Traditions? We don't need no stinkin traditions.

 

People will tell you to make new traditions after the loss of a loved one. Make new traditions and carry your loved one with you as you make them. But something about that just seems wrong. It feels like you are accepting your loved one’s death, and that feels like you are letting death win. So instead, we dig in our heels and hold onto every memory we can, and we sit in it. We breathe in our memories so deeply that it feels like they fill every cavity of our being. We are so afraid of losing our memories, losing what we have left, that we let the memories envelop us. But the problem with this, the problem with allowing the past to fill our being, is that it weighs us down. It can weigh us down to the point of paralysis. To the point where we physically can’t move. We can't move forward, we can't move past it, we can't breathe. If healing were a living, breathing thing, it wouldn’t survive here because it would have no oxygen. 

How do we give oxygen to healing? How do we let healing live? How do we move forward without feeling like we let death win? Referring back to the stages of grief, I guess we need to move towards acceptance. Our loved one is no longer with us in the way we once knew. Moving forward doesn’t mean we forget our loved one or we let them go.  It means that we agree to try to live in our new life.  We try to allow a little space for healing.  We agree to try to give a little oxygen to healing.

So how do we move forward with our traditions while making room for healing? Maybe we start small. Find a small new tradition or even an old tradition and tweak it, or, if you are so bold, keep a tradition going in the absence of your loved one. My mom used to buy my family new pajamas every Christmas. It was a tradition she started with me from birth. We would open the pajamas on Christmas Eve and wear them on Christmas morning. So, this year, as my first Christmas without my mom approached, I decided to tweak the tradition. I bought new pajamas for my family and we wore them throughout the Christmas season. Replicating the tradition was overwhelming, but tweaking the tradition was not only manageable, but actually enjoyable.  

There is a level of readiness that accompanies acceptance to make way for healing.  Maybe you are there, maybe you are nowhere close.  Maybe you don’t even know where you stand. I think I am there sometimes and certainly not others. When I journal, I mean what I write. But sometimes, when I go back to edit, I think “ohhhh I am definitely not there right now!” But in the words of an old friend, “it's all good”. We need to meet our grief where it is and take it one day at a time, keep our faith, put one foot in front of the other, and ride one wave at a time.