The First Christmas Without Them

There's a particular quiet that comes about three weeks after a funeral.

The flowers have gone over. The casseroles have stopped arriving. Everyone who flew in has flown home again, and the people who were ringing every day have gone back to their own lives, because that's what people do and it isn't unkind.

In my years as a funeral director, that was the stretch I worried about most. Not the week of the service — families are carried through that. It's afterwards, when the noise stops.

And if someone you love died this year, there's a particular date sitting out there on the calendar that you've probably already thought about more than once.

Why the first one is so hard

Christmas is built out of repetition. The same food, the same people in the same chairs, the same arguments about the same things.

That's exactly what makes it lovely, and exactly what makes it unbearable the first time somebody's missing. Every tradition is a small reminder. The decoration they made. The dish only they cooked. The chair.

There's also the sheer volume of it — the shops, the adverts, the parties, everyone asking if you're ready for Christmas. Grief is quiet work, and December is not a quiet month. Being sad in a season that insists on cheerfulness is its own particular loneliness.

If you've been dreading it since about October, you're not being dramatic. You're being realistic.

You're allowed to change the plan

This is the permission I most want to give you.

You can do Christmas somewhere else. You can go to the beach. You can have it at a different house, or on a different day, or eat something completely different. You can accept the invitation from the friend who always hosts and let someone else carry it this year.

Doing it differently is not disloyal. For a lot of families, a change of scene is the only thing that makes the day survivable — and nobody who loved that person would want the date to become something you dread every year for the rest of your life.

And you're equally allowed to keep it exactly the same

Some families find enormous comfort in doing every single thing the way it's always been done. The same table, the same terrible crackers, the same route to the same beach.

That's not denial. It's continuity, and continuity can be a kind of shelter.

There is no correct answer here. There's only what your family can manage this year — and you're allowed to decide differently next year.

Decide early, and tell people

Whatever you choose, make the decision before December and let everybody know.

The worst version of this is the one where nobody wants to raise it, so it goes unmentioned until the twenty-third, and then everybody is trying to negotiate something enormous while exhausted and upset.

One phone call or one group message, early: this is what we're doing this year, and it's fine if it's different next year. It takes ten minutes and it saves a great deal.

And if people offer to host or help — let them. They're usually desperate to do something useful and have no idea what to offer.

Make a place for them

Almost every family I've worked with finds some comfort in building the person into the day on purpose, rather than hoping nobody mentions them.

A candle lit at the start of the meal. Their decoration, hung first. Their dish on the table, even if nobody makes it as well. A short toast before you eat. A walk to a place they loved, after lunch, for whoever wants to come.

Keep it small and keep it brief — a minute or two, early in the day. It gives everyone somewhere to put the feeling, and it quietly settles the question of whether it's all right to say their name. It is. Say it often.

Let the children in

Children tend to be far more straightforward about this than adults, and they often take the lead beautifully if you let them.

They'll want to hang the decoration. They'll say the person's name cheerfully in the middle of lunch and then ask for more ham. That isn't callousness — it's children doing grief the way children do it, in short bursts between normal things.

Follow them. They're frequently better at it than we are.

The day itself is often not the worst part

Something families tell me again and again: the lead-up is harder than the day.

The anticipation, the shops, the writing of cards, the moment you go to buy their present out of pure habit. By the time Christmas Day actually arrives, you're usually busy and surrounded by people, and it passes more gently than you feared.

Watch out for the days after, though. The twenty-sixth, the flat week between Christmas and New Year, New Year's Eve with its insistence that you look forward. Those catch people out. Put something small in the diary for that week — a friend, a walk, anything that isn't an empty house.

Give yourself an exit

Before the day, decide how you'll leave if you need to.

Drive yourself. Pick a bedroom you can disappear to for ten minutes. Agree a signal with one person who'll notice and make your excuses without a fuss.

Most people never use it. But knowing it's there makes the whole day easier to walk into.

If it's not your grief — if it's your friend's

If you're reading this because someone you care about is facing their first Christmas, here is the most useful thing I know:

Say the person's name.

The great fear of the bereaved is not that someone will mention them and cause upset. It's that everyone will tiptoe around it and the person will quietly disappear from the conversation. "I've been thinking about your mum this week" is one of the kindest sentences in the language.

Then do something specific. Not "let me know if you need anything" — that puts the work on them. Say I'm dropping off a ham on the 23rd, or I'm taking you for a coffee on the 27th, and then actually turn up.

And remember them in January, when everyone else has moved on.

Be gentle with yourself

You don't have to do Christmas well this year. You only have to get through it.

Whatever you manage — a full table, or toast at four in the afternoon in front of the cricket — that's enough. There's no standard to meet, and the people who love you aren't marking you on it.

If you'd like to mark the year with something more deliberate, a memorial gathering in the new year can be a gentle thing — a chance to gather the people who loved them without the weight of the funeral, once the hardest months have passed. I help Waikato families with these across Morrinsville, Hamilton, Cambridge, Matamata and beyond, and there's never any hurry about it.

If this is your first Christmas without someone, I'm thinking of you. Be kind to yourself, and let the people around you help.

With aroha,

Kathryn