Despite the festivities, as the days get colder and the nights get longer, the holidays can be a difficult or stressful time of year.
For better or for worse, the holidays are usually when a lot of core memories with close friends or family members are created—and in times of grief, these memories can bring up complex emotions or exacerbate feelings of loneliness and isolation.
For people who have recently lost a loved one, grief may feel particularly poignant during the holidays—especially if it’s the first time they are celebrating or marking this occasion without that person.
With this in mind, we wanted to share some resources and recommendations to help people navigate grief during the holiday season and beyond.
Grief Resources
Our resources page has a wide range of materials and tools to help with grieving. Here are a few that we wanted to highlight.
- If you need emotional support, you can reach out to a grief or bereavement counsellor, and connect with someone who is trained to help people process grief. You can find links to grief counsellors in the “Grief and Bereavement Support Groups” section on our resources page.
- You can also get help through texts sent straight to your phone with Help Texts, which is a discreet and convenient way to get expert ongoing grief support. While this does not replace therapy, research shows that personalized text support is helpful for 95% of people who sign up for help navigating grief and other life challenges. Get 10% off when you sign up with this link.
- Bereavement support groups are another good option for navigating grief, providing the opportunity to connect and share with others who are going through a difficult time. These groups often focus on various themes, exploring and reflecting on grief’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects.
- If grief is bringing up thoughts of self-harm or suicide, we recommend that you reach out to the Suicide Crisis Helpline at 9-8-8 to talk to someone. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to support you.
Book Recommendations
Reading the stories and reflections of others can help you process and navigate your own experience by making you feel less alone and lost.
Here is a short list of recommendations to get you started:
Love and Salt Air by Lisa Hartley
When her mom passed, Lisa’s grief seemed boundless and all-consuming.
In this raw account of her emotions, she holds the reader close as she stumbles through her mom’s final months and then along a rocky path toward healing.
Her willingness to share her own broken heart and human struggles offers the reader wisdom and permission, saying, “Here, this is what it’s like—and you too will be okay.”
Anam Cara by John O’Donohue
In this revered classic, John O’Donohue explores themes of friendship, belonging, solitude, creativity and imagination, among many others.
Widely recognized for bringing Celtic spirituality into modern dialogue, his unique insights from the ancient world speak with urgency for our need to rediscover the thresholds of the soul.
It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine
In It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound new approach to both the experience of grief and the way we try to help others who have endured tragedy.
Having experienced grief from both sides―as both a therapist and as a woman who witnessed the accidental drowning of her beloved partner―Megan writes with deep insight about the unspoken truths of loss, love, and healing.
The Mourners Dance: What We Do When People Die by Katherine Ashenburg
Inspired by the homemade customs her daughter invented when her fiancé died, this book looks at the rich choreography of mourning rituals and practices through the ages and around the world.
It asks, how do we mourn in the modern world, when so many of the customs that made up the mourner’s dance have disappeared?
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
This powerful book is Didion’s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”
Poetry recommendations:
Poetry can also help you process and connect with all the emotions that might arise while grieving.
Here are some of our favourites:
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing by Kevin Young
In The Art of Losing, editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning.
Poems of Mourning by Peter Washington
Mourning has many forms and moods, and this collection of poems explores them all, from Tennyson’s black grief to Whitman’s radiant melancholy, Hardy’s despair to Rochester’s humour, Sassoon’s anger to Christina Rossetti’s tender resignation.
Emily Dickinson, “I Measure Every Grief I Meet”, “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes”, “I Can Wade Grief” (to name but a few)
Emily Dickinson’s timeless poetry explores and vividly illustrates the feelings of melancholy and pain that grief often brings on.
The Weight of Survival by Tina Biello
In The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello chronicles this upbringing of otherness, of being shaped by two very different communities, of blending identities into one, and what is left behind in the process.
While there is not much that can be done to avoid the powerful feelings of grief, you may find some comfort in the fact that—while grief affects people differently—it is a universal experience that everyone can relate to.
If you are currently mourning a loss, we hope that some of the resources we’ve provided above can help you along your healing journey.
If you would like to receive more resources sent straight to your inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter today.
Take care, and remember: you’re not alone.
