Everyone has arrived. Food is being passed. Someone tells the story they tell every year, and we laugh because we know where it is going. Yet something feels out of reach. Perhaps it is the ease we used to feel in this room, or the person we thought we would be by now. We look around, trying to locate what is missing, and find no empty chair. Sometimes the holiday table is full and we are still aware of an absence.
There have been a lot of changes in my life. Some have involved explicit losses, the kinds I can name without much explanation. Others have been more implicit, harder to separate from the ordinary acts of living. I am still trying to understand what some of them have meant. I can describe what happened, explain why it happened, and recognize what needed to change. And then I have to live in the space those changes have made.
This is the grief I want to give more room to this season. The friendship that still exists but no longer offers the same closeness. The work we care about that no longer feels capable of caring for us. The family member we keep hoping will ask a different question. Sometimes what hurts is how long we have kept setting a place for an experience that never quite arrives.
Even the changes we welcome can carry loss. Becoming more capable may mean noticing how much others now expect from us. Finding our voice may change where we belong. We can feel proud of the person we are becoming and miss the ease, real or imagined, of who we were before. That ache can be difficult to admit when everyone around us is congratulating us on “how far we have come!”
Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss gives language to losses whose boundaries remain uncertain, including relationships in which someone is physically present but psychologically absent. Her work challenges the expectation that grief must end in closure. Not every quiet loss fits that definition, of course. Still, I find something useful in making room for what remains in dissonance. We may know that a relationship has changed while continuing to hope, every time our phone buzzes, that it will feel familiar again.
These losses also extend beyond our private lives. The election and the ICE raids in Minneapolis at the beginning of this year have affected our community, our friends, and our families. The City’s assessment documented residents afraid to leave home, with consequences for attending school, going to work, and seeking medical care. The public story enters ordinary life. A familiar street can begin to feel different. Plans acquire qualifications. The question of whether someone is coming to dinner may carry concerns it did not carry before.
I think about the people we love here, across the United States, and around the world, whose lives are touched by political decisions and upheaval. We cannot always distinguish our own grief from our fear for them. We may be mourning a sense of safety, of confidence in institutions we wanted to, needed to trust. Some people never had the security others are only now discovering they could lose. The consequences are unequal, even when the worry travels between us.
The holidays can make that uncertainty especially sharp. We are asked to celebrate continuity while feeling how precarious it is. There are groceries to buy and messages to answer, and somewhere underneath the planning is the question of what kind of world we are making for one another, with one another. We may keep moving because there is work to do. We may also keep moving because stopping would mean noticing how disconnected, frightened, or disappointed we have become.
I know how readily I turn toward understanding, intellect, and wit. Many people I work with are very smart, thoughtful, caring people who do the same. We can trace a feeling through family history, name the social conditions around it, and explain our own reactions with considerable precision. Certainly, that ability matters. It can help us find choices where we previously felt trapped. But sometimes I notice that I have explained a feeling so thoroughly that I assume I have also felt it. That others can feel it too.
This intellectualization, using abstraction or excessive intellectual activity, creates distance from our embodied reality. I recognize how ordinary it can look and feel. I can offer a thoughtful account of disappointment while avoiding the plain sentence underneath it: I wanted this to be different. I can understand another person’s limitations and still struggle to admit how much I wanted them to show up for me.
Of course it is difficult to sit there with that pain and suffering.
Understanding gives me something to do. Feeling may leave me with a tight throat, an ache behind my ribs, and no useful next sentence. There may be anger that feels ungenerous, longing that feels embarrassing, or sadness I cannot defend as proportionate. I can start arguing with myself before the tears have even arrived. Other people have it worse. I chose this. I should have known. As though a sufficiently persuasive objection could make the hurt withdraw.
I think of famed existential psychotherapist, someone I deeply admire, Irvin Yalom and his wife, the scholar and writer Marilyn Yalom, in A Matter of Death and Life. In the preface, they describe decades of reading and editing each other’s work. Facing Marilyn’s terminal illness, they turn toward writing together. Yet they also revisit Irvin’s idea that having fewer regrets can ease death anxiety: their deeply valued life together does not remove the pain of bodily decline or anticipated separation.
In the opening chapter, Irvin moves between reflections on mortality, philosophical ideas, and mornings spent holding Marilyn’s hand in their backyard. Thought and tenderness share the page. Much of what they write makes sense to me intellectually. But having felt some of the grief and uncertainty they describe, I recognize something in their voices before I can explain it. Their words are invaluable, and part of their meaning lives in the longing, tenderness, and strain they carry. Their lives, identities, and circumstances are profoundly different from my own. Still, I recognize the wish for understanding to make something hurt less, and the difficulty of discovering its limits. Perhaps acceptance is part of what they are learning together, and what Irv must continue learning alone: how to live with the pain that remains, even when so much of it makes sense.
Acceptance is an invitation to become more honest about what I am asking my mind to accomplish. I can know why a chapter of my life needed to end and feel bereft when I reach for its familiar routines. I can recognize that a hoped-for future was uncertain all along and still mourn the mornings I had already imagined inside it. There is no contradiction to solve before I am permitted to be sad.
Sometimes sitting with that sadness might mean letting a sentence remain unfinished. Someone asks how we are, and we resist producing the polished version and just say: “I’m ok.” We say that we miss how something felt. We admit that we are tired of being adaptable. There may be silence afterward, and it may be, rightfully, uncomfortable. We do not have to rescue the conversation.
I do not want to turn feeling into another assignment to complete ‘correctly.’ Some days we can approach what hurts; other days we need to cook, work, or watch something ridiculous. We can step away and return.
Nor should we have to feel everything alone.
A person who stays curious without demanding a concrete, relatable explanation can make it easier to say something we have been circling for months.
There is beauty in that kind of company. Someone remembers what this time of year brings up for us or they can intuit from what we do not say. A friend notices that we have gone quiet and comes to sit nearby. We begin explaining, lose the thread, and discover that they are willing to stay anyway. For people accustomed to being articulate, there can be a startling tenderness in being cared for while we cannot quite find the words.
I want room for that beauty without asking it to justify the pain, the suffering. Neighbors caring for one another does not make the fear that brought them together acceptable. A new relationship does not cancel the loss of an old one. We can value what is growing while remaining angry about what was damaged. I do not think gratitude requires us to revise the past into something kinder than it was.
Perhaps this holiday season can hold a little more of the unfinished. We might set down the effort to make our lives sound coherent for an evening. We can acknowledge the changes we chose, the ones we never wanted, and the losses we are only beginning to recognize. Someone may understand. Someone may need help understanding. We can start with what we actually know: something has changed, and I am still feeling my way through it.
The room may look much as it did last year. The same dishes, the same early darkness beyond the windows. But we have brought another year of living into it. I want to notice the warmth of the person beside me without hurrying past the ache. To let a laugh come when it comes, and tears when they come. For a moment, perhaps, to be here without needing to explain myself out of anything.
Texts I mentioned above:
A Matter of Death and Life by Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-matter-of-death-and-life-irvin-d-yalom/19cd54581873ed04?ean=9781503632585
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss
https://bookshop.org/p/books/ambiguous-loss-learning-to-live-with-unresolved-grief-pauline-boss/321466ad316e984a
