The first Christmas after a bereavement brings home the reality of the loss.
THE FIRST Christmas after the death of someone loved, special, integral to one's life, one's family, one's emotional world, is a difficult Christmas. It is approached with dread, passed through with courage and left behind with relief that there will never be that first Christmas again.
The first Christmas is usually a time of acute sadness, remembrance, recognition of the loss and acknowledgement of its finality. Whatever protective shield that shock may provide prior to Christmas, Christmas dismantles it. The reality of loss is made visible when families gather without one of the clan.
The realisation that someone can be taken away, that a unit can be intruded upon, that a generation must move up the ranks to the frontline, that only the past contains the person and the future must be without that person, all these emotions are evoked especially at Christmas time.
There is no escaping the pain of loss: the empty chair, the person to whom one will not be writing a card, for whom one will not be wrapping a gift this year. There is sadness remembering the person upon whom one can never again bestow any greeting, gift, conversation, confidence, love or time.
Adults who lose a parent feel the loss at an emotional level that is more that of child than adult. When the "second" parent of adults' die, the end of an era arrives. Perception of life is changed: of time, of relationship, of what is important and unimportant in the scale of things. The big picture is viewed: life is short, needs to have meaning, cannot be taken for granted and does not continue forever.
Adolescents who lose a parent are rarely ready. Grief is often complicated by the complexity of the adolescent-parent relationship at the time of the parent's death.
Young people often feel guilty when a parent dies, particularly if they had engaged in any of the normal adult-adolescent challenges in the period before death. Sudden, unexpected death can rob them of the opportunity to say what they would have wished to say. Their intellect allows them to appropriate death's immensity, their youth makes it more emotionally intense.
Talking to them about the loss can only be invitational, not imposed. Adolescents need respect for their right to grieve in their own way.
Children who have lost a parent, mourn for them dreadfully in the aching, longing of a child's heart. It is not a departure they should have to encounter. It is a loss too soon. It is a physical ache. It is an emotional emptiness.
It is significant. It should not be ignored, shored up with gifts, denied, distracted or diverted. Children need the other parent to talk to them about grief. They may need to know that what they are experiencing is understood, is normal and that they can survive it. They may need some words put on their emotions.
They need gentle guidance through the unfamiliar territory of grief: a place that can be overwhelming unless they are lead carefully through its labyrinthine ways.
But children also need reprieve from grief's intensity, to laugh, to play, to spend time with their friends. They need to know that to cry is not a sign of weakness and that to laugh is not disloyalty to the person who has died. They need to know that there is no right or wrong way to grieve: that each person goes through grief and emerges from its depths in their own way.
There are no words to describe the grief process for parents who have lost a child. In the face of this death one can only express sympathy and ineptitude and a wish to be guided by those who are grieving in how to support them and how not to offend them with false consolations or platitudes.
It is hard for people who are grieving to interact with the jollity, the festivities, the anticipation and celebration of Christmas. It is too brash, too bright, too garish, too merry and too extreme when the heart is sore.
For grief is tiring. It needs peace. It needs time. It needs some solitude, calm and quietness to deal with the ambush of emotions and memories that accompany it, particularly in the first year, in the acute, early, angry, incomprehensible immensity of death.
That is why the night before Christmas, which is almost upon us, is a time when people often finally feel some peace, the balm of the night, the comfort of the silence that finally descends on Christmas Eve when the shops finally shut, the pubs close, the city calms and there is a sacred silence that is compatible with grief.
• Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD