HOW WILL I GET THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS:
TWELVE IDEAS FOR THOSE WHOSE LOVED ONE HAS DIED

1. Accept the likelihood of your pain. Chances are the holidays will be a painful time. The temptation is to bypass them entirely or pretend everything is perfectly normal. There will be painful times, but do not decide in advance that the approaching holidays will necessarily be horrendous.

2. Feel whatever it is you feel, not what others tell you to feel. Feelings like sadness, depression, anxiety, fear, anger, guilt and apathy are common and normal.

3. Express your emotions in your own way. Speak to others, write, read, create, do a project related to your loved one.

4. Plan ahead, to do the best you can with the circumstances you face. Re-look at your plans and traditions, and be creative about the holiday celebrations, so you can be true to the spirit of the season while being honest about the loss you have suffered.

5. Take charge where you can. Change traditions or put them off a year, do them at different times. And choose regular sleep and exercise, not increased alcohol or drugs.

6. Turn to others for support. By allowing others to help you, you can help them. Be straightforward about what you think will assist you and what won't.

7. Be gentle with yourself. Offer yourself the time you need and the kind of time you deserve to do what feels refreshing to you each day.

8. Remember to remember. If you feel up to it this year, you may feel comfort in finding specific ways to link yourself with the one who died, through wearing or carrying something reminding you of the person, or by creating a remembrance area with several things.

9. Search out and count your blessings. As best as you are able, remain open to what you have to appreciate and to what may be given to you during the coming holiday season. Your grief experience is leading you, however slowly and however tentatively to begin to change and to grow. Stay in the present moment.

10. Do something for others. Early in the grief process, the loss feels so overwhelming and the tasks so demanding, your attention may focus almost exclusively on what has happened and how it affects you. Yet after awhile it is helpful to place some of your attention outside yourself.

11. Give voice to your soul. The death you have experienced has exposed you to new realities of living and to new possibilities about what life and death, meaning and purpose are all about. Go deeper. Make room for the expression of your soul.

12. Harbor hope. Will life ever return with the zest you once knew? It takes time, but it happens. It takes effort, but it unfolds. Hope to enlarge as a person, to be strengthened, to integrate this loss into your life, to grow wiser as well as older, to be prepared to face other losses, to find the companionship you need within, to persevere. Hope is a powerful tool.