Your holiday grief is right on time
With the holidays fast approaching, it is not uncommon for me to be on the receiving end of so many conversations with friends, colleagues, investors, and family, discussing the topic of grief over the holiday season. This year has been a particularly difficult one for those who have experienced loss, as funerals have not been conducted as they used to be. In addition to the grief that is being experienced, those who are having funerals this year are feeling isolated and less supported as they trudge through the experience with limited support in the way of physical contact due to all of the COVID restrictions.
In addition to my work as a real estate entrepreneur, I also hold a license in the province of Ontario as a funeral director. For nearly a decade I spent the majority of my waking hours sitting across from grieving families, listening to their stories of love (and sometimes not love), life, and loss. While almost every family displays grief during this time of transition, the feelings are amplified during holiday seasons. I too, was one of those individuals, who, back in 2005 lost my father, six days after his cancer diagnosis, and three weeks before Christmas. I was alone in the hospital with him when he died. After multiple phone calls my family began arriving one by one. My aunt came in, and said “Oh, Kelly, I’m so sorry.” I immediately burst into tears and out of all of the possible concerns I could have had at that moment I blurted out “I bought my Dad slippers for Christmas!! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH THE SLIPPERS????”.
As a Western society, we are generally grief-a-phobic and death denying. We continually trick ourselves into believing “it won’t happen to me and nobody close to me ever will die.” We have even attempted to trick ourselves into believing that there are predictable and mapped out “stages” of grief – which, for the record, couldn’t be further from the truth.
Over the last decade of working in the death care industry I have also deluded myself into believing that I was grief-proof. The continued exposure in a way, led to some kind of systematic desensitization. Death didn’t scare me, the idea of dying did not scare me, and in fact, as a death-care professional, I eventually came to a place where my own relationship with death and the dead became quite intimate. This year, the year of the great COVID 19 Pandemic, my grief-proof belief system was proven wrong.
Fifteen years ago, my dad died. At the ripe age of 22, I was the executor of his estate, and upon his death I was left with two siblings to look after. My dad at no point, left any instructions as to what was to happen in terms of a final resting place. He indicated that he wanted to be cremated, but nothing more. At the time, my siblings were 19 and 16 years old. And believe me when I tell you they were in no shape to enter into a conversation about how to dispose of Dad’s cremated remains. My aunt graciously offered to take my Dad’s urn to her home and ensure it’s safe keeping until we had come to a decision.
This year, my aunt and I decided that it was “time” to finally lay things to rest. We made arrangements for my father to be shipped to me from her home in the U.S. back to Canada. For several days I used the tracking number to track his transit. On the day he was supposed to arrive, he didn’t, and the next day, he didn’t, and the day after that, still no Dad. Truthfully, I began to panic, calling postal offices and repeatedly being told “due to COVID there are delays in the postage system”.
Four days after the anticipated delivery date, I was backing out of my driveway, when I saw a box sitting on my front porch that read in big bold letters “CREMATED HUMAN REMAINS.” I immediately pulled back into the driveway, hopped out of my van and grabbed the box, holding it tightly and brought my dad into my house. The whole world went into slow motion as I walked into the kitchen and placed the heavy box onto the counter. I opened it carefully and saw the red velvet bag I remembered so clearly from the day we left the funeral home. I pulled his urn out, walked into my living room, sat on the couch with him and sobbed for a solid two hours, clutching his remnant closely. After I had pulled myself together, I was shocked that I had such an emotional response, especially given that it had been 15 years since my Dad’s death.
Wiping tears, I went back to the shipping box and began to pull out some personal effects that had also been with my dad’s urn. A pair of glasses, and his watch. I began to cry again and while examining the watch I noted that the battery was dead; presumably for the same amount of time as my dad. I noted that the hands on the watch stopped ticking at 1:52pm. I placed everything on the counter and took a deep breath. I looked up and noted the time on the stove and it read 1:52pm. I did a double take, paused and then I laughed out loud while holding his watch in my hand. The likelihood that a dead watch and the actual time would ever read the exact same time at the exact moment I picked it up was probably something like one in 10 billion. My dad had never been on time for a single event in his entire life, so it made a lot of sense to me that he had, according to me, arrived four days late. But according to him, he was right on time.
Grief is like that. I have spent the last 14 Christmases without my dad, and on this 15th Christmas without him, it will be my last one with him, and I’m still crying. All of that to say, wherever you are, and whatever kind of loss you’re experiencing, there is no “time limit” or “stage of grief” you should or shouldn’t be at. Love doesn’t end when someone in our life dies, and grief doesn’t end after a certain number of stages. So as the holiday season approaches, if you’re grieving the loss of someone who’s left recently or long ago, be gentle on yourself and remember that wherever you are in the process, you’re very much on time. And for those of you who are wondering, I kept the slippers – I think I’ll put them with him at his final resting place this spring.
Much Love,
KC.