Abi is a doubly bereaved mother, and converted to Christianity in her youth, after being brought up in a Jewish household. She’s a teacher, retreat leader, and author. She runs the Living With Loss project, which began in 2016, which offers retreats and workshops to bereaved people.
Abi also keeps leaflets up to date for The Compassionate Friends, including the one titled, ‘Coping with Christmas and Other Seasonal Events’.
Dreading December? Can’t face Christmas? No idea how you are going to manage your grief in the face of all the baubles and cheer? We’re here to try to help you through. Listen to Abi May and Debbie discuss the difficulties of seasonal festivities and suggest a few things that just might help.
Living With Loss is Abi’s webpage with details of the retreats and workshops on offer
The Compassionate Friends leaflets Coping with Special Occasions and Coping with Christmas and Other Seasonal Events
Winston’s Wish Coping with Christmas blog 2023
Untangle Grief’s guide to coping at Christmas (do check the accuracy of the events listed by downloading the app)
Christmas Day Helplines
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NO-HO-HO – SURVIVNG CHRISTMAS
[00:00:00]
Debie Enever, Host
Abi May, Guest
Hello, this is the Bereaved Parents Club podcast. It’s the club none of us want to be members of, but here we are. My name is Debbie and I’m a bereaved parent. This podcast is for all of us to share and celebrate the stories of our children and offer support to each other. Each episode will explore topics that have relevance to us as we navigate the world as bereaved parents.
Whether your loss was last week, last month, last year, or even last century, you are welcome here. And whether your child was a baby, a youngster, a teenager, an adult, or even a parent themselves, you are welcome here. Please be aware that each episode will deal with themes of death and loss.[00:01:00]
It’s that time of year. A switch is thrown and suddenly the glare of the festive season is everywhere. On TV, on the radio, in almost every shop, cafe and pub. Schools, churches, offices. It’s almost impossible to escape the shiny, twinkly lights of the season. For many bereaved parents, these festivities bring the hardest challenges of the year.
Today, we’ll be looking at how to survive the season. And although we’ll mainly focus on Christmas, much of what we’ll explore is relevant to other significant events that occur around this time, such as Diwali, or Hanukkah, or those that take place at other times of the year, such as Eid. Our guest is Abi May.
Abi is a doubly bereaved mother, and converted to Christianity in her youth, after being brought up in a Jewish household. She’s a teacher, retreat leader, and author. She runs the Living With Loss project, which began in 2016, which offers retreats and workshops to bereaved [00:02:00] people. Abi also keeps leaflets up to date for The Compassionate Friends, including the one titled, ‘Coping with Christmas and Other Seasonal Events’.
Abi, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you, Debbie, and thank you so much for having me and for giving me this opportunity to talk about my children.
Yes.
And that’s one of the, um, most important things for me in my bereavement and in my life now. So, um, I’d like to tell you a bit about them.
My son, Pax, was born in 1979. And it turned out that he had a blood condition that was little understood in those days. And he died in 1982. It’s a long time ago. That’s 42 years ago. He was only three. He was a lovely little boy, very quiet, very meek. And I miss him desperately. I think that’s one thing to say to people who are listening who have been bereaved of a child – we are [00:03:00] grieving for our children for as long as we live. And they’re always a part of us, and we honour their memories.
When Pax died, I had one other child, Catherine. She was the younger of the two. And I didn’t actually know how to grieve Pax. I was quite young. I was in my early twenties. And the church I was a part of, and my first husband at the time, didn’t really support me in my grief.
And I thought I wasn’t really supposed to grieve, because I was supposed to be a person of faith. So I took my grief and I pushed it down, I suppressed it, and for years and years I would never talk about Pax, because if I did I would just start weeping. So I would just hold that grief inside, and that’s something I deeply regret.
As the years went by, Catherine grew up and sadly, she was a lovely girl, that’s not sadly, she was a lovely beautiful young woman, and she was smart, she was kind to other people, but she did suffer from mental illness. [00:04:00] And we had quite a difficult decade for her, in and out of mental health care. And she died by suicide in 2011.
She was 30 years of age. And when Catherine died, she was, um, even though some people said, ‘well, you could have known it was going to happen’, she had tried to take her life before. It still was a shock, and it’s still, to be honest, at this point now, 13 years onwards, it still doesn’t feel real, in many respects.
It’s hard to imagine she’s gone. Losing Catherine was, seemed like the end of my life. And to be frank, I thought it was, and in many ways I wanted it to be. I could not see a way forward. I had no more children. And I really did love my children. I do love my children. When Catherine died, my grief exploded.
The grief that I’d held inside for Pax all those years came out. I was grieving for Catherine. I was [00:05:00] grieving for Pax. I was grieving for both of them. I was grieving for the future that I would never have. I was grieving for the fact I would never have grandchildren. And it just seemed like the end of my life.
I couldn’t see a way forward. And I was in quite a, I was in quite a state. I was really in a desperate state. A few things were very different after Catherine died. I had a lot of memories of Catherine. For Pax, he was only three. The memories were limited, and they are now, a long time ago. For Catherine, I had a lot of memories to, to think through, to process.
Because of her difficulties, I sometimes had a hard time remembering happy memories. It took me a while to find those happy memories again. She loved to cook. She made a big mess when she cooked. She loved her bike. She’d go for, um, spin classes. She’d had her own life. She lived in her own house down in Dudley and she would go down to the gym. She didn’t like to walk back [00:06:00] up to the hill to her house, so she’d get on the phone, and she’d talk with me, like, whenever I was doing that, I would always answer the phone, and she would, um, chat with me, and she would kind of, we would just chat about this and that, we could talk for hours, I don’t know what we used to talk about, but we could talk for hours, so she, we’d talk all the way up the hill, she’d be walking up the hill, as soon as she got home, she’d say, bye mom, and hang up, that was just kind of, It was really nice, nice to remember that.
She’d call me first thing in the morning. She’d be sitting on the front step of the house, having a smoke, just kind of having a smoke and having a coffee. She’d just chat while the cigarette lasted kind of thing. So those are good memories.
I’d say to bereaved parents that sometimes if your child has had a difficult life, sometimes it’s hard to find those good memories, but those are things to cherish.
There was a few things that helped me survive this incredible grief, because it was incredible grief. One thing was I was remarried and I have a very kind, um, husband. And he was very, he was the stepfather for Catherine. He’s a very [00:07:00] kind man, he is a kind man, so please think about him as you listen to this as he’s going through a battle with cancer.
I also found support, I found The Compassionate Friends, I found other bereaved parents, talking with other bereaved parents was really eye opening for me because I hadn’t realized other people would go through this horrendous grief, the horrendous guilt. I also, um, had counselling with a local charity that did grief counselling.
They do normally six sessions. I ended up going for counselling for two years, I had a lot to unpack. Um, I’ve been a Christian as, as you mentioned in the introduction. I didn’t find my faith helped me, just to mention. At the beginning my faith was in such a confused place. And that’s a whole other story, as I had to kind of re find a way.
My faith is important to me, but it’s really changed. And I found that I needed to walk in a more spiritual path rather than a religious path.
On the subject of the festive season, I have to say [00:08:00] that that first Christmas, Catherine died in April. And that first Christmas without any surviving children was really, really hard. And I was always quite Christmassy. I enjoyed Christmas. Catherine didn’t always spend Christmas with us as a young adult, but that first Christmas was difficult. And I could probably tell you in a few minutes a bit more about how I got through it.
Well, thank you so much for sharing that story. Um, it’s lovely to hear about Catherine. Uh, it’s always nice to have those happy memories shared. I think that’s one of the joys of speaking to other bereaved parents as well, is not just that we share the sadness, but that we can talk quite freely and openly and joyfully about our children too, and people want to hear. Uh, so that’s lovely. Thank you very much for that, Abi.
That does move us on then to paying some attention to our topic today, uh, which is the festive season and coping with it. This episode is going to go [00:09:00] out on Halloween, which in itself has become this huge kind of childhood celebration now which brings its own particular traditions and memories for people.
But tomorrow, all the pumpkins will turn into Christmas baubles and the whole festive thing just absolutely kicks up a notch. So, how do we survive it when it’s intrinsically tied up with family times and childhood? Abi, perhaps we start by considering, you know, how you coped with Christmases?
Yes, thank you. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to, where to put myself. I can’t actually remember. I was trying to remember that very first Christmas. I don’t know what I did, but I know that I was miserable. Pretty sure I kind of, I have a little summer house in the garden. I think I sat out there and lit candles and cried because that seemed to be basically what I was doing that, that first year.
I think the next year, I’m not sure a hundred percent which year it was. I decided I had to find a way through, that it wasn’t going to change. Christmas was never going to be the same. There [00:10:00] had to be a way. For myself, I found that I needed to think about other people. So in my town of Stoke, there’s a church that runs a big meal that they, on Christmas morning, they pack up packages.
It’s like for the elderly, the homeless, the underprivileged. So, um, we’d go to that church early on Christmas morning. We’d help with packaging, packaging up like gift bags. They would help with serving this meal and just sit around and talk to the people that came. And that became our go to Christmas for about 10 years.
It just took up Christmas Day. It was a focus. There was usually lots of other volunteers there. It seems a lot of people want to do something for Christmas. Other times we kind of got into making people gifts for Christmas. There was a homeless project where they would make the backpacks. People that were homeless, you’d kind of get a pack and you’d kind of gather things.
It would be distributed and it was, um, we did a pink one. Backpack and a blue backpack, one for Catherine, one for Pax. I always have to do [00:11:00] things for both of my children individually. And then my husband was helping at a homeless feeding a couple of months later, and a girl walked in wearing the backpack that we put together in Catherine’s memory.
So things like that. I do like going to, I do like the music of Christmas. So I would go to church for like songs. I found the songs very emotional. And they would get to the songs about the angels in heaven and I would just start weeping and weeping. But that was okay. And that was allowing myself to feel a bit of joy, but also allowing myself to express the grief I felt at that time.
It’s 13 years now, so I’ve gone through quite a few Christmases. I usually do like a little project. I create something. I do like people, art project or something creative. Um, I have a double grave. Pax is buried in India, but I have kind of a double gravestone where Catherine’s buried. So I’ll go there on Christmas. Sometimes I’ll have a little drink. And I’ll often kind of play Christmas carols on my phone. I’ll put some kind of [00:12:00] little ornaments or a little reindeer. And I kind of try and include them in the, in the celebrations. And there’s a few graves along, there’s another grave for a young woman. And parents come and they actually keep a bottle, a bottle at the gravestone.
I’ve met them and they’ll kind of come because they live nearby. They’ll come and have a little drink with their daughter kind of every day during Christmas. So it’s nice to see other parents kind of do what other people might consider a little bit crazy. But it’s including our children in this very painful time.
It is painful to miss our children, but there are kind of ways through. Some Christmases it’s gone well, sometimes it’s been really more difficult. Sometimes it depends on other things that are happening. Sometimes the visitors, if we have a lot of visitors, sometimes that’s been difficult for me, because they start talking about the children, which is very nice, but on Christmas particularly, I find that more difficult. But sometimes you kind of grin and bear it. [00:13:00] Sometimes you take your grief, kind of take it inside, and sometimes you let it out.
I think that’s it. I think what’s useful for people listening is to realize that. There isn’t necessarily one way that you end up dealing with Christmas, and even when you try and impose some sort of new traditions or new things to do, those can be changed because of things like a pandemic, other family members having other commitments, you know, people’s lives change around you, so every Christmas can feel differently, both in terms of what’s going on with other people, but also what’s going on with yourself and your grief, depending on what’s going on in your life.
I know for me, the first Christmas was actually really not that bad. Um, I think possibly because I was still in shock, and I still had my parents, and we had Christmas together, and I insisted on us doing all the kind of fairly normal things of having silly hats and crackers and music and Christmas dinner, and it was all really quite lovely.
Whereas the second year, by which time I’d also lost my mum [00:14:00] as well as my only son, it was just me and Dad, and that was horrific. Because we were very, very aware of the empty chairs around the table. So it’s going to be different every year. There are some things that you might know work for you that you can perhaps try and impose every year.
And there are other things that you’re going to have to be more flexible about because the Christmas bandwagon will keep rolling on regardless of how you feel.
Yeah. In my interactions with other people, um, through my living, the Living With Loss project, meeting many other bereaved parents, I’ve seen that it seems to help to have some kind of an idea of what you want to do. It’s going to happen. I mean, one of the things about Christmas, and there are the other festivals, there’s Hanukkah, there’s Diwali, but one of the things about Christmas, it’s so much in your face. You just, you can’t escape it. So there’s a few kind of little tricks to maybe try and make it feel not so overwhelming.
Well, one things, um, still kind of when you’re watching TV, sometimes I’ll stop watching live [00:15:00] TV, sometimes it helps to kind of switch to kind of streaming services. So you don’t have to kind of watch the ads, those emotional ads, you know, the John Lewis ads, all those ads that come out, they just kind of make you more emotional.
Those films, the emotional, all of the families coming home for Christmas, for many, um, parents bereaved, that can just be triggering, can just be more difficult. So being kind to yourself and avoiding the things that make you feel a bit worse.
Some parents talk about they try and go away for Christmas, try and get away from the normal environment. That seems to have kind of pros and cons because it could be that going away, um, you’re in a different environment. But often, even in other countries, they still acknowledge Christmas and they kind of acknowledge it for the kind of, the Westerners that come on holiday. So you may not be escaping Christmas, and sometimes the disadvantage is that you don’t have the kind of security of home or your friends and family close by.
I think another [00:16:00] thing is just doing what feels right to you, even with things like Christmas cards. Like some bereaved parents, they just don’t want to bother with Christmas cards. It’s a bother. Yeah. So, if you don’t feel like, there’s no law that says you have to send Christmas cards. On the other hand, sometimes it’s kind of nice to hear from people you haven’t heard from in a while, so maybe you do want to send a card.
Some parents kind of manage it by then acknowledging their child. They say, you know, love, ‘love from me and remembering so and so’. They kind of include their child in, in the celebration in that way. So those are some, some things that some parents have found helpful.
Sometimes it’s the lead up. The countdown is on now for Christmas. Sometimes we can kind of get anxious how we’re going to feel on the day. And sometimes in that anxiety, it actually amplifies it. But it is just another day. And I know some parents, they just kind of tune out. You know, maybe they don’t go to Christmas parties. They don’t go to celebrations. [00:17:00] They just kind of tune out.
You know, maybe they do a DIY project. It’s a bit like New Year’s Eve. I remember the first New Year’s Eve. I was actually more upset about New Year’s Eve now I recall, because it was, I was moving to a new year without Catherine. I was going to be the first year when I had no living children. Catherine was gone. I was really anxious about New Year’s Eve. I, I painted the bathroom. I got out a pot of paint. And I just did decorating, home decorating. Um, because I just needed something to get me through that time without the focus on, you know, the, you know, the normal TV, etc. So, sometimes having a bit of a plan can help.
But sometimes also not getting over anxious. It is a day, it will pass.
I think that’s it. One of my theories is that because we don’t have Christmas every day, we don’t develop this kind of resilience to it. We all have our hard days and we’re generally exposed to them a bit [00:18:00] more. So if, if Christmas happened every Sunday, for example, we’d get used to it, you know, we’d develop a bit of a thick skin around what we do on Sundays to manage that, but it comes around once a year and has this huge kind of impact to it, so we don’t develop the resilience to cope with it.
But I think if we treat it like we would do one of our other hard days, then, then that can be a way of managing it. So if on one of those hard days or ‘days you can’t dodge’, as one of my friends would say, if what you would normally do is go for a walk or turn off the telly or, catch up with a friend if you can, then try and replicate those things as far as you possibly can.
That can be helpful too, doing something that’s familiar and good to you. One of the things that I did before we started to chat was to look at some of the comments that people had posted on social media pages around last Christmas. That was other bereaved parents posting on bereaved parents groups to see the [00:19:00] kind of things that were coming up that people were concerned about.
So I thought maybe we could have a little look at some of those and just talk around how people have been feeling and what they might be able to do?
One of the things, I think the first one was, somebody mentioned, ‘I’ve never felt so alone in a room full of people’. I think that idea of having to go and socialize with work or with family or some other occasion that you’ve not been able to escape from can be really overwhelming and you can feel very alone.
And when I’m in a healthy place, I will sometimes think, okay, this is three hours of my life. What would Dan do? And I use my son as inspiration, and that means that I try and be as nice, and kind, and funny, and tolerant as he would have been in that scenario, so sometimes I use him as a bit of a guide. At other times, I might just stay for a very short period of time and excuse myself, because yes, you can feel incredibly alone when you’re surrounded by people all having a good time, or appearing to have a [00:20:00] good time.
Yeah. And I think if you’ve got anybody that you can confide in, whether it’s a friend, whether your a partner, whether it’s a family member, somebody at the really kind of difficult moments that you can even, even if they’re not there at this event, that you can step out and just pick up the phone and say, ‘look, I’m really having a hard time’ just to know that somebody will acknowledge your pain.
Another strategy method of getting through those moments is just simply to leave. We’re under no obligation. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we have family members that we need to be with. But often in these other kind of work situations, just stepping out can help.
There are helplines. And personally, and I know other people have found it really valuable to have somebody you can just pick up the phone and talk to a helpline, whether it’s Samaritans, Compassionate Friends, there’s all kinds of helplines open around this time of year, just to have somebody that can be a witness to the pain that you’re [00:21:00] going through, and not to feel completely alone, because you’re not.
Absolutely, and we’ll make sure that links to those numbers and those web pages are on our episode listing. I think one of the things that you mentioned earlier that, um, a lot of people do, one person mentioned visiting the grave on Christmas Day. Now, I have to say, the cemetery is always very busy on Christmas Day, it would seem, there’s a lot of visiting goes on there.
What I enjoy, if that’s the right word, is going up in early December, with my Christmas tree, and my baubles, and my portable speaker, and my son is buried, well, his ashes are buried, uh, in a grave, which is next to the plot for my mum and dad as well, so I have a family gathering at that point, there’s me, mum, dad, and Dan.
And now don’t tell anyone, but I’ve also sprinkled the ashes from the dog there as well. Um, so so we’re all there and it’s our family gathering and I put the music on and I decorate the tree. We get the tunes [00:22:00] on. I fill them in about what’s going on. I tell them what plans I’ve got for Christmas and I have a really lovely time, which I know sounds really weird, but I feel so satisfied because that is almost like my bit of Christmas with my family.
And I feel quite lucky that they’re all together there in that one spot. Uh, and I say hello to all the other people that are buried around as well. And it feels quite nice and quite festive, which is very strange, but I really enjoy it. And it takes me away from being there on Christmas Day. I don’t go on Christmas Day because I find that too overwhelming, particularly when there are a lot of other people around.
So it’s just an alternative to go at a quieter time and perhaps enjoy that bit of peace and that catch up with that person too.
I think that’s just lovely. And I can just picture you there, Debbie, kind of rocking out with the music. I think you, you brought up a really important point there about allowing ourselves to actually, to feel a bit of happiness, allowing ourselves to enjoy life again. I think it’s a real big hurdle as a bereaved parent, [00:23:00] because sometimes we do feel guilty and we miss our child so much, but there can be moments of happiness, moments of peace during our everyday life, and even also at Christmas, like maybe, we’ve talked about kind of like the pain of Christmas, but, if we go, like, maybe we enjoy Christmas carols, and we go to a carol service, and we enjoy it, maybe we can enjoy meeting up with friends. Maybe we’ll enjoy some film on the TV. To allow ourselves moments of happiness, I think, is really, is really important, and I think it’s a really beautiful thing that, well, we can do that.
Absolutely. Because a lot of the messages that were on the, social media groups were obviously from, from people who weren’t coping terribly well at Christmas and were feeling overwhelmed, were feeling the loss, feeling the crying, not wanting to do Christmas, having to put a mask on to get through the day.
And those are the tough Christmases, there is no two ways about that. They are the tough Christmases, they are when [00:24:00] we need the helplines, when we need those people around us who perhaps can take over if we’re not coping. For me, I didn’t have another child, so I didn’t have to manage somebody else’s expectations around Christmas.
And I, I find that hard to imagine how to cope with being positive and upbeat for another child in the family when you are not feeling remotely cheerful or happy, uh, about things. So, that tension must be very difficult to bear.
Yes, and it must be. To have other, whether it’s other children or even elderly family members or people you’re caring for who are relying on you. They’re expecting, there are expectations. But sometimes we do put on a mask. Sometimes we go through the motions. Sometimes that’s just what needs to be done. Sometimes we do need to put up a tree. Sometimes we do need to put up decorations. Not because we feel like it, but it’s because of our love for them.[00:25:00]
I think one of the things to realize. Like for me now, I’ve been bereaved for decades, 40 years since I’ve been bereaved of Pax, is that the way we feel it does change and sometimes we go through the motions because it has to be done for the sake of other people. But then as the years go by, we may find it easier to cope.
We’ll look back and say, well, yes, I wasn’t happy those Christmases. It was really hard, but I’m glad I did it for them.
Yeah, I think that’s a really important thing to remember why you’re putting that mask on and who you’re doing it for. Untangle are another organization that did a really good guide around Christmas and kind of good things that you can do. And they do talk about sort of looking after yourself at Christmas, which I know you’ve touched on as well.
And that can be things like limiting alcohol. So on the one hand I might say look whatever gets you through but on the other hand [00:26:00] if it’s making you feel worse then you know, maybe not but it might also be things about remembering your loved one and doing things slightly differently and making new traditions.
I think all those things sort of come in together that actually you might want to do something now that’s different that honours your child that you might not have done before. That might be lighting candles, decorating a special bauble, serving their favourite food. Or buying something that they would have loved and giving it to somebody who might really need it.
So there are a lot of ways to help yourself feel better by perhaps doing things for other people and honouring your child as well.
Yeah. There’s a balance to be found, I think, in our daily living. That’s one of the hard things about living with grief is that we need to have time when we remember our child. We need to keep them in the conversation of our lives. We want to do things to keep their memory alive. And then we, another side of [00:27:00] this balance is we need to take care of ourselves, do the things that bring us life, the things that keep us breathing, the things that physically we need for our health sake, for our mental health sake.
And then we have the people in our lives that we care about that also need our care and attention. I think everyday living as a bereaved parent, it’s kind of, there’s this, it can be a bit of a conflict sometimes, having enough emotional bandwidth, enough physical strength to care for our child’s memory, to care for ourselves, and to care for the people and our responsibilities.
Maybe we’re going to work, et cetera. Those needs that we have to fulfill on a daily basis are amplified in the festive season. So finding that balance. Taking care of ourselves, taking care of our children’s memory, taking care of the people in our, in our life circle. It’s always going to be a difficult balance and sometimes we’ll get it [00:28:00] right and sometimes we won’t.
I think the self care, you mentioned, um, alcohol, there’s other substances that can feel like they give us some relief but they tend to not in the long run. Sometimes we, we try something one year and we find it helps us through. And then another year we find it’s not the right thing. Again, there’s the, there’s the buildup, there’s the day, and then there’s kind of the aftermath.
One thing about Christmas, it’s a whole season. It’s like Boxing Day, and there’s all these days off work. Finding ways to occupy ourselves, to bring us some joy. Kind of day by day, giving ourselves, thinking, thinking about that, like, okay, three legs on like a three legged stool. We’ve got one leg remembering, one leg taking care of ourselves. One leg taking care of people in our circle. If we can find time for each on every day, we’ll be doing well. We won’t always do it. Some days, maybe the focus needs to be on family members. Maybe [00:29:00] some days we focus on our memories. Sometimes we just sit there with a cup of hot chocolate watching a film that we enjoy.
And it’s kind of our time. It’s just, we will find that balance. And not to kind of beat ourselves up that we haven’t done it just right, like, oh, I wanted to go to the grave, but I couldn’t face it. Or I wanted to go see granny, but I couldn’t face it. Don’t beat ourselves up. We’re all doing the best we can. That’s all we can do. We do the best we can every day of our lives. We do the best we can on these special days too. That’s all we can do.
One of the things that a lot of churches will do, Christmas being, at least nominally, a Christian festival, as well as, you know, a big Santa event, are the memorial services, and also hospitals might do that too, something that anyone can access, and it doesn’t matter, they might say it’s for anyone who’s passed away in the last 12 months, they’re not going to turn you away, if your loss was much longer ago [00:30:00] than that, and those can be neutral events to go to because they’re not family bound. There’s somewhere where you can go and have a moment of reflection, whether you’re religious or not. They offer a lovely space, a very non judgmental space for you to go along.
Yes.
That was just something that I wanted to mention.
Light up a life. A lot of hospices do it. And again, you don’t have to have been bereaved. And your child doesn’t have to have died at the hospice. They’re usually open to anybody to go. And you can have a little candle that you like, or a flashlight that you light up, and it can be quite meaningful.
In terms of staying peaceful and positive, keeping things low key and stress free is probably the big key for, for, for surviving Christmas, particularly if we were the kind of upbeat people who loved Christmas and did all the organizing for friends and family beforehand, there’s a huge weight of expectation there too. But there’s absolutely nothing to stop us stepping away [00:31:00] and doing something very low key and very stress free by doing the minimum that’s required and no more.
It won’t matter and we’ll look back and probably feel quite grateful that we did that for ourselves as well.
Yeah, this is part of being kind to ourselves, making things easier on ourselves. I mean, the shops are just crazy in the lead up to Christmas. So we can do an online shop, have your Tesco delivered to the door and avoid, avoid that kind of mad rush of, of the shops.
Finding things that are easier. Some people like to eat out. Personally, I don’t like to eat out around Christmas time because it’s also kind of festive families, but there’s no reason we can’t get a takeaway. You know, there’s, there’s, um, things that we can do to try and make it kind of, like you’re saying Debbie, it’s very well expressed, kind of keeping it low key, making it easier for ourselves, and, you know, keeping our expectations realistic, what are we able to do?
And if we were the person that organized everything and did the big Christmas [00:32:00] meal, just being able to be honest and say, I can’t do it this year, this isn’t the right year for me doing it. If we’d been in a kind of a major car accident and we were injured, nobody would expect us to kind of do all the big Christmas celebrations and do the invitations, the cards and the big meal. They’d say, okay, you’re recovering from this major accident or major illness, you know, somebody else will come. We’ll carry it this year. So we have gone through a major, major trauma, the loss of our child, the death of our child. So we need to speak up and say, look, I’m traumatized, I’m not in the right space. Somebody else needs to do it.
Um, I think one of the things I was thinking about was the difficulty for people who work in retail or travel, as in rail or buses or anything where you can’t escape Christmas. Where you’re absolutely surrounded by people in the midst of all those preparations. That must be exhausting.
Yeah, it must [00:33:00] be really difficult and it’s, we talked earlier about parents with, with young children who do need to go through the motions or have other family responsibilities. Sometimes we go onto autopilot and, and it’s really hard. We do things for other people because they need to be done, but it’s painful for ourselves and we’re giving out something that perhaps it’s more than we feel like we have to give.
And that’s why we need to replenish ourselves afterwards. And having something, having something to say, I know I’m going to have a couple of days when I close the door, and I’m just going to be kind of in the cave of my home, and I’m just going to be for myself. And if, if you have children that do need caring for over Christmas, I mean, it’s not just Christmas Day, Christmas holidays, it’s going to be kind of a long period.
But perhaps there’s a friend or a family that could step in for the afternoon, so we could kind of go out, we could just be ourselves, go for a walk in the park, take a bit of time. Go to the cinema, do something just for ourselves. I think this is where, um, letting the people in [00:34:00] our close family circle, if we have it, if we’re fortunate to have friends or family, even one person that can really understand what we’re going through, saying, look, could you give me a half day?
I really need a bit of time to myself. We might then go through this experience and then think, Oh my goodness, next year I have to do this again. But also to hold some hope that perhaps next year we will, we’ll be feeling a little bit different than we are this year.
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that somebody put on one of the social media posts last year, I found really lovely. And they’d written that they put up a Christmas tree every year since their son died, with the Christmas lights as the evergreen plant is a way to remind themselves that it’s the darkest point of the year and the darkest point of their life, but hope is still there. It’s still on the way. The days are beginning to get lighter and their mood will be getting lighter with it.
And I think that’s something quite profound and poignant to hang on to [00:35:00] at this very dark time of the year that actually we are moving forward into some light.
Yes.
What’s midwinter like for you? What is the prospect of hope?
One thing about the darkness of winter, one thing I find very difficult is that the short hours of daylight and the fact it does get dark so early and it’s so dark in the mornings.
So I think one thing about Christmas time is that we bring light in, we actually make an intention to bring light. We turn on the lights, we hang up the lights, we decorate. I like lighting candles. I do light candles for my children. On my Christmas tree I have all these little collections of pairs of ornaments that people have given me or I’ve picked up that can represent my children.
But I have loads of little Christmas lights up around the house. Even the outside of the house, putting up lights. I’ve got more and more, every year I put up more lights. And I think it’s a symbolic of, for me, we go through this really dark time in our life with the death of our child or children, [00:36:00] and it can seem so bleak, and we’re waiting for the light to come back, but sometimes we, we need to kind of, we make the steps to bring the light back in.
Whether we bring in the light by, by, by. putting up lights and plugging them in or lighting candles, but then we let the light back into our life in other ways. Maybe we allow ourselves to sit and listen to some music that brings us some peace. I don’t mean some kind of frivolous happiness, but peace, something that brings us reconciliation with the universe, kind of sounds very good, but kind of like some spiritual peace and that’s why I mentioned earlier that, that my faith is in a different place and I don’t usually get a lot of great peace or joy or, from a church service, I don’t go to church very, but rarely, but I find moments of peace sitting outside wrapped up in a blanket looking at the stars.
And just having moments of peace is bringing light back into my life, reading [00:37:00] something that lifts my spirit. Maybe it’s a short, short poetry, or even sometimes for me, the Book of Psalms is something very important because I find that the Book of Psalms expresses every human emotion. There’s great joy in the Book of Psalms, but there’s also great anger and great despair.
So sometimes I’ll find just one little phrase. And I can just sit there and meditate on that, and that’s like turning a light on. So I think sometimes when we’re in the dark times, for me, finding ways to switch the light back on, even if it feels like we have to make the effort, and then the light comes back. Spring does come again. It’s not very long after the darkness of December and the darkness of January, the little crocuses start peeping up again and you start seeing the little buds on the tree. Light will come back. And I think for me, that’s human hope. That’s also Christian hope that the light returns.
That’s really lovely. Thank you. Is there any particular messages that you would like to pass [00:38:00] on to any listeners?
It’s so hard to lose a child. I think it’s the hardest experience in life. None of us expected this. None of us wanted this. It’s hard sometimes to find that light. And we talked about finding the light.
Remembering the moments of being pregnant. It’s whether we are a mother that brought the child inside of us, or a father or a partner that stood beside us as we as the child was growing. It’s a real privilege to bring a life into this world, and that child will always be, remembered however old they were, this child existed and we can be proud that we were their parent.
Whatever their life was, whatever difficulties that were there, whatever joys that we shared, I hope that you will hold those memories and those memories will hold you too. And that you’ll take care of yourself. As you take care of yourself, you are preserving the memory of your child. And that’s sometimes the motivation we need to take care of ourselves so that we can carry on sharing the [00:39:00] memories of our children, and that’s one thing that has helped me, that I hope will help you too going forward. Keep taking care of ourselves so that we can tell our children’s story.
That’s lovely. Thank you. That leads us on to something that we always ask our guests, which is for something that they’re grateful for. Um, because we’re kind of trying to bring some light back in at the end of our podcast, which can be quite intense discussions. So, um, Abi. What are you grateful for?
Well, I had planned something to say, but I’ve completely changed my mind. Um, actually what I’m going to say for is food. Because food is such a wonderful thing. Because food is something we enjoy in the moment. Food is something also that resonates with memory. Um, I enjoy eating chicken because it’s so good. I don’t actually like chicken, but I like it because my daughter liked it. So sometimes I’ll eat it just to remember. I have a really good friend who is very sadly bereaved of her daughter and she won’t mind [00:40:00] me telling about that.
Her daughter’s name is Hannah, and Hannah really loved Green and Black chocolate. So Hannah and Rosie, my friend, will come over and she’ll bring Green and Black chocolate. We’ll eat Green and Black chocolate in remembrance of Hannah. Thrilled to be able to talk about Hannah at this point.
Catherine loved chicken, Pax loved spaghetti. I like a nice piece of fish. I like chocolate too, all kinds of chocolate. I like ice cream and I do like being given boxes of chocolate at Christmas. If my friends have been listening, I do like that!
That’s all very lovely. Thank you very much, Abi.
That was my conversation with Abi May.
Please visit the episode listing and our webpage for all the resources that we touched on today. And if you’re listening at Christmas, we’re sending you extra light and love. As always, please rate the episode, or leave comments on our socials, or email us at hello at bereavedparentsclub.org.uk, just so that we can make sure we’re doing a [00:41:00] job that serves you.
This episode is dedicated to Pax and Catherine.