How to Show Up for a Griever During the Holidays
Be present, patient, practical, and persistent
By Meghan Riordan Jarvis
There is a powerful half-truth about the holidays—that they bring family and friends together in joyful celebration. Of course, that’s the case for many people. But for others, the holiday season can be a stark inventory of losses, and grief for people who helped create all that joy in the first place.
As a young therapist, I was trained to start asking clients about their feelings toward the holidays as soon as I saw the first red leaf fall from a tree. I often made a note to myself so I’d remember. These days, I don’t need a reminder. There is a bittersweet thread of deep loss that runs through the cloth of my Thanksgiving table and spools around my own Christmas tree every year.
The 2023 holiday season will mark six years without my dad and four without my mother. Although I’d been a grief and loss therapist for decades when they died, my own experience of grief taught me some deeper truths about how to really show up for grievers, particularly around the holidays.
Presence matters. Be present for your griever. Call or show up immediately. You won’t make it worse. Support offered quickly can interrupt more complicated trauma responses.
Four years ago, I was standing alone in a parking lot when I learned my mother died. I always say I was alone because that is how it felt. But in truth, I’d stepped out of a minivan where my kids were playing Pokémon and tried to make sense of the words my husband was choking down the phone from my mother’s house, where he’d just discovered her.
An invisible version of me crumpled to the ground, just like actors do in the movies. There was also the version that immediately called my siblings. “It’s my fault,” I whispered to each of my brothers and sisters. I knew my mother had been ill. She had minimized it, but so had I.
“It’s not,” they said. They will always love me more than they blame me.
When I finally hung up, I was completely disoriented by the noise and traffic that surrounded me. I had no idea how to move forward.
Suddenly, the phone in my hand rang.
It was my friend Sarah. She already knew I was trapped in the rubble of my former life. She explained three times that my husband had called her, but everything seemed nonsensical. Suddenly my mind narrowed, and I understood that Sarah was calling to help me.
“Bring your kids to me,” she said through tears. I got in the car, and I drove straight to her. I couldn’t look her in the eye as the kids piled onto her lawn and into plans for a rainy-day movie. She signaled she understood it all by squeezing my hand hard. I felt the pressure of her presence for hours. In fact, I can still feel it.
Be patient. Witness, validate, and listen. Don’t try to fix things. Your loved one is growing into a griever. Your opinion isn’t needed, just your patience and belief.
After the movie and police and the funeral home had come and gone, Sarah came to find me. Grief had me pacing like a caged tiger.
“Let’s take a walk.” It was an instruction, not a suggestion. Sarah is a therapist.
I made it ten paces before I doubled over. She put her hand on my back. Again, I was grateful for pressure and touch.
“I need you to let me say this,” I said desperately. “I need you not to try and talk me out of it.” Sarah nodded solemnly as tears streamed down my face. She let me say what I couldn’t stop thinking. “It’s my fault she died.”
Sarah looked me in the eye. It felt as though she was buckling me into a safety harness with her steady gaze.
“I won’t try to take that from you,” she said, “but I am sorry you have to feel that way.” Her voice was full of compassion.
Sarah didn’t try to talk me out of my panicked and distorted thinking. She didn’t insist on logic. She didn’t speak with pity or condescension from the distant perch of a person with an intact life. She let me be as I was and did not insist otherwise.
Be practical. Find something hard and take it off your griever’s shoulders. Do it immediately.
Three hours after my mother was discovered dead, my childhood best friend, Maia, strode into the house and wrapped me in a tight hug. She asked me for my mother’s address and appointment books. It didn’t occur to me to ask why. I was making impossible phone calls to friends and family. My memory flits through Maia handing me countless glasses of water, one half and then another of a sandwich, and a fresh box of tissues she’d brought from her own house. Hours later, after she was gone, I passed by the kitchen counter where I found multicolored Post-It notes scattered like confetti across my mother’s planner. The words “Notified of death” was written in Maia’s angled lettering, and dozens of names—my mother’s doctors, hairdresser, lawn crew—were written underneath.
In under two hours, Maia performed a secretarial task that had taken hours of pain and tedium off my plate. When I asked her how she’d thought of it, she told me she’d called a friend whose mother had died a year earlier and asked, “What was the task you wish someone had done for you?” Then she came to my house and she did it for me, which has to be the best kind of love there is.
Be persistent. Remember your griever’s pain. Ask about it. Talk about their lost loved ones. Include their name around the table and in your celebrations.
The early days of grief are incredibly difficult, physically and emotionally. The central nervous system—the brain and the spine—are trying to stay in good communication, but the impact of the loss often means that the superhighway of messaging from the brain to the body can be easily obstructed. The body’s twelve systems (digestive, endocrine, cardiovascular, and muscular, to name a few) can all be significantly impacted. Grievers suffer a plethora of troubling symptoms, like brain fog, memory loss, disassociation, distractibility, and disrupted sleep. After my mother died, I accidentally threw my credit card away so many times that the company refused to send me another.
As the brain learns a new way forward, grief symptoms begin to stabilize, and the challenge becomes how to live in a world that no longer includes your loved one. Grievers begin to look and seem more like we remember, so we begin to treat them like their “old selves.” The world goes on, and their support system goes back to their everyday lives. Grievers don’t have this option, of course, and instead have to find their way into a new life.
Instead of feeling part of the celebration, grievers feels alienated on anniversaries, birthdays, random Tuesdays, and—perhaps most acutely—holidays. This type of loneliness can never be fixed. But it can be noticed and validated.
Ask your griever about their feelings directly, even if it has been a while. Tell them a story about their loved one. Share pictures and ask others to do the same. Grievers don’t want to steal the shine of a celebration by mentioning the pain they carry, but they appreciate being asked. If they don’t want to talk about it, they won’t. If they do, it will feel like someone sliding over to open up a seat on the subway after a long day of standing.
The holidays are a time for love and connection. Make sure to reach out to those who carry pain and remind them that joy is not a prerequisite for being included in the festivities.
Last year a friend sent me a crochet angel for my tree.
“I remember your mom loved this sort of thing,” she said.
It will have a place on my tree this year, and every year from now on.
Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a podcast host (Grief Is My Side Hustle), two-time TEDx Speaker, and psychotherapist specializing in trauma, grief, and loss. After experiencing PTSD following the deaths of both of her parents, Jarvis founded Talking Point Partners to help employers address complex emotions such as grief in the workplace. Jarvis is currently at work on Can Anyone Tell Me Why: 25 Essential Questions About Grief and Loss, which publishes with Sounds True Media in 2024. Originally from New England, Jarvis currently lives in Maryland with her husband and their three children, where competing piles of LEGO bricks and books cover most surfaces of their house. Jarvis’ debut memoir, End of the Hour, is out now.