By Sarah Wildman

Grieving parents like me are told to gird themselves for anniversaries and holidays, for birthdays and religious events. We’re advised to plan for days associated with joy. We consider exit strategies. We talk about how the markers of civil religion and religious observance are harder for us, now that we no longer exist exactly inside society, but run alongside it, observing. Each holiday centered on family is now barbed.

So, all that’s to say, I have been approaching Thanksgiving this year with trepidation.

I love a holiday focused on gratitude and gathering, of food and camaraderie. I tend to cook when I’m sad or worried, and I’ve been both, a lot, of late. I bake challah and cakes and cookies. I prepare salads and mains and sides. I sauté and stir and sweat and focus. On any given Friday afternoon, my kitchen looks as though I’m expecting a crowd. But no matter how many I’ve invited, it is never the fullness of our table I see, but the absence of a place setting.

And yet, as much as holidays and calendar markers are as hard as promised, in this first half year of bereavement since our daughter Orli, 14, died from the complications of metastasized liver cancer, it is her daily absence that is the cruelest blow. It is making a pot of Orli’s favorite black beans knowing she will never sit down to eat them; it is adding back chocolate into the recipes I had removed it from, for she, unfathomably, loathed it; it is setting the table again and again for three instead of four; it is the expansiveness of the back seat of the car. It is in this quotidian drama that our family has to work to find levity as well as management, joy and, yes, exit strategies — especially as, in so many of these moments, we find ourselves alone in the noticing.

The notes and text messages slow and stop, the absence drones on. Living in loss is heavy; it is made all the more so by a world overflowing with grief, and parental pain. I see myself in all these newly minted members of my terrible club.

It’s also a remarkable amount of work, a second (or third) job. My partner, Ian, and I have sat down with groups and met with counselors. We have joined Zoom sessions, read the words of those who have come before us. Together with our surviving daughter, Hana, 10, we recently traveled to a conference at Boston Children’s Hospital to process our grief and try to face the absence at our table with other similarly reeling families.

Such experiences aren’t in search of solace or solution, but of place. It is powerful to be around people who recognize the insistency of loss, its daily presence, the continued impact of which so easily slips past others, unseen, as everyone else returns to the business of living. It has made me recognize how many people walk around concealing pain.

As a family, we have weathered a batch of life markers since Orli’s death. Hana had a birthday in June, Ian in October. We have had Passover and Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and Sukkot, each of which was — the counselors were not wrong!— by turns meaningful and excruciating. Families arrived in synagogue, or at the holiday table, dressed and smiling, their children growing ever older, while Orli remains the age at which we parted.

Quietly, we mark our elder daughter missing, and wait on others to do the same. On Passover my father proposed adding a cup (“cos,” in Hebrew) for Orli, the way we leave a cup for Elijah, noting that absence is woven into our observance. In late summer we even, ill advisedly, attended a wedding. It was too soon. We were not ready to be surrounded by unadulterated joy; we did not know how to hold ourselves, and our pain, without dulling the bride and groom’s shine. We fled during cocktail hour.

But I have also found I relish the occasional dark humor of other parents who have lost children, who recognize the macabre place we all live, how comically awful it is to run into people who still don’t know. “How’s the family?” a writer I ran into asked me the other day. I wanted to say, “So Hana started volleyball, and, well, Orli’s dead.” Orli would have laughed. Instead I changed the subject.

I’ve been in awe of the strength and cheek of Hana, who decided to pen a letter to the writers of a children’s television program to tell them what real drama looks like (her sister’s seizure! Her miserable, hospitalized 14th birthday! The morning of her sister’s death, when she said a final goodbye); of Ian, who gets up daily and throws himself into parenting as though the world hadn’t ended in March.

This first Thanksgiving without Orli will also be the first time a group of friends and family that had traditionally gathered this time of year will be together since before Covid and cancer. The last time we assembled for the holiday the children ran freely in the hallways of our friends’ apartment building, careening along beige walls and dragging their sticky hands, making a hilariously loud ruckus near the elevators. I can see Orli, her hair still long, untouched by the ravages of cancer treatment, by turns serious and silly, chasing her sister and cousins, healthy, red-cheeked, unaware of what was to come. I have a photo of her there as a toddler, in a dress from my childhood, a red-checkered pinafore, years away from the abyss.

I already long had a mixed relationship with Thanksgiving, partly because it always lands on or around my birthday. I loathed, as a child, that friends would be away, that school cupcakes almost never arrived on the actual day. As an adult the holiday neutralized — even, briefly, got happier.

Then Orli had her first biopsy on my birthday, a few days before Thanksgiving, in 2019. My relationship to the holiday tilted once more. As we waited in pre-op, she worried she had ruined my birthday; I promised her there was no place I’d rather be. That first cancer Thanksgiving Orli was in terrible pain, pale and wan and yet, unbelievably, smiling in the few photos I took that week. Chemotherapy had not yet begun; her diagnosis, let alone prognosis, was still elusive.

We rushed to assemble a home-based holiday with as much cheer as we could muster. She told us she felt like she was in a movie; we wished it were so. One night, as she lay in the bath, she implored me not to cry in front of her; it scared her. So I didn’t. Instead we watched “The Greatest Showman” on repeat, and sang and cooked for many more people than we had on hand. For all the Thanksgivings that came after, I drew courage just being together.

— Since my sister’s passing in June, I’m dreading Thanksgiving and other seasonal family events without her. But there are ways to handle the loss and the festivities.

By Steven Petrow

My sister died in June. That awful day was the beginning of my “first (fill in the blank) without Julie” dates. They kept coming: My first birthday. The first summer vacation. The first change of season. Now comes the onslaught of the first holiday season.

My therapist, and friends who have suffered losses, have warned me that “the ‘firsts’ are always the worst” — so I am dreading the upcoming holiday season.

And for good reasons, says Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and author of “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.”

Our bonds and rituals with our loved ones are deeply encoded in our brains, she says. For instance, we expect a spouse to come home after work at 5 p.m. or a child to awake up excitedly on Christmas morning.

When they don’t, when expectation hits the harsh reality of the new situation, “we experience grief, pain and suffering because they were so important, and we can’t function in the world in the same way,” she says.

As a result, O’Connor says, “your internal map of the world no longer matches up with the world itself,” which is why we need to created a revised cartography of our new lives.

“Suddenly, every plan that is in place has a hole in it where that person should be,” O’Connor says. “The first time, that hole is most apparent because you have no other way of understanding [for example] what a holiday looks like” without that person in it.

Our family was lucky — if it can be called that — because we were prepared.

Julie’s death was not sudden, as she had lived with ovarian cancer for 5½ years. Last Thanksgiving, which we feared would be her last, our entire family — spouses, nieces, boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as chosen family — gathered to be together with her. We leaned into every tradition. My pecan pie. My niece’s cheese board. While Julie, our family’s top chef, prepped and whipped, sliced and diced the turkey and its fixings. In our photos from last year, she’s right there in the middle; ditto in my memories.

A month after Julie died, her wife suggested that we carry on this year with our holiday traditions to provide continuity. Sticking with tradition can be a comforting way to approach the first holidays.

Brad Milne, co-founder and chief operating officer of Better Place Forests (which provides grieving families the opportunity to spread their loved ones’ ashes at the base of a tree in a protected forest) wrote in a blog post, “It can help you feel closer to your lost loved one by reminding you of happy holidays spent together …. People coming together to support one another often creates a comforting sense of solidarity.”

It’s not the only way and, frankly, I’m ambivalent about it. Yes, I want to be with my family, but I worry — no, I know — that we can’t replicate the past and that it will be painful.

That’s why others decide to change their long-held traditions in the first year — and sometimes much longer — after a loss. A complete change of scene, a break from tradition, can provide a different kind of comfort.

After Ed Chaney and Mandy Hitchcock lost their 17-month-old daughter, Hudson, in May 2010, they decided to leave the country altogether for that first Christmas without her. So they headed to Paris. Thinking of the popular saying “Wherever you go, there you are,” I asked Chaney whether they hadn’t just brought their sadness with them. No, he said, “we didn’t leave the country to escape the grief, just to grieve on our own terms,” without having to worry about the reaction or emotionalism of others.

Many of those I interviewed felt silenced by relatives at holiday celebrations and discouraged from bringing up their pain. O’Connor says it’s important to remember that each person in the family grieves differently and needs different things. “There are some who still really need to avoid conversations about it and there are others who need to memorialize and express how they’re feeling, ” she says.

Kate Kennedy, an educator, whose parents died in a car wreck when she was 27, told me, “I wish I had been allowed to talk about how worried I was that grief would bury me on a holiday. The not being able to say it out loud was hard.”

I worry about that, too. If everyone seems happy, will I bring down the room?

Preferring not to celebrate is normal, writes Milne, but he cautions against being alone as the alternative: “Having people around you for support is important when you’re grieving.” Over and over, I heard “Don’t be alone” and “Don’t isolate” from those I interviewed. It’s important if you can arrange it to be with people who understand what you’re going through.

Looking for advice on how to make it through the year-end dark days, I discovered the Happily Ever Adventures blog, where Lena Ameripour described how she survived her first holidays after her mother died of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “I didn’t know how we were supposed to be happy without her,” she wrote. She and others provided several suggestions about how to survive the “firsts,” which I intend to rely on:

• Do something in memory of your loved one. I’m going to ask my family to go on a walk after our big meal, something we usually did together when Julie was alive.
• If there were games that brought joy before, play them again — or try new ones. We love jigsaw puzzles and Rummikub, No need to change that except to introduce Qwirkle, a board game involving tiles that I think will suit our competitive spirit.
• Buy a gift in honor of your deceased loved one and donate it to a hospital or a favorite nonprofit group. I’m going to send an amaryllis, my sister’s favorite flower, to her oncologist and others who helped care for her.
• Watch a favorite movie together. Our family used to binge on the Hallmark Channel’s schmaltzy holiday movies, which, as Julie always said, deliver “a happy ending every 90 minutes.”
• Tell others what you need. No one is a mind reader, not even loved ones or family members. Do you need a break? Or a hug? A good cry? As I joke with my dog, “Use your words!”
• Find some joy. Even when grieving, there’s joy — in the foods we’ll eat, in the hugs we’ll give and get. Even in our memories. Yes, we can hold more than one emotion at a time.

I’m also planning to tell Julie stories of holiday seasons past. Ellen Steinberg, a graphic designer whose father died 14 years ago, told me, “talking about the deceased diffuses the pressure cooker of sadness that comes from people trying to hold it together and rise above the abyss the missing person has left behind. Talk about them. Share a story. Soon you’ll be laughing about a wonderful memory and quite literally bringing their spirit into the room.”

O’Connor also reminded me “to remember that grief comes in waves. There will be many different moments, and each of those moments will require your big tool kit of coping strategies, a different tool for every situation.”

She also notes that it’s normal for these waves to come and then recede, and knowing that may help us not to fear them quite so much and may even help in the midst of grief.< “I am sorry for your pain,” a friend wrote me recently. “It will most likely always be there but hopefully, it will lessen as you find your own way of facing it. Wishing you peace throughout this first year without your beloved sister.” I wish the same to all of you facing the holidays for the first time without your loved one. Complete Article ↪HERE↩!