Grief knows no holiday. And for those who lose someone they love at Christmas time, the shock and loss can seem like a double blow. Even years after, the holiday remains a painful reminder for some.
"It seems like it colors the whole period around it, no matter how festive the season is supposed to be," said one. "It's forever tainted."
This year I know several people who are struggling through the holidays. One is a friend whose mother died four weeks before Thanksgiving. In honor of her long-ago wish to be buried in red, mourners at her memorial service each wore a touch of the color.
Now my friend and her 85-year-old father are trying to get through their first Christmas without her.
"We're keeping it simple, which makes it easier on us," said my friend, who helped set out her mother's ceramic Christmas tree and hung the pickle ornament on the little jigsaw tree her father cut out.
The familiar rituals and the memories they bring both hurt and help heal, she said. She's finding unexpected comfort in her father's retirement community, where people are never too busy to visit.
"It's like my father's father said: You cry a little, then you get on and work and laugh. Then you cry a little, then you get on and work and laugh," she said.
To honor her mother and to give special meaning to the holiday, she and her father plan to replicate her mother's from-scratch menu. It includes oyster stew on Christmas Eve and German stuffing and cranberry relish -- made with Wisconsin cranberries sent by a family member -- on Christmas Day. After, because they need the holiday to be social, they'll go somewhere else for pie.
"My parents both grew up on farms and the meal is a significant thing for farm people," she said. "It's important that it be more farm-oriented."
Someone else I know recently lost his ex-wife, a good friend even after their divorce. Since her untimely death shortly before Thanksgiving, he has been raising their young son alone.
Now he's trying to get through Christmas the best way he knows how: by keeping up the family traditions in the house they once shared and where, even after the divorce, they always celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas morning together.
Already he's missing her special touches.
"She was always a good one for the holidays and that's going to be tough," he said. "She always made sure things were nice, baked something that was special or different."
Making this year's celebration even more bittersweet is the knowledge that it will be his last in the house, which is being sold to help settle the estate. Still, he's determined to carry on Christmas like before for the sake of their son. Which means putting something special for him under the Christmas tree.
"She kind of saw this coming and she set aside some Christmas money to buy a Wii for him," he said. "So, he'll have a present from his mom under the tree Christmas morning, which is kind of cool."
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