Our friends had been out of the country when my daughter, Jess, died. They couldn’t make the funeral. Easter was the first time we had seen them since January, when she passed.
They had known Jess since she was small. They had watched her grow up. All of our children had grown up together.
What would normally have been a day of catching up turned into something else entirely within minutes of them walking through the door.
They needed to grieve with us but hadn’t had the chance. The funeral had happened without them, and the loss had been sitting there, unaddressed, for ten weeks.
Seeing us made it real.
Their grief triggered mine. My grief reflected back to them.
I have thought about that Easter many times since.
There is a version of holiday grief most people recognize. The empty chair. The tradition continues as normal, except the person who belonged in it isn’t there. That grief is quiet, constant, and private.
But there is another kind. The kind that arrives with your guests.
Holidays bring people together. Some of those people haven’t seen you since the death. They didn’t come to grieve. They came to celebrate.
But the moment they walk through your door, something surfaces. They see your face and they remember. The grief they postponed arrives on a day you were already trying to get through.
You become the occasion for their grief on a day when you were barely managing your own.
The culture has no script for this.
Holidays are scripted for joy. For togetherness. The expectation is that the day will function normally, or close enough. That script doesn’t account for what actually happens in homes like mine on that Easter Sunday.
If you are in early grief today, you may already know what I mean. You have spent weeks or months learning to carry the absence in ordinary days. The holiday does something different. It fills the house with people who knew the person who died. Some of them are still working up to their first conversation with you. Some will cry in ways that surprise them.
You didn’t plan to spend the holiday managing other people’s grief.
And if that day hasn’t come yet, it will. A summer birthday. The first Thanksgiving. Father’s Day with an empty chair and a house full of people who haven’t said anything yet.
Every one of those days carries the potential collision between what the day is supposed to feel like and what it actually feels like when someone is missing.
The empty chair is not the only way grief shows up at the holiday table.
Sometimes it walks in with your guests.
More soon,
John