Reflecting on Holiday Traditions in Grief

Summary

In this episode of Growth from Grief, Sue Andersen discusses the challenges of navigating grief during the holiday season. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing emotions tied to traditions and offers practical suggestions for creating new traditions that honor lost loved ones. The conversation highlights the need for self-compassion and the freedom to adapt holiday practices to better suit individual needs during times of grief.

Takeaways

• Grief can manifest from various types of loss, not just death.
• Traditions can evoke strong emotions, especially during the holidays.
• It's important to assess how certain traditions affect your grief.
• Creating new traditions can help in the healing process.
• Lighting a candle in memory of a loved one can be a meaningful gesture.
• A memory tablecloth can serve as a lasting tribute to those we've lost.
• Food traditions can be adapted to honor lost loved ones.
• Self-compassion is crucial during the grieving process.
• It's okay to change or skip traditions that feel too painful.
• You have the right to create a holiday experience that works for you.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen (00:03.382)

Hello, I'm Sue Andersen, grief guide and yoga teacher dedicated to helping individuals navigate the challenging journey of loss. Welcome to Growth from Grief, where I aim to offer strategies to transition from the depths of grief to the path of healing. Whatever loss you are grappling with, here you'll discover support to ease both the physical and emotional burdens of grief. Together, let's embark on a journey towards strength, peace, and healing. I'm so glad you are here.

Susan Andersen (00:56.235)

Welcome to today's episode. We're continuing the theme of healing through the holidays. If you're new to this podcast, I welcome you. And if you're a returning listener, thank you for joining and I hope that you have been able to share this podcast with others in your life who might be grieving or by leaving a review on Spotify or Apple because leaving a review does help others find this podcast. So I thank you for that.

In today's episode, we're continuing with the Healing Through the Holidays theme. And today we're going to talk about traditions. So if you are new to your grief, if this is the first holiday season that you are facing after your loss, it can be really, really difficult to figure out what to do.

And there's a lot of competing forces, if you will. So even in your own head, you know, you’re not sure if you should carry on a particular tradition, not sure if you want to be with people or you don't want to be with people, want to cook or don't want to cook. Maybe it's a different home that you're in, a different environment and you're struggling to try to figure out, you know, what are you going to do to keep certain traditions? How are you going to keep them when you're in an unfamiliar place? 

So remember, you know, when we're talking about grieving, our loss can be anything. Our loss can certainly be a person, but our loss could be other things in our life. Loss of freedom, loss of a job, loss of a home. There are lots of losses that we are grieving and sometimes they're compounded.

Susan Andersen (03:24.269)

So I invite you to take a moment and just think about the holidays and maybe think about emotions that you feel when you think about certain traditions. So for example, if getting together with family creates a lot of anxiety and always has, how will that affect you this year after your loss? And even if this is not the first year of your loss, even if it's two or three years down the road, there's still that grief that you are feeling in your body, your entire body - physical body, emotional body, spiritual body, the whole nine yards. So think about what traditions bring up strong emotions and decide what you want to do, or at least be aware of it, thinking about it. You know, do you want to still have those family members over or do you want to try to do something different this year?

Susan Andersen (04:57.717)

Sometimes worrying about the event is worse than the actual event. So when you think again, just using this example of getting together with different family members or going to somebody else's home, know that sometimes anticipation is actually worse than the actual event. Now, I know a lot of people who have experienced a loss of a person and that first year was really, really difficult because a tradition was carried on, for example, going to a relative's home. And unfortunately, when this person went to the relative's home, they were treated just as if nothing happened, as if they didn't have this loss. No one said the person's name. So it was really exceptionally difficult. And in fact, this person and this is a story that I heard from two people, two totally different people, that they experienced this. They ended up having to leave as quickly as possible after the meal because it was so uncomfortable being there and not being recognized and the person who died, their name not even being said at all. 

So these are different kinds of challenges that you might face which may make you rethink what you want to do in changing traditions.

Susan Andersen (06:51.435)

So I have a couple of thoughts on things that you might want to try, might want to think about. A nice thing to do at a family gathering would be to light a candle. And you could light a candle for the person who has died in their memory. You could also have that candle there, light it and ask each person that's participating to say something about how the person who died has lit up their life. So if I was doing this, for example, with my family and I was thinking about my son and honoring my son, Ian, then lighting the candle, I would say something like, you know, my son, Ian, lit up my life. His smile lit up my life.

So that's just an example of something that you could do around the table. And maybe each person has their own candle or you're just lighting the one candle and going around and somebody is, each person has the opportunity to say how the person who died lit up their life. So that's one idea of something that you could do to create a new tradition and to honor the person who passed away. 

So you could do this candle lighting and each person gives one or two words or one or two sentences about how the person who died lit up their life. 

Another idea would be to create a tablecloth of memories. In this example, you could take any tablecloth that you had, maybe in your family you used a traditional tablecloth that maybe was another family members from another generation, a grandmother's, a mother's or something like that. Maybe it's dirty, I mean, stained, not necessarily dirty, but maybe it's stained and it's okay. You wash it and it's the traditional tablecloth that you use at the holidays.

Well, one idea would be to write memories, write something on that tablecloth. So each person has the opportunity to just recall a memory. Maybe it's a memory of another holiday or maybe it's a memory of the person who died. And you kind of just write that on the tablecloth, right? A funny moment or you know just a nice memory about this person.  I kind of like that idea because then when you take the tablecloth out again the next year, you have that memory. You have what people wrote the year before. Things change every year, of course, and maybe there's new remembrances that you want to write down on the tablecloth. it's sort of this, again, tablecloth of memories. So that's, you know, just another thought in terms of changing your tradition and getting other people to be involved.

Susan Andersen (10:49.453)

Now, if you decide that you don't want to be with other people, you would like to spend your holidays with just maybe your close friends or just a few people in your family that you want to spend time with and you want to break from tradition, let's say it's too painful to think about creating a traditional holiday meal. Well, make a new tradition for this time. Decide that you want to cook, maybe it's the favorite foods of the person who died. Maybe it's favorite foods from another time in your life, your favorite foods. Maybe it's going out to dinner. Maybe it's just having snacks. It's important to give yourself grace and to do what you feel is right at this time. And again, you might not know what's right. 

A person that I know, she lost her brother and during the holidays they loved to have shrimp cocktail. She made shrimp cocktail and she and her brother just devoured it. They loved it. And after he passed away, she was unable some holidays to make that shrimp cocktail. She always bought the shrimp, but sometimes it just stayed in the freezer because she couldn't bear to make it. Other times she made it and it was a nice memory for her of the times that she spent with her brother. She gave herself permission to make that decision

the day of that holiday. So she was prepared, but not necessarily wanting to make it, make that dish, make that shrimp cocktail.

So that's something else to think about. How does food play into your tradition, your holiday? So think about how you want to change that up a little bit, making a new tradition, or maybe it's really not a tradition that you're making. Maybe it's just, hey, this year, I just have to make a change for this year. I don't know if I'm going to continue making that change, but for this year, I just must change it up. I can't do what we did before. It's just not going to work.

Susan Andersen (14:14.803)

So I just talked about three things that you could do to change a tradition, to make a new tradition. One is using candles as the foundation of reading a poem or reciting a memory in terms of how this person who passed away lit you up. Whatever your loss is, maybe you're recalling what made you happy, right? So something that made you happy prior to that loss. That could be the light that you're remembering, the light that you're seeing from that candle. So there's the candle lighting.

There's the idea of taking a tablecloth and making it a memory tablecloth, where you write on that tablecloth a memory of the person, or again, your loss. So if it's a place, an animal, whatever. You're just writing a memory. And if it's a fabric tablecloth, then...You know, you're able, you're using like a permanent marker and you're able to use that again the next year and write something else, some new memories. 

And then the third idea involves food. And that is giving yourself grace, giving yourself permission to do whatever you want in terms of food. So maybe be prepared like my friend who prepared, she got all the ingredients for her shrimp cocktail and then that day decided if she was going to make it or not. And other people that just decided I'm throwing the holiday out the window and I'm just going to stay here and eat some meal that I enjoy. So you can think about that as well in terms of tradition kind of turning on its head. 

So I hope these ideas have just sparked a little bit in you that help you just think about something that you can change if you want to about that holiday tradition and understanding that you always have the right, you always have the permission, give it to yourself to do whatever works best for you. Thank you for listening to this episode and I'll see you next time.