Giving Thanks Through Loss, a Hard Candy Christmas, and One Small Change

On being too pregnant to eat, embracing new life, and comfort in the changes we can control

On Thanksgiving Day 2015, I was 9 months pregnant. One might assume extremely pregnant is a great way to enjoy Thanksgiving, as one’s body is prepping another human and one’s appetite is up in corresponding fashion. But alas, third trimester is not where you want to be on this glorious celebration of gluttony. Your stomach is pressed up against your lungs and liver and intestines, all fighting for space in their home of modest square footage. More stuffing doesn’t stand a chance.

I cooked a ham. I ate very little. I settled for one piece of about half a dozen homemade pie choices, which was indeed a hardship. But it was far from the biggest hardship that year.

Two months earlier, my husband had died in a bike wreck. Two days after Thanksgiving, my second daughter was born. It was, if I may use an unlyrical idiom, a lot.

For anyone who has experienced a loss, as we are all destined to eventually, the firsts are tough. I remember the first time I walked into my house or put my toddler to bed after Jake died. I remember the first time I painted my nails. I put that off for a long time, clinging to the sad purple remnants of my September manicure, which finally wore away with the passage of time I was still marking but he wasn’t.

But the first holidays. Those are tougher, dreaded even, and the annoyance of the calendar is that they’re guaranteed to come around every year. What to do with yourself that first Thanksgiving or first Christmas? Especially if you can’t eat the pie or drink the wine, as was my particular predicament.

When I was in the thick of grief, I stumbled on a few strategies that worked for me. I assume I was guided by Providence a bit as I made these decisions because, years later, I found out some of the things I did instinctively were backed by research into bereaved families, long studied by Dr. Irwin Sandler at Arizona State University’s Family Bereavement Program.

When it came to big holidays, I needed something new. Not totally new, but I was marking a new chapter in my life. We could honor what came before while creating a path forward.

My transition into my new life was certainly accelerated by the birth of my daughter. Everyone experiences their transformed life after loss differently, dipping toes in, hanging out in the false comfort of denial at times. I had no choice but to use the two months after Jake’s death to adjust the best I could and prepare for new life in the most literal and spiritual ways. I don’t have a point of reference for an alternative, but my hunch is the drastic nature of the change helped me. There was a physical process and a whole new tiny person to mark the dividing line between my life before and my life after.

They say not to take on anything major within six months of a traumatic event. I used to chuckle when I heard this. “Well, I’m going to push a baby out of me and raise ’em by myself, but sure, I won’t get bangs or anything, I guess.”

The truth is, everything feels major in the wake of a loss. Breakfast is major. Of course Christmas is hard! Acknowledging that is part of getting through, according to Sandler’s research. His guidelines for bereaved families include “recognizing that holidays can be difficult… encourag[ing] the parents to use good listening skills to provide children with a safe environment to talk about their feelings about the holiday, simplifying life wherever possible during the holidays, and continuing some old traditions while possibly adding new traditions during the holidays.”

My daughter was born at 5:15 a.m. Thanks to a smooth birth and the birth center rules, I was back at my house by 9 a.m. that day. I asked my brother who, bless him, lived with us for 6 months after Jake died, if he would go get us a Christmas tree. I had never been an early decorator, often waiting until early December or later to put up a tree. But life was changing. We would change with it.

Forever after, Nov. 28 would be a day of celebration, the beginning of a season of good cheer, and we would get a Christmas tree to mark the rebirth of our little family.

I asked for help when I needed it— another new tradition for me— and stayed near the house as necessitated by a newborn. The next year, I took my first born to get the tree because the baby was cranky, and by 2017, we all three went together.

And it wasn’t just the three of us for long after that. We added Steve, who more than carries his weight both literally and spiritually.

Then Holly.

This Thanksgiving Day, I’m 8 months pregnant with No. 4. I live a life I never could have imagined on that Thanksgiving Day of 2015 (though the part where I can only fit one piece of pie is familiar). If you’re in the depths of loss right now, if it’s all fresh and heavy for you, know that a) there can be a new life and b) you don’t have to think about that right now. I know it can feel painful to even think about moving further away from the time your loved one was here with you, even if moving is needed to recover. There is a time when recovery feels like betrayal. That time will pass, but I understand.

Ask for help when you need it, give yourself the grace to do less, and maybe, just maybe, let a small new tradition plant the seed for something you can’t even imagine now. Our lives will change without our permission. That is inevitable, sometimes in big, scary ways. In my time of upheaval, I made one small change I could control, to open myself up to the possibilities of what lay ahead. Every year, when our tree goes up, I’m reminded of how much has grown from it.