GRIEF + HOLIDAYS = MELTDOWNS?
I found myself in a predicament one Thanksgiving eight years ago. It surprised me. Suddenly my grief (which I thought was under control 1½ years after my wife’s death) re-emerged full force. I escaped to my master closet and sunk down to my knees as full-on sobbing took over. For maybe five minutes I just let it run its course, and then suddenly it was over. While I was shaken by the event, I was able to re-join my family for dinner. The power of that experience has stuck with me ever since.
While I have teared up and/or had sad moments since then… I have not sunk into this type of deep sobbing since then. I still remember, honor, and love my wife, Theresa… but, as many of us find out… life continues.
During Thanksgiving and Christmas during the first year or two after losing your wife, you may also find yourself suddenly breaking down into full sobbing. This can occur without warning and may force you to escape (as I did) to your closet or basement to let it all out.
Even though your life may seem to be settling into a sort of new-normal, these out-of-the-blue regressions can be expected… even welcomed. Why? Because these moments reaffirm your love for your wife. They are a way to remember and honor her at a time when you may feel that you are losing her as your new world fills up with new people, new activities, and new experiences.
But these moments can be unsettling and confusing for us, as well as for those around us. It is normal at Holiday times to feel guilty along with intense loneliness and sadness, because:
you are here, and she is not,
she is missing out on these important days,
the holidays just don’t seem the same without her, and/or
everyone else seems to have moved on with few mentions of her.
So, you have a choice. When you have this experience, do you sink back into deep grieving with self-isolation, grief, fear, and self-doubt? Or do you embrace this event as confirmation of your love for your wife and allow yourself a brief and healthy good cry? If you do the latter, you will quickly find yourself able to rejoin the others in celebration of the holidays.
Experiencing these sudden breakdowns with full-on emotional expression of your grief does NOT mean that you are regressing, or that you are caught in a “complicated grief” cycle that can be hard to escape. It just means that your feelings and emotional security are still somewhat fragile, leaving you open to these sudden ambushes of your psycho-emotional state.
Counter-intuitively you may find that all your worrying about how you will react during the holidays may act as a buffer between you and deep grieving. I have heard from many widowers who told me that they had no problems with their first holiday without her, but were ambushed by it during the second year of holidays… probably in part because they had let their guard down by the second year.
So, don’t look to the coming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s with dread, but rather with the attitude of being ready for anything… knowing that you will survive this and continue to heal.
Good luck my friends.
© Copyright 2025 Fred Colby
All rights reserved
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Fred Colby is the author of:
Widower to Widower - available through most booksellers and libraries.
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