When Love Remembers: Surviving Holiday Grief

Light a candle for those loved ones you are missing at your table this holiday.

When love remembers, grief finds me. Perhaps, during the holidays, grief finds me more easily. It is like the falling snow outside my window. A soft front moves through my body, cool at the edges and tender at my center.

I feel grief in the quiet moments:

when a song flows from the stereo

reminding me of someone I loved

when laughter echoes

where a voice used to live

when I bake Christmas cookies

and

homemade bread

I feel my mother's

and

grandmother's presence in my kitchen

and

I hear my father's voice

asking me to bring some cookies for him

Grief is love remembered. Grief is love that no longer has an address and no physical place to land. Grief flows emotions through our bodies, memories, and breath. Grief is unconditional love for those who came before me, walked with me, and ancestors I never knew whose presence still lives quietly in my blood and bones.

They are not gone or forgotten. They are braided and woven into my breath, my life, my heart. I feel their presence in the quiet grief that softens my heart.

Christmas is so much more than just the holly jolly moments where we are marketed to believe all has to be joyous, festive, and perfect. We are not here to be perfect. We are here to experience life in all of its many facets.

This season asks for gentleness when grief arises. Sit quietly with what rises. You do not always need to be cheerful and productive. Let your memories breathe. Trust that love remembers and it does not end when someone dies.

Settle into the rhythm that love flows forever - do not fear grief or try to hurry it away. Let your tears flow. Tears will subside and they will come again and they will go again. Emotions need attention and a place to flow through. When we attempt to control them by tucking them away to feel at a more convenient time, they can become stuck.

Keep a vigil. Light a candle for the ones you love that are no longer with you physically. Keep them in your memory. Your memory is alive. It moves and breathes when you breathe.

Your loved ones are remembered through you. Love doesn't leave when a person does. It just changes state. It becomes part of the texture, atmosphere, and the light that settles around you and makes it sacred.

Their absence becomes a deep faithful, beautiful, echo and a resonance within you. The warmth behind your ribs, the ache that does not ask to be answered only witnessed.

During the holidays, love remembers and saturates your heart for what once was like the way light appears on the snow gently falling from the sky.

Allow grief to soften into a rhythm of gratitude, a blessing, a heart that is not broken, but opened wide to invite in the light of love that refuses to end.

Amen. Aho. And so it is.