The December I’ll Refuse to Perform Joy
About Grieving When Everyone Tries to Be Cheerful
Quick announcement: I think I’ve finally found a structure for The Creative Cure that feels in alignment (for now 🤣): A weekly mix of personal experiences that people (hopefully) find relatable, insight into my work as a psychotherapist for creatives that people will (hopefully) find helpful, and poems/short stories people will (hopefully) enjoy because they are inspired by the former two. If you’d rather not get the fictional works, you can toggle them off via your settings:
And what comes next is one of those experiences. I guess it’s a fairly universal one…
My father-in-law died three days ago.
Three days are not nearly long enough for any of it to feel quite real yet. We’re still in that strange liminal space where you keep forgetting and then remembering, where your brain hasn’t caught up to what your body already knows.
He died on November 30th. Now it’s December 3rd, and many of the people around me are insisting on “Christmas is coming”.
When December Demands Joy
The Christmas playlists started in shops weeks ago. Mariah Carey’s voice follows you down every aisle, belting about what she wants for Christmas. Some employees already wear Christmas accessories.
My inbox is full of subject lines about “holiday magic” and “gift ideas” and “spreading cheer.”
The entire world has shifted into a key of (sometimes aggressive) merriment, but our family is stuck in a completely different song.
“You should still celebrate Christmas. Life goes on. That’s what he would have wanted.”
“Try to find some joy in the season. Focus on family and being together.”
We are focusing on family. We’re focusing on getting through each day, also for our daughter. Also for my mother-in-law who is old and overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. She was with him for 60 years. That’s basically a lifetime. So think unspeakable grief mixed with utter helplessness regarding next steps. She is hard of hearing, so phone calls are sometimes not easy. Online forms? Forget it. Talking to relatives? “Errr, I’d rather not, you do it, son.” So it’s mostly my husband who is doing it while also mourning the loss of his father. And as everyone who ever had to function while dealing with loss will know: It’s a lot.
We are focusing on the fact that his dad’s spot on the sofa is empty and will be empty forever, not just this Christmas but every Christmas from now on.
But that’s not the kind of “focusing on family” many people mean. Some are rather thinking of what I like to call “the Hallmark version”. The version with presents and matching pyjamas and Christmas dinners and everyone gathered around the tree looking grateful and “intact”.
Grief is fine, but please keep it away from the holiday cheer. Process your loss, but do it quietly, and somewhere that doesn’t interfere with everyone else’s festive plans (which I totally understand because that is a valid feeling). And definitely not on December 25th, because that’s the day we’ve all agreed to be happy.
Some of our Christmas decorations are up. I organised a pop-up tree this year, funnily enough for a completely different reason: I’d hurt my back weeks ago and I’m still healing, so I didn’t want to bend and stretch while decorating. But there’s very little joy in getting the house “Christmas-ready” this year. Meanwhile, the Christmas decorations are appearing in our neighbourhood like mushrooms: Lights on every house. Inflatable Santas. Those projection thingies that make fake snow fall on garage doors.
Is Everything Okay?
What’s the right answer to that? No, everything is not okay I guess because grief doesn’t wait politely until Christmas is over. It doesn’t care about timing. It doesn’t care that it’s inconvenient. It doesn’t care that everyone else has holiday parties to attend and gifts to wrap and matching family photos to take.
We’re supposed to be making plans for Christmas, but we can’t see past next week, yet the world keeps spinning on its festive axis. The emails keep coming. The music keeps playing. The lights keep blinking.
I’m not going to pretend we’re “okay” or “fine”. I’m not going to show up at holiday parties with a smile painted on. I sort of did that on the very day he died. For my daughter, knowing it was coming because he’d been in hospice and deteriorating rapidly, because she had been looking forward to her school’s Christmas Fair. That was enough performance.
When people ask what our Christmas plans are, I’m going to tell them the truth: I don’t know because it’s not really on top of my list of priorities. We might find some happy moments if they come naturally. We might not. Or it might be a bit of both, which is the most likely outcome I guess.
I know this will make some people uncomfortable. But someone else’s discomfort is not necessarily my responsibility. Not this year anyway.
What This December Actually Is For Me
This December is not about joy for me. It’s about getting through the next day. It’s about answering the same questions over and over: what happened, how is his wife doing, what can we do to help. It’s about writing thank-you notes for the flowers and the cards that say things like, “He’s in a better place now,” which may be true but doesn’t make this place, the place without him, any less empty.
It’s about watching my daughter grieve her papa while I try to grieve with her and for her and sometimes despite her, because grief is so private even when it’s shared.
It’s about the often painful practical tasks that death requires: Sorting through belongings and paperwork.
And all of it is happening against a backdrop of jingle bells and holiday sales I’m trying to block out.
December is always somewhat exhausting, but this year, especially so. It’s the month we have to get through to reach some other side that we can’t see yet and aren’t even sure exists. Well, I know it exists because I’ve been here before with my mum, but my daughter hasn’t (this is her first loss of a loved one).
This December, there will be no performance of joy. And the psychotherapist in me also wants to say this to anyone who is, ever was or will be in this place at some point:
We don’t need anyone’s permission to grieve how we grieve. But we should claim it anyway and state it clearly:
We are allowed to dislike December, for ANY reason. This year or always.
We are allowed to resent every Christmas song and every twinkling light and every cheerful “Happy Holidays!” while also having moments of enjoying them. That old chestnut of, “Two things can be true”.
We are allowed to skip parties, decline invitations, ignore other people’s expectations.
We are allowed to let this month pass, just waiting for it to end.
Sometimes, Christmas truly is optional. Joy is not mandatory and cannot be forced, no matter what the calendar says. And this year, this December, three days after death, I am giving myself permission to simply get through it and let moments of joy happen if they are happy accidents…
If you would like to listen to a read-aloud version of this post, you can do this here:
Hi Petra,
We went through this very thing 2 years ago, December 7. Thinking of you.
Petra, I’m so very sorry for your family‘s loss.
I’m also sorry for the well-meaning but very poorly applied platitudes you have (already??) received.
I wish you well in your not performing and just being inhabitance of the liminal space this December. I know that you already know this, but I wish you a smooth enough pathway in inhabiting the grief and the joy in all of the ways that it may manifest in these next weeks