THE EMPTY CHAIR AT HOLIDAY TIME
We just changed the clocks this last weekend, and now the darkened early evenings of November remind us that we are approaching Thanksgiving, and during the fourth week after that, the days of Hanukkah begin and we celebrate Christmas. When Halloween had not even taken place last week, I thought I heard a few bars of December’s holiday music wafting my way in a store. It struck me again that this is always a poignant, sometimes a suffering time of year for those who have lost a loved one to death, or for those who are caring for one whose death is imminent. And our hearts go out to these individuals in a very special way, because the calendar forces them to pass these cultural and religious annual yearly markers and endure the memories that surge forth and almost overwhelm even those who thought they had worked through their grief and sorrow, or their anticipatory grief.
I have always been moved by the words of Rev. Phillips Brooks in a carol that is sung in Christian churches each year, for they so beautifully capture the poignancy and impact of coming once again to a time of huge remembrance: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” The holidays we celebrate in November and then again in December have usually been centered on families getting or being together in joyful, but sometimes ambivalent ways. Memories of these occasions stack up year upon year. We are forced once again to take a look at what relationships have been for us, whether nourishing, indifferent or even painful. It’s like we have to, once a year, open our mental closets and take out (or examine) the contents of the relationships we have formed over many years, just as we physically bring out the huge turkey platters, the Menorahs, the lights and decorations for the Christmas trees.
My own baby brother died four days before Christmas in 1935 in Los Angeles Children’s Hospital from an inoperable brain tumor. The doctor in charge was away at the time of his death, buying Christmas cards. So overcome with grief was my mother, that in bitterness over the doctor’s absence, for a dozen or more years afterwards, she refused to send Christmas cards. And there were no grief support groups or even a social worker around who could assist my parents to come to some kind of working through the expected grief and sense of loss. One of my nephews reported that in talking to his grandparents, if the name of the dead child was ever mentioned, decades later my parents would begin to weep. This is but one example of how a death and the coming and going of holidays can cast shadows that last for a lifetime. But it does not need to be so!
First off, those who grieve can seek support from family, friends, social workers and bereavement support groups, the latter being especially important when family and friends are themselves having to deal with the loss and grief surrounding a loved one’s death. It might be well to anticipate that the holidays may prove especially lonely and sad, and seek out support in anticipation of sorrowful feelings overwhelming one. I just wrote for my own church newsletter that in the coming weeks, a nearby bereavement support group would welcome those who are finding the coming of holidays very saddening. Cliff and I hope that local residents will take advantage of trained bereavement facilitators providing a safe, confidential space where people sharing similar burdens of loss can “talk out” their grief and find it to be so what the old truism says, “Joys are doubled in the sharing and griefs are halved.”
In anticipation of holiday get-togethers, it might be well to visualize that there will be “an empty chair,” then to sit with that image awhile and let oneself experience the tears that may come. Avoidance measures will not work. Try working through the sense of emptiness, gently, gradually accepting its reality. Begin to think, “I cannot erase this loss, but I can lessen its impact by putting into play something new.” Initiate a new tradition surrounding holiday celebrations. And get others to help you think what that might be. And if remembrance of the dead is to be honored, that might become part of the new tradition too. It could be a toast to the departed family member, or a favorite song sung, or a favorite poem recited. All of this is by way of saying, “Yes. You are gone from our midst, dear one, but you live on in memory and in our hearts, and we shall never forget you!” Why else do we find ourselves singing, year after year, these words that touch something deep inside us?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o’ auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
Well tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
As I am seventy-seven and have seen many a Christmastide, I have developed my own unique solitary Christmas Eve tradition. It began when I was fifteen and five hundred miles from loved ones with whom I had spent all previous very happy holidays that I could remember. I ran a visual recording in my memory of all the Christmases up to then, and somehow that brought great comfort. In all the ensuing years since, and it takes a longer time now to “look back and re-create” each Christmas scene, I have repeated this practice. When each year’s stack of Christmas cards often brings news of the death of a family member or long-time friend, it is comforting to remember what Charles Dickens calls, “The Ghost of Christmas Past.”
Many find solace visiting the gravesite of their loved ones during the holidays. Thus we used to pass a San Fernando Valley cemetery dotted with tiny Christmas trees, all decorated and lovingly placed there by family survivors. In our own family, we have gone more than once to the resting-place of my precious foster parents. My foster mother loved Christmastime most of all times of the year. In her Hollywood apartment, a card table went up in early November on which presents began to be beautifully wrapped. Christmas cards went out early and incoming cards were received with daily delight. To honor her memory after her death, over many years, Cliff and I would provide anonymously a Christmas dinner, all the trimmings, to some family who could not afford turkey or ham and all the goodies that go with that main dish. In the years when we lived in a University town, we often invited to dinner a foreign student, very far from home on Christmas Day. Such gestures, though small in scope, help to fill up the empty space one feels in one’s heart after losing a beloved person, and being reminded again of the loss at holiday time.
So here Cliff and I wish you a gentle, tender holiday season in the days to come. And we thank John White Chadwick for saying it so beautifully in his poem, The Abiding Love:
It singeth low in every heart,
We hear it each and all—
A song of those who answer not,
However we may call;
They throng the silence of the breast,
We see them as of yore—
The kind, the brave, the sweet,
Who walk with us no more.