A Second Year Without Dad: Moving On and The Emotions of Traditions.

The scene that got me thinking was in the first week of November.  The usual radio station in Louisville started playing all Christmas music, and I was listening to it.  After I dropped my son off at his high school I drove down one of the picturesque streets in the Louisville Highlands that looked like the Chicago suburb backgrounds of the Home Alone film and other John Hughes movies.  The combined sights and sounds hit me that it was a second holiday season without dad. 

As you live your life without someone no longer there, part of the grief process is you eventually develop acceptance: you find ways of filling the metaphorical hole in your life.   If you are not filling the hole, you are going in other directions so you don’t just keep living in the pain.  

Examples of Not Moving On and Not Accepting

It was a moment of reflection about how I was doing on this one.    In my business, of course I learned from my patients about what it means to fail to accept someone’s death and continue to live in the pain (I’ve changed some details to protect their confidentiality).

The first was a patient I worked with eight years ago who talked about making her whole house a shrine to her deceased son.  The son had a debilitating condition and she was his caretaker for his entire life.   She had pictures of him everywhere.  She came to group reporting she was always crying. She eventually disclosed she had created a shrine that she had been staring at for years.

 A second example of living in the pain was a depressed woman who lost her infant. She admitted that she had continued to sleep with her infant’s ashes. 

 A third example is a guy who put his son to bed and woke up two months later in a hospital.  It turned out that there was a house fire and his son died and he did not know it until he woke up out of a coma.  He continued to use drugs and had several admissions to the hospital.   When talking to him, he stated his continued feel of guilt about surviving.  Even though it was a rental house and the fire was caused by electrical wiring, and there was no logical or rational fault of his in the situation but  he continued to live in the grief years afterwards.

As for me, whenever I still pass by battery-operated sound effect toys in places like World Market, I still think about how Dad would have liked it.  It is only a few seconds to remember that Dad has gone.  Sometimes I am tempted to buy one of the laser sounding toys and play with it for a few minutes in memory of Dad, but it doesn’t otherwise thrill me.   I suppose that I have been moving on pretty well.

Moving On at Christmas and the Challenge of Traditions

As I think about moving on at Christmas and the holidays, I have concluded that it is harder because of the family traditions.  Traditions are habits with a little more significance.  They are symbolic experiences of our relationships and connection.  They tie our shared past to our shared present.  When a loved one (especially who made the tradition happen) has gone, it can start to represent the emptiness or the void in our relationships. 

Changing what traditions mean is very hard because we don’t go at them rationally, but emotionally.  Emotional thinking is automatic, and thus we don’t really think slowly and factually about the holidays.  But, we are very quick as human beings to go immediately to the sad and mad feelings and we sink in the depression of the situation.

So, assuming that you are reading this because you are looking for something and want something, I am not sure what I have anything more to offer you than the following: if you and your family are observing a tradition that otherwise has a painful side to it, try to live in the moment and focus on what it means to your current relationships.

You and I have the power to determine what holiday traditions mean now.  Kept traditions represent our family histories and memories of the loved one or ones with whom we have shared the experience.

However, traditions also bond us now to the people we love and call family now.   If no one else wants to share a particular tradition, it may be an opportunity for acceptance and moving on in the creation of a new holiday tradition.    

As for me, my little nuclear family has developed a few traditions around my 15-year-old’s apathy and resistance to getting away from his computer. We’ll do church and get Domino’s Pizza on Christmas Eve.  We’ll watch one or two movie versions of A Christmas Carol. We will invite others over for a pizza party on New Year’s Eve for the fourth straight year, and we’ll get Chinese food on New Year’s Day.  Those practices are not exactly Christmas-y, but they are traditions at this time of year that bond us.