How Do You Handle Grief At Holiday Time?

• 8 Dec 2013
• The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Donna Raziano is chief medical officer of the Mercy LIFE (Living Independently for Elders) program in Philadelphia.

Handling your grief at holiday time

Q: Why are anxiety, depression, and other mixed emotions so common during holidays?

A: Though most of us look forward to celebrating the holidays, they are often a hard time for anyone who has lost a loved one. Instead of being happy times, the holidays can worsen feelings of grief, sadness, and emptiness.

Bereaved people need to give themselves permission to grieve. Families should acknowledge the loss together — talking about the loved one allows them to keep memories alive. Ignoring your grief won’t make the pain go away. Talking about it in a supportive environment may make you feel better.

The key thing to remember is there is no right or wrong way to celebrate the holidays after the death of a loved one. The best way to cope is to plan ahead, get support from others, and take it easy. Here are more tips:

Be kind to yourself. Handling your emotions may be the only job you can manage right now.

Express your feelings. Cry or rage if needed.

Ask for what you need. Others do not know what you need — like a ride to visit a loved one’s grave — unless you tell them.

Help someone. It gets your attention off yourself.

Appreciate your other loved ones. It’s normal to feel alone in your grief, but don’t isolate yourself.

Resolve how to spend the holidays. There is no perfect solution. The season may be hard no matter what you do.

Celebrate as usual; many people wish to keep traditions intact. But some opt to start new traditions honoring lost loved ones.

Avoid the holidays if they are too hard. Do something new if it makes you feel comfortable.

You will survive the holidays; time is the best healer of grief.

Immortal Longings, Poem by Robert Pinsky

Immortal Longings by Robert Pinsky Inside the silver body Slowing as it banks through veils of cloud We float separately in our seats Like the cells or atoms of one Creature, needs And states of a shuddering god. Under him, a thirsty brilliance. Pulsing or steady, The fixed lights of the city And the flood of carlights coursing Through the grid: Delivery, Arrival, Departure. Whim. Entering And entered. Touching And touched: down The lit boulevards, over the bridges And the river like an arm of night. Book, cigarette. Bathroom. Thirst. Some of us are asleep. We tilt roaring Over the glittering Zodiac of intentions. "Immortal Longings" by Robert Pinsky, from The Figured Wheel. © The Noonday Press, 1996. Reprinted with permission

It's the birthday of poet Robert Pinsky (books by this author), born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1940). He played the saxophone in high school, and he said: "My first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing [...] The fact that it was my breath making a party out of things was miraculous to me, a physical pleasure." His parents wanted him to be an optician like his father, but he chose to go to college, the first person in his family to do so. At Rutgers, he took a class on poetry his freshman year, and he was amazed by "Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats. He said: "It was the speed with which he covered the ground. Wow: 'artifice of eternity'!'' Pinsky typed up "Sailing to Byzantium" and hung it on his dorm room wall, and decided to become a poet himself. He went on to graduate school at Stanford. When he arrived at Stanford, he thought he was quite talented, so he took a bunch of his poems to the poet and critic Yvor Winters and announced that he hoped he would receive credit just for having written them. Instead, Winters read his poems for three minutes and then said, "Well, there may be some gift here, but it's impossible to tell, because you simply don't know how to write." Pinsky begged to be let into one of the professor's courses, but the prerequisite for all the other classes wasn't being offered that term. Winters took pity on Pinsky and offered to take him on as an independent study, and he became Pinsky's mentor at Stanford. Ten years later, Pinsky published his first book of poems,Sadness and Happiness (1975). In 1993, a group of 19 poets, including Pinsky, were each asked to translate a section of Dante's Inferno for a reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Pinsky was so excited by the work that he just kept going, and he ended up publishing The Inferno of Dante: A New Translation in 1995 to great acclaim.He said: "I got hooked on the technical challenge [...] It was more like having an absorbing new video game or sewing pattern or boat-building pattern than a large undertaking. It was like trying to master a song, or working on your jump shot or something. It was not consciously a scholarly or even a literary process: more athletic or musical or puzzle solving: working on a wonderful jigsaw puzzle or sudoku." His books of poetry include The Want Bone (1990), Jersey Rain(2000), and Selected Poems (2011). He said: "I think that if an audience for any art is having a good time, they are willing to suspend the need for comprehension for a while — that's part of the pleasure. [...] And if it doesn't sound good, it is boring even if we understand it. That's the trouble with a lot of boring art: you understand the stupid cop show, or the tedious sitcom gag, too soon and too completely. Same for the stupid middlebrow poem."