Grief at the Holidays: When Love Has No Place to Sit

The holidays arrive every year whether we feel ready or not.

They come with lights and music, rituals and expectations—tables set the way they’ve always been set, recipes made the way they’ve always been made. And yet, for many, something essential is missing. A chair is empty. A voice is quiet. A presence that once anchored the season is gone.

Grief doesn’t pause for the holidays.
And the holidays don’t soften grief.

Instead, they often magnify it.

For those who are grieving, this season can feel like walking through a world that keeps insisting everything is joyful—while your heart is carrying something heavy and tender. For palliative care clinicians, it can feel like holding space for others while quietly carrying your own losses, past and present, into exam rooms, living rooms, and hospital halls.

This space—where grief and celebration collide—is not something to fix. It is something to honor.

Grief Is Not the Absence of Joy—It Is the Presence of Love

One of the quiet lies grief tells us is that we are “doing it wrong” if we feel sad when we’re supposed to feel grateful, or if we laugh and then feel guilty for it.

But grief is not a failure of resilience.
It is evidence of attachment.

It is love that no longer knows where to go.

At the holidays, grief often shows up as longing—for the way things were, for conversations we can no longer have, for traditions that now feel incomplete. That longing is not weakness. It is a reflection of how deeply someone mattered.

You are not broken because you miss them.
You are human because you do.

For Those Who Are Missing Someone This Season

If you are grieving a loved one this holiday season, know this:

You are allowed to show up differently.

You are allowed to say no to gatherings that feel like too much.
You are allowed to leave early.
You are allowed to cry in the middle of a carol or a dinner or a quiet moment alone.

You do not owe anyone a version of yourself that feels “normal” or “cheerful.”

Some people find comfort in keeping traditions exactly the same. Others need to change them entirely—or skip them altogether. There is no right way to grieve during the holidays. There is only your way.

Sometimes it helps to make room for the person who is missing in intentional ways:

• Lighting a candle in their honor
• Speaking their name out loud
• Making their favorite dish
• Writing them a letter
• Sitting quietly with a memory that still feels alive

These are not acts of holding on too tightly. They are acts of love continuing.

For Clinicians Holding Others While Carrying Their Own Grief

For those of us who work in palliative care and serious illness—grief is not an occasional visitor. It is woven into our days. And during the holidays, it can feel heavier.

We carry the stories of patients who died this year.
Families we supported through impossible moments.
Conversations that linger long after the visit ended.

And sometimes, we carry our own losses too.

There is a quiet pressure in healthcare to be the steady one, the composed one, the container for everyone else’s pain. But clinicians are not immune to grief. Compassion does not require self-erasure.

If you are a clinician reading this:

• You are allowed to feel tender.
• You are allowed to acknowledge the weight of this season.
• You are allowed to set boundaries that protect your own heart.

Grief is not a professional failure. It is the cost—and the privilege—of caring deeply.

Making Space Instead of Filling It

Well-intended phrases often fall flat this time of year:

“They would want you to be happy.”
“At least you have so many memories.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”

What grieving people often need most is not reassurance, but permission—to feel what they feel without being rushed through it.

Sometimes the most healing thing we can offer—whether as clinicians, friends, or family—is simple presence:

• “I’m thinking of you.”
• “This must be hard.”
• “You don’t have to be okay with me.”

Silence, when offered with care, can be a gift.

Grief Changes, But Love Does Not End

Grief does not disappear after the holidays. But it does change shape over time. It becomes less sharp, less consuming—though it may still rise unexpectedly, especially in seasons like this one.

What remains constant is love.

And love, even in grief, is not something to rush past.

If this holiday season feels heavy, know that you are not alone. Many are carrying invisible losses alongside you. Many are learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to live in a world that has been irrevocably changed.

At Rewriting the Last Chapter, we believe that honoring grief—especially during the holidays—is not about dwelling in sorrow. It is about making room for truth. About allowing love to be seen, even when it hurts.

This season, may you give yourself permission to grieve gently.
May you let love take the shape it needs to take.
And may you remember: missing someone is not a sign that you are stuck—it is a sign that they mattered.

And they always will.