On Christmas, and bereavement

The first time you have to celebrate — no, ‘celebrate’ — the holidays after the death of someone you love is probably awful. Awful! The first Christmas after my dad died, I would rather have taken a piece of rough-grade sandpaper and rubbed it hard across my face than have participated in seasonal cheer. And my dad was Jewish!

But we’d always celebrated Christmas together as a family, in our funny peculiar interfaith secular way, and as such the prospect of Christmas, the arrival of the holiday season, the communal jolliness, felt like an endurance challenge, not a pleasure. On Christmas Eve and the day itself I spent a lot of my time texting a friend who had also lost his father — a couple years ahead of me in the grieving process, so I guess he was having a less shit time? — and trying, alongside my mother, not to do too much crying. We watched HBO GO, using the password of a sympathetic, kind friend. We went to the cinema. I made a pavlova for dessert and exacerbated a yoga injury in my neck so badly with violent, emotional egg-white whipping that I had to go to many sessions of physical therapy in the new year to fix it. No kidding!

The light of the dawn of the 26th was immense: we could return to the world again and not have to go through any more motions. We had a really nice day, ate some leftovers, went for a walk, went to the main branch of the New York Public Library — I took a photo of my mom standing by one of the grand elegant lions. In the photo she looks happy and relieved, like someone who made it to the summit and down a treacherous mountain.

I’m writing this to tell you: it is OK to be dreading Christmas. It is OK for it to be a terrible time and it is OK for you to feel the best when it it over. I’m writing this because I would have liked to read this, about this time last year.