just in the next room asking me to turn it up. And then the next morning… nothing. A strange, hollow quiet. Not peace, not calm—just a blank space where last night’s tidal wave had been. It still startles me how grief moves like unpredictable weather, sweeping in and receding on its own terms. November has a way of unearthing the memories I’ve tucked c...
Read more