Holidays and Grief: Strategies to Get Through the Holidays After Your Spouse Dies

As the holiday season approaches, we want to extend our support and understanding to all the widows out there who may be facing this time of year with mixed emotions. We know that the holidays and grief can be particularly challenging, with traditions that may bring back memories of loved ones and the absence of those who are no longer with us.

In our latest episode, we share our personal journeys through the holiday season as widows. We highlight the importance of embracing individuality and how each of us made choices that resonated with our unique needs and circumstances. Whether it was seeking solitude, going on a cruise, or simplifying holiday decor, we all found our own ways to navigate the emotions that come with grieving during a time that’s traditionally filled with joy.

Key topics in this episode:

• Emotional challenges during the holiday season
• Empowerment and making personal decisions
• Balancing grief and parenting during the holidays

The main thing we want to emphasize is the need for self-compassion during these challenging moments. Losing a spouse is an enormous loss, and the weight of grief can feel overwhelming, especially during the holidays. It’s okay to prioritize your well-being and make choices that feel right for you and your family.

Healing is a deeply personal journey, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to finding light during the darkest times.

Listen to the Full Episode

Links + Resources From This Episode

• Holiday Hope Summit
• Are you searching for emotional support, practical advice, and guidance on navigating widowhood? Join us in the Widow Squad membership
• Follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Episode Transcript

Melissa: Hi. It’s Melissa Pierce with my co hosts, Jen Zwink and Kim Murray. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Widow Squad podcast.

Oh.

Oh.

Wait a minute.

Can you guys smell that? Do you smell it?

Kim: I smell pumpkin. Yes. I smell pumpkin lattes. I smell pumpkin spice.

Melissa: What else? Oh, God. I’m getting a hit of, like, pine trees.

Kim: I definitely smell the pine trees.

Melissa: Okay. Oh, there’s some turkey smells coming in here now. Can you feel and smell the holidays approaching? Do you have a pit in your stomach and a little bit of dread hearing those cheery holiday songs?

Well, we’re feeling it over here, and we bet many of you can relate. So today we’re going to talk about some of our experiences during the holidays after losing our spouses.

And trust us, it’s leading to something big and beautiful for everyone listening, so stick with us.

Jen, can you start us off and let us know what those first holidays were like for you?

How Jen Experienced the Holidays After Loss

Jen: So Brent was killed October 16th. We had the funeral a week after he was killed so suddenly and unexpectedly. I just didn’t realize the weeks were going by so fast. And all of a sudden Thanksgiving’s coming and Christmas is coming. Claire was only two years old. Man, that first year was very much a blur. I felt like I was separated from my body. I didn’t know where my brain was. I didn’t know what was happening.

What I did know was that I was feeling like I didn’t want to try and have the same normal Thanksgiving experience that we normally did. I didn’t want to have to sit at the table with family members and expect a normal situation, so I just wanted to avoid it altogether. And so, we did. Claire and I ended up leaving. We left town for Thanksgiving, and I was gone for about a week and a half with her. Nobody gave me any grief about it.

Nobody made me feel guilty about leaving. They were just like, “you do whatever you need to do, whatever feels right.”

So, I had a lot of support in that respect.

Melissa: That’s amazing.

Jen: Yeah. Looking back, I’m so thankful that I had that. So, we ended up getting away. We went to the beach, which is my safe space, my calming space. I just wanted to be on the water. I just wanted to sit on the beach and just look out at the waves. So that’s what I did.

We had a very relaxing, as relaxing as it can be, getaway. And shortly after that, we got home, and here it is. Christmas is upon us, quickly coming fast and furious. Again, it was a situation of do I try to keep things normal? Now, you know, I have a 2-year-old, so I have Santa involved. There’s Christmas Eve and Santa Claus is coming, and there’s all the excitement in that. And so, of course, I was gonna keep that part of our Christmas as normal as that could be. But a lot of that was putting on the happy face and taking her to get her picture with Santa and doing all of that stuff on my own. It was gut wrenching.

It was the hardest thing that I have had to experience is being a parent, having to balance the normalcy of trying to keep the kids happy, and then also balancing my grief and how I’m handling everything and how I’m gonna be Santa on Christmas Eve by myself.

When she sleeps with me in the bed, the second I move and get up out of the bed, she pops up too. So it’s like, how do I manage all of this? I had a lot of help from my parents. I had help from my siblings, my brother and my sister. I was in the living room putting out Christmas presents. Somebody was standing guard by the door watching to make sure she didn’t get up to see, and it’s all the things that you would have your husband there for. All of that Christmas morning joy, everything, you’re sitting there with this smile on your face and trying to be happy. And just the big obvious elephant in the room is he’s not here for this. He’s not here.

And she’s running around smiling and so happy and getting all of these presents. It’s just this heavy weight on you. I do know too that I overcompensated a little bit as far as gift giving.

Melissa: That make sense.

Jen: Especially that first year, it was like, okay, let’s buy this. And then let’s buy this and this. There were a lot of gifts that first year for her because I’m trying to make up for what she doesn’t have. Right? How do you do that? I was just trying to overload the presents because he wasn’t there. So that was another thing. Again, you know, as far as family obligations and things that were expected of me, I didn’t have too much of that.

My family kind of let me off the hook that first year. They were just telling me, “don’t worry about buying presents. We’re not expecting anything from you. If you want to come on Christmas Eve, come on Christmas Eve. If you don’t, that’s fine.” There was no pressure, which was amazing, which was awesome. And then again, at the very last minute, I wasn’t going to go. I wasn’t even going to go.

I was going to stay home with Claire and just have our little Christmas Eve, just the two of us. But then again, I was thinking of her and the things that she would be missing out on. So last minute, at 6 o’clock on Christmas Eve, I said, “okay, mom. I’m coming over.” And all of my family was over there. And I think I’ve told this story before, but I literally had nothing. I had nothing for anybody. I didn’t buy gifts.

Kim: Who cares about the gifts?

Jen: I stopped at Walgreens. It’s at Walgreens, like, five minutes from my house, and I just ran in. And you know how they have the big things at the front of the store with all the last-minute gifts? It was Chia Pets. So, they had Chia Pets, llama Chia Pets, the heads with the Chia Pet hair or whatever. I grabbed, like, 10 Chia Pets and just threw everything on the counter and then, showed up at my parents’ house with unwrapped Chia Pets. It was like I was insane. Right? Like, I’m the insane crazy lady, but I showed up with Chia Pets for everyone, not wrapped.

Kim: That they then re-gifted as a white elephant the next year.

Melissa: Right.

Kim: Because it doesn’t matter.

Melissa: I mean, does everybody get Chia Pets every year now? I mean, it feels like it’s a great great tradition.

Jen: No. I know. Is this funny? Is it just a sad point? It’s just a mess. That’s what it is. And that when I look back on my first Christmas and my Thanksgiving, it was a mess.

It was a blur. It was a mess. A lot, I don’t remember, but, yes, I remember the Chia Pets. Yeah. It was a disaster. It’s a disaster.

Melissa: But it’s a testament to you though because you’re like, you know what? I cannot be in a room full of people who are happy and singing whatever. I can’t do that, so I’m gonna do my thing. The fact that your family was like, okay, let’s honor Jen. Let her do her thing. We’re here when she needs us.

For you to just be like, I can’t do this. I’m not gonna do it. Good for you.

Jen: Yeah. I really did not have that pressure that a lot of people do. A lot of widows do. They have a lot of expectations put on them, and I did not have that. So I’m very thankful for that.

Melissa, what about you?

Melissa’s Unique Holiday Experiences

Melissa: Well, I had a pretty decent gap that first year. Dave died in January, so I had several months until the holidays reared their ugly head. So, I never really gave it any thought until you go in the store and you hear the holiday tunes and you see all the Christmas gifts, all that stuff.

I made it through Thanksgiving and with the same traditions as we always did. We always spent it with my family. You know, the dinner, the big dinner, and all the traditions that go around that. And I made it through that. And my kids, the whole time, I kept asking them, like, do you guys wanna do something different? Like, do we want to, I don’t know, go somewhere? Go to the beach? And they’re like, “no.”

I was really kind of making my decisions based on what they wanted to do, but I would always ask them. So, Thanksgiving came and went. Christmas is another story. That was super rough because we would always go into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree. I’m not doing that, you know. And so, I was trying to convince my kids to just go somewhere. I was looking at Disney cruises. I wanted to run away.

Because Dave wasn’t there, I just wanted to forget that there was ever a Christmas.

So I kept searching for things. Oh my gosh! Disney has a cruise for Christmas! I would kind of throw it out at the dinner table. “Hey, what do you guys think about a Disney cruise?” And I’d be like, no, that seems weird for Christmas. Okay, okay. Let’s try another angle. So, you know, a couple days we go by and I’m like, “oh, well, we can just go to Disneyland!” We don’t have to go on a cruise. And they’re like, “no.” Why would we go to Disneyland in the middle of winter? That’s weird. You know? So, finally my oldest just chimed in with, “well, we just want to do what we normally do.”

Well, how do we do what we normally do when their dad’s not here?

But I understood what they meant. They wanted to kind of have as much routine as possible that felt safe for them. I mean, they weren’t saying that verbally, but that’s just kind of what I understood.

So, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna have to muddle through on this one. They wanted a Christmas tree and I was thinking, like, I don’t want to do a tree. Can we just get a little tabletop fake you know, some kind of just tiny little Pine tree? And, they’re like, “no, we want a big tree!” We’d pass by tree lots and they wanted me to go and cut down a tree.

We went to a Christmas tree lot, got the tree. I had to dig out the stand, and I never did any of this. Like, Dave would put the tree in as wel. We would go cut it, but he would put the tree in the stand, he would put all the lights on, and then the boys and I would, like, decorate it and make it look pretty.

So we got the tree. It was tiny, but the boys did help me get it in the stand. And then they went and took off and played games or whatever. So I remember untangling the lights and wrapping the lights around the tree. I’m on a chair, and I’m sobbing in the tree.

Jen: You’re like, I don’t even want to do this. It wasn’t even my idea.

Melissa: I don’t want to do this. I’m angry. I’m sad. So I just remember sobbing into the tree and got it all done. And then I’m thinking, well, what does Christmas Eve and Christmas day look like? What does that mean because we spent that on the other side of the state with everybody. And I think by this time, I was presenting, like, yeah. I got this all together. You know, you don’t worry about me, guys.

We were kind of on our own for Christmas Day. Everybody had their own family things going, and I could have raised my hand, like, “hey, can we come hang out with you?” But I didn’t want to hang out with anyone.

So one tradition that Dave and I had was on Christmas morning, we would have a really big gift for the boys we would hold back. We’d give them underwear and socks, you know, all the their crappy little gifts. And then we’re like, “well, that’s it, kids.” You know? And then what we were doing, years before, is we would send them on a scavenger hunt with clues. And usually the night before Christmas Eve night, Dave and I would have a few drinks and we would come up with these elaborate clues and scattere them all around the house and place them all over. And it was just really a fun thing for us to do.

And so they were asking, like, “hey, are we gonna do that again?” I’m like, “sure.” So yeah. That was another thing. It’s like, the night before, I’m sitting there trying to come up with these clues for a scavenger hunt. My brain at this point is fried.

Kim: So I don’t even know how you can do that. Honestly, that’s a lot.

Melissa : It was terrible. It really was. I would be like, go to the place where you first wake up in the morning, which is the bathroom. Yeah.

It was like a 2-year-old could’ve put these clues together. They were a little disappointed. But they got the big prize at the end.

I just didn’t have it in me. And then I made a decision Christmas day to go see a movie in the afternoon. We went to see the move We Bought a Zoo. So that was December 2011. And then we continued that tradition of, like, we would go to my brother’s on Christmas Eve, and then we would just do our own thing on Christmas Day. But it’s still sad you know, it still stunk.

It was awful. And I was going through the motions, but I really had to listen to my kids and kind of honor them and what they wanted to do. It’s really about them. I’ve had my own childhood Christmases, which were fantastic and great. And here they’ve got some pretty crappy Christmases without their dad. So yeah. I just kind of sucked it up, and I did that for them. But honestly, I don’t love the holidays. Can you guys relate?

I’d like to skip it altogether. But, you know, it’s just not reality. It’s not how our culture and society is. So we do have to move through it somehow. So, yeah, that was that was those are my fun holiday times.

How about you, Kim? What were your some of your holiday experiences early on?

Kim’s Approach to Holidays and Grief

Kim: Well it was an awful, horrible time, which none of us likes because we’re not happy. Okay? Nothing’s joyful. Nothing’s merry in this merry Christmas. It’s hard, but when you have the kids, then you have to have some kind of a thing. I wanted to keep things the same, which I convinced myself in my brain that if I kept everything the same, it would be fine, and it would be okay. And it wasn’t because nothing’s fine or okay or the same.

So there’s that.

I was like, you, Melissa. Mark died in February, so I had pretty much that whole year to figure stuff out. But I wasn’t really thinking about it per se.

The time from Thanksgiving through the end of the year is a busy one for us because there’s Thanksgiving, and then my birthday, and then Mark’s dad’s birthday, and then Christmas Day, and then Mark’s birthday was the day after Christmas. So we always had a lot going on between Thanksgiving and even New Year’s Eve at the end of the year. We had rituals. Thanksgiving was at our house, and then we would go out to dinner somewhere for Mark’s dad’s birthday, and then Christmas Eve was at his parents, and then Christmas day was at our house. And then the day after Christmas it was Mark’s birthday, so we’d go do something with his parents again.

So it was like the Murray fest in those days leading up to Christmas. I thought I’m just gonna keep everything the same. I’m just gonna do it all the same way, which is a crap ton of work. Okay? So I am putting an enormous amount of responsibility on myself to not only do the things, the dinners, and the whatever, but decorating and putting up the Christmas tree, which was torture, obviously. That’s horrible. I put up the tree, and I had this ornament made years ago, and it’s a picture of Mark and I holding our boys when they’re little babies. It’s in our backyard and it was snowing. So they’ve got these little hats on with the little fur around their hats and their cute little cherubic faces with their rosy cheeks. I had that made into an ornament. A picture ornament. It’s been on my tree all these years. Putting up that ornament was like…well, you might as well have just ripped my heart out of my chest.

Melissa: Oh my god. Pandora’s Box.

Kim: Pandora’s Box. So, I’m sobbing, you know, putting this up. I want to just say right here though that ornament is front and center on my tree every year, just so you know.

And then my dog died the same year Mark died. So Mark died in February. We had to put our dog down in October.

So I have Mark’s stocking. I had our dog Lucy’s stocking. And I’m like, what do I do? Do I put them up? Do I put them on the mantle? Right? I didn’t want to put up the stockings. My brain was saying, don’t put up the stockings. I’m having this conversation in my head, should I, shouldn’t I? And I ended up putting up the stockings. I really didn’t want to, but I did. It was just reminder after reminder after reminder, and then just all the work, all the actual work to get everything done the same way.

I was outside putting up lights around my pine trees and my bushes and whatever. So most of the time, I’m thinking I’m doing this for the kids. Right? Because they deserve to have some kind of a semblance of normalcy, you know, as much as they can. We had a fake tree. There was no going out in the forest, Melissa, and cutting down trees, okay?! I’m not doing that. So I could get the tree put up but the outside lights were hard to do.

And the kids were in no position to help me. They just weren’t even thinking about that. It was just a lot. Well, I ran myself ragged, and then I was mad after everything. Like, why did I do it that way? Why didn’t I just honor myself and say no to some of these things? But Mark was an only child, so I’m not not gonna spend it with his parents. They’re my family. They still are my family.

We still have to be together, but they’re grieving in a different way as parents than I’m grieving as the wife. And the kids are grieving differently as the children. So it was just a big grief fest, and we tried really hard to make it “ normal,” but that first year was hell.

I had to decide what to do the next year. So, guess what we did, Melissa? We went on a Disney cruise. I was like, I am I’m not messing anymore. We’re not doing this again. And the kids were funny because you’re like “let’s go on a Disney cruise!” And they’re like, “well, can’t we just stay home?” And so you wonder, like, what is wrong with you? Like, do you understand what I’m saying?

Melissa: I’m offering Disney to you. Disney.

Kim: It’s so crazy. So, we did that. Even though we loved it and it was fun, it was great and everything, I still think in some kids’ minds, like mine, they just wanted that routine of being home.

What I noticed about myself was that I would get more and more resentful every year about putting all this crap up, to be honest with you. The decorations and the trees and the this and the that.

I think it was in 2018, so this would have been four years after Mark died, I decided to have bunion surgery over Christmas break.

Melissa: So, on purpose?

Kim: Kinda. Yeah. I had to have surgery. And I had to get it in before the end of the year for health care reasons. But, it was brilliant, you guys, because I had a cast on my foot. I couldn’t do anything.

Melissa: That was your excuse.

Kim: That was my excuse. I had bunion surgery so I did not have to put up a Christmas tree. Yes. These are the lengths we’ll go to. I was gonna have the surgery anyway. But that year, I was like, “sorry, yeah, I can’t put the tree.” And the boys were a little bit older at that point. I’m like, “listen, everything’s in the basement. You know where it is. If you want to put up the tree, you can do it. You want to put up some of the decorations, bring the bins upstairs, you could do it,” and they didn’t want to.

So I kind of turned it around a little bit as in “you know, I understand what you guys want to see happen. I’m not capable. So I could use help if you want to see it, or you can resign yourself to the fact that we’re not gonna have any decorations inside or outside.” I thought maybe I could put a little tree on an end table. I mean, it wasn’t, like, completely bare.

I just didn’t want to put anything up. The boys are adults now. I don’t have to go all out like I did before, but I still don’t love it. I don’t love the holidays. Like I said, Mark’s birthday was the day after Christmas, so it’s just like, ugh. You know? Just the reminders.

We do what we can. I guess you learn as you go along that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. And everybody’s going to have an opinion about what you do or don’t do. So, you might as well just do what’s best for you or your kids. And if you have small kids, obviously, you may have to put in a little more effort to have it be a little bit magical for them.

You know, Mark, for a lot of years, believe it or not, he dressed up as Santa.

He would come through the front door. We would ring the bells, and the boys would get up. And we had a two- story house, so there was a landing in the hallway. And the tree was in the living room. So, if you looked over the landing, you’d see the tree. He was far enough away that they couldn’t really make it out.

And he wouldn’t talk because he had a very deep voice. So, it’s like, don’t say too much because they’ll know it’s your voice. You know? Don’t say too much. But he would do that every year, so that was awful when he wasn’t doing that. He didn’t do it the year that he was sick, obviously. You know? He was sick the year of 2013 over Christmas.

So that was really hard. My kids got older and realized that some things they thought about Christmas weren’t really what they thought. I don’t want to, you know, burst anybody’s bubbles here who might be listening. But after Nicholas figured things out he was like, why did you lie to us? I said, “I made your childhood as magical as possible, and I would do it all over again the same way.” And basically that I hope when you have children, that’s what you do.

Even though your husband dies, you still want to give that little of magic to your kids as much as you possibly can. But if it gets to where it’s at the detriment of your mental health, then don’t.

Melissa: Yeah. It’s actually kind of very freeing. You get to do whatever you want to do, and you get to not do whatever you don’t want to do. I mean, you have you have some power and control. It’s a little bit different with little kids, but you can still make things your own. Like, we’ve got new traditions now that we didn’t have with Dave.

Kim: It took a surgery for me. I had to get my bunion surgery done in December so I could sit with the cast on my foot, but whatever. But we don’t need permission, and I think that was one of my biggest lessons back in the day was I thought I needed someone to tell me that was okay to do because we don’t have the guidebooks that we always talk about. We don’t have the guidebooks. We don’t know what’s right and wrong, and now we know nothing’s right or wrong. It’s just whatever you choose. But I really thought I must do everything the same, and that’s just an enormous amount of pressure.

So take the pressure off yourself if it’s too much. Some people love Christmas, and the thought of not doing that would be too much for them. I understand that too. Right? If you love it and that’s what brings you joy, then do it. If you don’t love it and it doesn’t bring you joy, don’t do it.

Again, we don’t need permission from anybody to make our own decisions. We know the holidays are a really hard time for widows.

Introducing the Holiday Hope Summit

Kim: So, with our shared stories and the stories of so many of you, we felt an urge, well, more like a pull, to create something meaningful, something supportive, something that we didn’t have after our husband’s died.

Over the past several months with lots of late nights, brainstorming sessions, and deep conversations, we’ve been secretly weaving together a gift for our widowed community.

We are so excited to tell you about the Holiday Hope Summit for widows, which will run from November 16th to 18th, 2023. This free event is entirely virtual, and you’ll be able to attend from anywhere in the world with internet access. We are offering a lineup of over 25 grief and widow experts with training focused on your emotional health, physical health, widowhood challenges and self care during the holidays.

These grief and widow experts are creating presentations geared specifically for widows to help you tackle the real, gritty, complex aspects of navigating the holiday season. So this is free, you guys.

And your ticket includes access to all of these presentations and to our private Facebook group where widows just like you will be hanging out and working towards peace and healing during the holidays. And this is where you’ll be able to connect with the speakers and other attendees of this summit before and during the event.

There’s even a couple of opportunities to win a full month membership into the Widow Squad. So Melissa, Jen, and I are dedicated to helping you move through the holiday season with hope, resilience, and peace, and making this process as seamless as possible.

The Holiday Hope Summit is not just another self help event. It’s your targeted road map for a holiday season that honors your widowhood journey and fuels your path forward. It’s time to stop just getting through the holidays, feeling weighed down by all the emotions and the loneliness. We remember all too well what that was like. So let’s switch it up and move through this holiday season with insights into the topics that are often brushed over but are crucial for widows during the holiday season.

If you’re ready to experience hope, peace, and healing, grab your free ticket at www.widowsquadpresents.com.

We will also have a link to get your free ticket in this episode’s show notes.

Wrap Up

Jen: Alright, our wonderful listeners, The holidays have a way of stirring up memories, feelings, and longings, and it’s okay to seek joy and find hope even through the heartache.

Our Holiday Hope Summit is here to be that sanctuary of understanding and compassion.

Trust in the journey.

Take care of your beautiful self, and remember, you’re not alone. Let’s navigate this season together.

We can’t wait to connect, share, and embrace the holidays with all of you.