12/22/2024
🎄 Holiday grief is real ❤️🔥
This post is for those of you who are struggling during the holiday season, missing your beloveds. This is a valid and common response to the holiday season when going through grief. The holidays accentuate the reality of loss‼️
The focus during the holiday is on family. If you have a fractured family or are experiencing loss, this brings that sensation of incongruence into exaggerated focus as you can see so clearly what society is putting the focus on during the holiday period.
My own version of holiday grief hit me the other day, missing my recently departed parents. This season it’s thankfully much less then how it was two years ago after their immediate loss, but it still runs through me. How can it not, I am human and having a living and beating heart that feels deeply? ♥️
Please know that thoughts of su***de are common during this time. If you are considering that, I urge you to remember that YOU ARE LOVED and how much you would be missed you if you left. Often we don’t realize how cherished we are, when caught in a haze of depression & loss. I was teetering on this edge two years ago, stunned from the tragic death of my beloved parents, so I speak from experience.
Last Christmas, I spent the morning bawling in San Francisco as I missed my father so much. 💦
This holiday season I have chosen to stay home on my beloved ‘aina Kaua’i to be with my precious animals and be in the house I just finished building, courtesy of my parents deaths. There is great joy, gratitude and blessings in my 🧜♀️ house & thankfully, I am through the gauntlet of grief to a place of celebration. Of course, I still miss my parents though. We were incredibly close. I am happy say I feel them often near me in the spirit realm.
My advice:
✨Do something that brings you joy. If that’s hard to do, find a place of neutral connection, something that can ease the pain a bit.
✨Reach out to someone. Grief can be isolating & you feel like you’re the only person in the world going through it. You are NOT! Sharing the experience can lesson these feelings of isolation.
✨Watch a movie, something that can take your mind off of the empty feeling you’re going through.
✨Get out in nature, connect with animals. Nature heals!
My heart goes out to you going through loss. First holidays without your beloveds can be especially painful. Most of all I want to let you know that I SEE YOU and understand. I love you! ❤️🔥 Please take the best care of yourself that you can during this time.
This photo was taken 6 years ago during the last holiday I spent with my parents. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 peripheral D cell lymphoma the following summer. You can’t tell, but when this photo was taken, breast cancer was spreading through out my body. I was limping due to cancer in my hip bone (my hip bone would break 10 months after this photo was taken) and I was actually starting to be quite uncomfortable. That is another story though 😉