My grandma used to eat a fun size Flake in bed every evening at 7pm. She’d feed her pocket-sized rescue dog toast most mornings while he sat in my papa’s old wicker chair in the sun.
On birthdays, she’d always sign the card from her and the pup, in curling cursive I could pick out of a handwriting line-up. She smelled like Youth Dew perfume and looked quite a lot like the actress Joan Plowright.
She was a television star in her day but by the time she got to being my grandma, she was just my grandma: marvellous and mischievous and perfect.
Lyn James died three years ago, so she won’t be making her perfect golden roast potatoes this Christmas.
For some reason, I feel her absence more on a festive occasion. Something about the celebration, and the music, the food, the unwrapping of presents and the signing of Christmas cards makes her feel even further away than any other day.
It’s the same with my papa, who left us many years earlier. A small, furiously talented man who didn’t eat much, even on 25 December. A naughty, intelligent man who taught me to play Scrabble, and appreciate language, and do voices for the characters in books.
My grandparents were my favourite people in the whole wide world, and it is a continuing shock to me that they’re just not here anymore.
As we get closer to Christmas Day and the fresh year that waits beyond it, it’s perfectly natural to start thinking about who won’t be taking their seat at the dinner table – who won’t be doing Secret Santa, who won’t be contributing a pudding, who won’t be joining in on any of the renditions of Jingle Bells.
People I know and love have lost parents and siblings and cousins and children and friends. Some of them have died, others have simply disappeared or been cut from that person’s life. I know people who’ve lost family members tragically, I know people who are simply refusing to speak to them anymore.
Whatever the reason for absence, I know all of us feel it more acutely on a day when we’re meant to be happy and joyous. It can be a cruel sort of juxtaposition: the conspicuous jolliness of Christmas and the way you actually feel when you wake up, eat up, drink up or go to sleep that night.
Christmas is a funny time of year like that. Deaths feel more permanent, and sadder. Absences are more obvious, and it makes them harder. The melancholy we might otherwise avoid seems to present itself, demanding to be felt.
There are ghosts at just about every Christmas lunch, haunting, in their way, the people who remain. It can be a pleasant sort of sadness, the kind that makes you feel warm and fond of the person who’s no longer here. Or it can be an awful sort of anguish, one that just hurts.
Just like anniversaries, and birthdays, and special occasions, there’s something that feels significant about the 25 December and we feel as though everyone should be present. When they’re not, it’s a shock all over again, no matter how many years it’s been this way.
That’s one of the cruelties of grief, it never fully goes away, it just keeps turning up – even at Christmas.
But it is OK to feel sad at this time of year, even if it doesn’t feel quite right.
It’s OK to miss your grandma, or your papa, or your dad, or your mum, or your brother, or your sister, or your son, or your daughter, or your friend. It’s OK to sit with that pain for a bit, even on a day when you’re supposed to be relentlessly merry.
If we all assumed that everyone hurts a little bit extra on Christmas Day, perhaps we could choose to be gentler, kinder, even more compassionate than usual.
A bit of tenderness can be all it takes to make the difference, along with space and opportunity to talk about the person that is gone. Alternatively, we should respect a desire to soldier on without a mention.
Small acts of remembrance – whether that’s making a toast to them, sharing a story about them or just giving yourself permission to say their names out loud – can help. It can be religious, for those that are into that sort of thing, or absolutely not.
I don’t celebrate Christmas for the religious aspect, I don’t know much or care about it being Jesus’s birthday. My family doesn’t observe any religious traditions, unless you count singing carols loudly and badly. But I do believe that Christmas is about family – the ones we have, the ones we were born into, and the ones we choose.
I believe it’s about gratitude and love and turkey. Let’s also make it about sympathy and kindness and patience.
Let it be about letting people deal with their grief in whatever way they can and do. Let it be happy, sure, let it be merry, but let it mournful and sad and strange, too, if it needs to be.
My greatest Christmas wish is that we’re there for each other through it all. And then, if possible, get into the spirit of Christmas and try to appreciate the people we still have.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/16/if-youre-grieving-this-christmas-youre-not-alone-11840215/
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