Give Time Time: Surviving the holidays Part II of III
Dear Reader,
I have gotten the wise advice: give time time and often thought: what the hell does that even mean? This week I have done some exploring to share the practical ways that adage works in my grieving.
In our ever-grasping culture we try to stuff, rush, avoid, and undermine our emotions. Grief is top of the list to be squashed and conquered. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s culturally imbedded five stages of grief have offered us a way to measure our progress and feign control over the complicated tapestry of emotions by overlaying expectations on a timeline. In reality, I’ve grieved in a field riddled with those five campsites along with others, stumbling from one to another and back again, never sure into which camp I’d awake. In her late-in-life work On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross concedes, “I now know that the purpose of my life is more than these stages….I have loved and lost, and I am so much more than five stages. And so are you.”
Harvard researcher Erich Lindemann coined the term ‘grief work’ in the 1940s while studying trauma survivors (notably, survivors and family of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire). In Lindemann’s findings, typical grief includes floods of somatic distress (including difficulty breathing, weakness, loss of appetite, exhaustion, tension, mental pain, restlessness…), hostility towards friends and family, a desire to isolate, and a preoccupation with images of the deceased.
Through Lindemann’s lens, expectations that we will be joyful, fun, and celebratory partygoers, guests or companions during the holidays seems nearly impossible. Traditions and obligations may be out of reach for us. We must be gentle with ourselves by being willing to recognize limitations.
Take Breaks
If you need a moment away from joy-filled party when you feel sad, or a breather from a stressful family situation when you feel overwhelmed or angry, don’t hesitate – do what you need to care for yourself immediately. It is 100% okay to do so. Here are a few things I’ve done to catch my breath:
Taking a walk
Stepping into another room
Offering to run an errand (alone)
Asking for privacy to write in a journal for an hour
Say No.
Your emotional, physical and psychic energy might have more limitations this year. Saying “no” is perfectly okay. Connect with your gut feeling; don’t say “yes” to invitations or celebrations that feel overwhelming. Accept invites or obligations only as you have the energy and the desire to do so.
Make your “yeses” tentative — let hosts, family, friends know you’ll try to attend, but it just might not be possible. Take on your usual obligations (decorating, cards, baking) only as they bring you some pleasure or distractionand let them go if they feel too big.
Keeping up traditions
It may seem tempting to slip into the psychic shoes of your lost one: This washer favorite holiday so I have to go at it with all my enthusiasm. It’s not your responsibility to carry on traditions that are too emotionally burdensome right now. December 2018 you can reconsider baking the mince pie.
Giving time time is permission to be gentle with your sweet self. Martha Whitmore Hickman sums it up beautifully:
“Our life runs in seasons, as does our grief. Some seasons are long and some short. But if we are resolute in our efforts to be present to the moment, even as we know this moment will give way to another, we can be assured at these times of renewed pain that things will get better.”
Wishing you each gentle care,
Kiddo
