Holiday Nostalgia: Joy & Grief

We celebrate most holidays to the tune of two "Eves" around my house. Birthday Eve Eve, New Year's Eve Eve, and this week -- Christmas Eve Eve. It's like a tiny personal holiday to get some extra celebration in before the official day.

But today's eve-squared is salted with nostalgia and loss. Today's the anniversary of my father's funeral, 12 years ago. Today I'll dance around the kitchen, wrap presents, and deliver banana bread to the neighbors with Mom and Megan in our reindeer antlers. But I'll also step away for a quiet moment to remember my dad. To enjoy him, and to miss him. And even to grieve his loss.

Here he is with my brother, sister, and tiny me back in 1987.

I know I'm not alone in having a mixture of sweet and salty emotions this time of year.

Whatever our losses and pains — old or new — the holidays can press them into us, demanding attention. We all need a healthy way to show up to our losses without casting our joys and victories in a pessimistic light. A way to deal wholeheartedly with our heavy feelings. To resolve or validate them, making room to receive other emotions too.

Emotional Vibrance and Grief

We talk about Emotional Vibrance a lot at Wild + Brave. It's our way of actively working to receive the information and energy packed inside of each emotion that arrives in our lives. If we don't have adequate emotional responsiveness, our lives can become deserts of burnout and discouragement. Even our negative emotions contribute to our emotional health and well being.

Negative emotions like anger, resentment, grief, jealousy, and sadness are powerful allies. They help us show up to our lives, to stop waiting for change. Without negative emotions, we wouldn't wake up to moments of urgent action or build a better future.

Grief's Purpose

Grief has a unique job in our lives: it's here to remind us of what is precious. Life, time, the humans nearby are urgently valuable...but their importance can be hard to keep in focus when life's petty urgencies gobble our attention. Even small griefs can wake us up to what matters and help us to let the petty stuff go.

Grief also holds onto the meaning of a person or an intangible after it has been lost. In some ways, good memories alone don't do justice to the losses we have.

Grief also reminds us of the vulnerable, tenuous hold we have on life, on the lives of others, and on the things we have given our hearts to. It's like Oliver Burkeman points out in Four Thousand Weeks; our lives:

“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”

We don't talk often about life's brevity. We react with anger for those whose lives were cut too short. Like my dad, someone I'd hoped to spend decades more with. But say we'd had the decades I expected, rather than losing him "early." When would the point of "enough days with my Dad" have come?

Never is when.

That's why grief helps us be more wise in valuing the loves and hopes still in our lives.

The grief we feel over one loss is a gift to us. If we let it, grief will confer preciousness back onto the things that are vulnerable to being taken for granted. It can restore our ability to treasure the things and people that busyness makes us treat lightly.

Grief over one thing lost makes me tread with more care in the remaining opportunities of my life.

Grief on Repeat

One of the reasons grief often fails in its purpose in our lives is because it can seem to be stuck on repeat. Emotional Vibrance means receiving an emotion when it arrives by giving it attention, taking appropriate action, and sending it on its way...and then re-receiving it when it comes around again. Even wholeheartedly processing grief in one season of life doesn't mean you will have "resolved" the loss.

Grief is one of those emotions which wants to be paid in installments, but that's because each grief has a lifetime subscription of preciousness it can confer on our lives. With each payment of wholehearted engagement, grief brings a new wave of meaning into life.

Letting Grief Help Us Engage in Life

I'm grateful to have so many incredible memories with my dad. It feels like he made the most of those early days with us. Dad planned to use his "retirement" time while we were little and knew it would mean working in his older years. He knew he would regret missing time with us while we were small.

He didn't even know how short his years were when he made that decision. He wanted to have no regrets, and his choices in turn gave me fewer regrets. I didn't have to miss him in the first phase of life, and it is a great comfort me as I navigate the middle of my own life without him.

As I go into the new year, I'm letting the wisdom grief brings to tune me into the preciousness of what really matters. I'm letting grief help me hit the reset button on busywork, petty frustrations, and striving for meaningless metrics.

In the new year, I'm making sure my metrics match what really matters to me, and they help me show up to the beauty today offers.

What would happen if we could receive the beauty of today, be freed to release false urgencies, and live with a growing sense of the preciousness of the people and opportunities in our lives?

What would happen if we could take joy in today's paperwork, housework, childcare, and learning because we give were awake to the precious thread of meaning inside of it?

If grief, sadness, or regret are part of your holiday emotion set, make sure to let those heavy emotions do their job. Let them bring home to you more of the meaning that remains in your life. Let them boost your satisfaction in your work, patience in your loves, and the ability to savor this moment wholeheartedly.

And let them comfort you with the truth; that even when we lose someone, we don't simply forget them. Holding on to them in a wholehearted way deepens our ability to experience joy for the rest of our lives.