Fragile Light ⭐️

Navigating Grief During the Holidays

Every year, when the holiday lights start going up and neighbors begin talking about plans and menus and cheerful gatherings, I feel the air shift in a way most people around me don’t notice. For many, this season brings warmth. For me, it brings memories. Sharp ones, tender ones, ones that still echo in my chest after all these years.

The truth is, the holidays hold some of the most difficult moments of my life. Two of the most defining losses I’ve known happened wrapped in tinsel and calendar squares marked with celebration. The holidays, for me, are woven with grief and love so tightly they’re nearly indistinguishable.

This is my story. And maybe, if you're grieving too, it’s a companion for yours.

When the Holidays Are Bookends to Loss

Every Thanksgiving, people ask cheerful questions like, “Are you excited for the holiday?” And I nod, or I smile, or I say something polite, because that’s what people do. But inside, there is always an ache that arrives before the turkey, before the plans, before the grocery lists.

On a day meant for gratitude, I lost my dad. After weeks at his bedside, the hospital sent us home to have a meal, shower, and get some rest. They assured us they would let us know if his condition changed, and they did, just as we were sitting down to give thanks. We made it to the hospital in just enough time to kiss his forehead and say goodbye. I still wonder to this day if he heard me.

It’s strange how time works. The world moves forward year after year, but the holidays have a way of dropping you right back into the moment everything changed. Even though he has been gone from my life, longer than he was a part of it, I can still feel the heaviness of that night, how the world suddenly seemed too quiet in some places and unbearably loud in others. The way other people talked about food and football and traditions while I was learning how to breathe through his absence.

And then, years later, Christmas took on a new shape of loss.

After nine months of intensive caregiving, my mom passed away. On Christmas night, she was more short of breath than usual and asked me to send some text messages of cheer on her behalf. She quietly and slowly whispered messages like “Merry Christmas, I love you,” over the hiss of her oxygen. When she began repeating the same message to everyone she instructed me to text, I realized she was saying her goodbyes.

I slept next to her that night because I was worried she would be too breathless to call out for me if she needed anything. She woke at 4 a.m., slowly lifted herself to sit at the edge of her bed, and declared. “I’m ready”. She asked me to order the hospital bed, an action she had been resisting for months. Forty-eight hours later, she was gone. While the decorations were still up and the world was still wrapped in sparkles and cheer, my mom slipped away.

Two losses.
Two holidays.
Both permanently marked.

Saying Goodbye Over Text: A Strange, Tender Kind of Final Conversation

People don’t quite know what to do with that detail when I share it. It doesn’t fit neatly into their understanding of “normal” end-of-life conversations. It doesn’t look like the movie version of a bedside farewell.

But life isn’t a movie. And death certainly isn’t.

My mom and I had endless conversations over the years, and she shared so many incredible stories as she reflected during her final months. I had the opportunity to tell her what an honor it was to have her as my mother and to have spent those last nine months with her. I said words that felt surreal and yet poured out of me like they had been waiting for that exact moment. I told her everything I needed her to know, everything I hoped she’d carry with her. I thanked her, told her how deeply I loved her, and that I would do it all over again in an instant.

And then there was the contrast of sending a one-line text message goodbye.

There was something strangely sacred about it, sending love and gratitude and farewell into a tiny glowing screen, knowing those words would be the last people heard from her. Writing those messages for her broke my heart open, yet I was strangely proud of her for leaning into a natural process that she had been so very resistant to, for so very long. 

The Weight of Two Empty Chairs

The holidays are full of rituals, some tiny, some grand, but all of them seem to illuminate absence. The chairs at the table. The stockings. The recipes. The inside jokes no one repeats anymore because the person who created them isn’t here to laugh.

Sometimes it feels like I’m walking through December carrying two ghosts.

And then there’s the exhaustion, the emotional labor of bracing myself for the casual, unintentional insensitivity that can come with this time of year:

“Are you coming to the holiday party? You should really get out more.”

“Don’t be sad, it’s Christmas!”

“You must be used to it by now. It’s been years.”

“You can’t spend every holiday thinking about the past.”

As if the past isn’t part of who I am.
As if grief is something you graduate from.
As if loss listens to the calendar.

What I’ve Learned from Holidays I Never Wanted to Redefine

Over the years, I’ve had to create my own way of moving through these seasons. Not around them, through them. Slowly. Messily. With gentleness when possible and quiet self-preservation when it’s not.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s okay to protect your heart.
If I need to skip a gathering or leave early, I do.

It’s okay not to perform cheerfulness.
I don’t owe anyone a festive mood.

It’s okay to honor both of my parents in my own quiet rituals.
A candle. A memory. A moment. A message whispered into the silence.

It’s okay to feel joy, too.
I’ve learned that joy doesn’t betray grief. It simply sits beside it.

It’s okay to still miss them, deeply, sharply, even decades later.
Love doesn’t expire.

I’ve stopped trying to make the holidays feel “normal” again. Instead, I’ve allowed them to become something else, a season of reflection, love, complexity, and honesty. A season where grief doesn’t have to hide.

A Quiet Message to Anyone Mourning During the Holidays

If you, too, are carrying loss through a season that expects celebration, I want to say this gently:

You are not doing it wrong.
You are not being dramatic.
You are not “grieving too much” or “not grieving enough.”
You are a human being navigating days that hold pain and memory and love all at once.

It’s okay if the holidays look different for you.
It’s okay if they always have a bittersweet edge now.
Mine do too.

And in the quiet moments, when the decorations glow softly or the world briefly pauses, maybe you’ll feel what I sometimes feel. Not just the ache of missing them, but the warmth of having loved them so deeply in the first place.

That warmth is a kind of presence, even in the absence, a small light in a season that can feel dim.

And that light, fragile as it is, is often enough to carry me through.