The Caring Death Doula
In a world that rushes past death and ignores grief, The Caring Death Doula stops to listen with tenderness, truth, and time. Whether you are grieving right now or here to learn how to help those grieving, join your host, Frances, a certified grief educator on the journey of finding connection, conversations, and comfort. Let's make grief and death a natural part of our conversations.
The Caring Death Doula
Grief and Loved Ones During Celebrations
In this episode, we discuss how when holidays, birthdays, and family celebrations collide with loss, the result can be a confusing mix of love, pressure, and exhaustion. We walk through a compassionate, practical approach to navigating celebration when your heart is heavy—without forcing a smile, apologizing for tears, or following someone else’s timeline.
We start with permission: there’s no map for mourning, and your way is valid. From there, we explore gentle tools you can tailor to your needs. Writing a private letter to your person—or to your future self—creates space for the memories, anger, gratitude, and questions that don’t fit at the table. Then we offer ideas to consider: setting an empty chair, sharing one story, or serving a favorite recipe. If that feels like too much, we scale it down to small experiments, like saying their name in a calm moment.
Family dynamics often complicate even the best intentions, so we share language to set expectations with care. Propose an opt‑in time for remembrance so those who want to participate can gather, and those who aren’t ready can step back without judgment.
Each idea is an invitation, not a rule, designed to help you carry love forward rather than “move on.”
By the end, you’ll have a toolkit for the weeks ahead: options for remembrance, scripts for boundary‑setting, and reassurance that connection doesn’t end when a life ends.
If this helped, follow the show, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review to help others find support when the season feels heavy.
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Hello and welcome back. Thank you for joining me. I so appreciate you tuning in. Now, if you were listening to my last episode this earlier in the week, I mentioned how with the holidays coming up here in the United States, that I wanted to start talking about ways that we can work through ways that we can carry our grief, our love for whatever situation, whatever person, whatever cause to our grief, to our loss. We're going to be looking at ways that we can just move through these holiday times. And if you don't live in the U.S., your holiday times might be different. But we all have holidays, vacations, celebrations, special occasions that come along. And they're hard. And sometimes we don't want to, we don't want to do them. And so we're going to be looking at ways to just move through all that. And so the last episode we talked about writing, writing a letter to your loved one, to yourself, to your God. Just writing to get it all out. And then perhaps keeping it somewhere that you can look back on it. To either encourage you to show how you've, I don't want to say move on, because we don't like that terminology, do we? But how you've just carried your grief and your love through this time. And that might help you be stronger in a year or two or five, whenever you look back on this letter and just see how you've done it and that you did do it and that you can do it again. So today I want to just talk about other ways that we can get through this time. And of course, it's all individualized, right? There's no right or wrong way to get through the holidays. There's no map, there's no guidebook. And your situation is influenced by those around you and how they handle their grief and how they handle your grief and what they allow and don't allow and what they say or don't say. But one way you can honor your loved one, and it may make you feel better to get through these special occasions, these holidays, these celebrations that are going on right now in your life. Maybe you set a plate for them and leave a chair empty at the table. And then you share stories of your loved one. And you share memories and laughter and the joy. And the tears may come or they may not, and that's fine. Maybe you serve their favorite foods. Maybe you have their favorite drink and you toast. You make a toast for the holidays, for life, for the preciousness and value of each one that's around the table or in the room. Maybe you get out the pictures, the videos, and you just spend time enjoying each other's company and the memories, the laughter. Just know that we're all still interconnected. It never ends. The physicalness of the relationship of the person is gone, but it's never their essence, their life, who they were, who they are is still around you, within you. And you can celebrate that. If that is what helps you move through this time of celebrations, special occasions, holidays, then that's great. That works for you, that's what you need. Now there's going to be some of you that that terrifies you. That maybe gets you crying, just even thinking about. And that's okay. There's no there's no pattern, there's no timeline, there's no like, okay, it's been three years, three to five years. Okay, so now you can have his or her food, or play their favorite songs, talk about them, see pictures. For some people, they can do that right away. Some people, it takes a few years. For some people, maybe they never do that. And neither way is right or wrong. I just wanted to give you some ideas on how you can get through these holidays. Within your family, there might be some that want to celebrate and include your loved ones' meals and memories. And there might be some of you within your family that don't want that. So maybe pick a day and announce it to the family that we're going to be doing that. And those of you who want to come and be a part of this can. And if you're not ready, if you're not comfortable, it's okay. We need to make it okay. And it is okay that we're all grieving in our different ways. I would encourage you to just try it out one day. It may just be you. Just say your loved one's name out loud and see how that feels, what comes up for you. And don't guilt yourself. Don't don't guilt or shame yourself if you can't do any of this. Or don't let any thoughts of what your loved one would want you to do or not do, or, or what you think they would want you to, how they want you to celebrate, or depending on how many years since they've been deceased, it should be this way or that way. Don't don't let your thoughts burden you. Don't let your guilt and shame burden you. Just take a small step and just just test it out and see. Maybe speak to just one family member and get a feel for where they're at. This may be something that your family does and it's nothing new. But for others of us, this is totally new to say, hey, it's mom's birthday, or it's your dad's day that he would always take off, and you know, this or that tradition. And I want to honor that this year. How how do you feel about that? So I want to encourage you to be a little bit proactive. When you're ready, if you're ready, just softly, just softly test it out and see how it feels. And then expand to someone within your circle, someone within your family, and just test that out a little bit. Just know that you're seen. I'm holding space for you. I am the caring death doula, and I am here for you.