Don't feel bad if you're not feeling as festive as others this Christmas. Photo / Getty
OPINION
If ever there was a season of forced joy, it's Christmas. We are meant to embrace the holiday and its trappings, to love togetherness and bustle, to live out the end of the year in something resembling ecstasy.
We can give ourselves a break, especially this year.
After lockdowns, isolation, being afraid to encounter fellow humans, job losses and a housing market gone even madder than before, we'd be forgiven for exuding something less than glee. We can also forgive ourselves for being a bit smug about our mostly maskless, non-socially distanced life, while the rest of the world plunges deeper into Covid-inflicted despair. We have empathy, which we can discuss face-to-face over a cold beverage while resting in sunshine.
December can be a wrenching 31 days for people who have suffered loss. December 3 would have been my 21st wedding anniversary. Shortly after that date, I shared a photo on social media of myself and my groom, young faces full of promise. We were unaware of feeding tubes, a ventilator and multiple surgeries that would mark the end of Sean's life in 2010. We married on a rainy Friday evening in a Cleveland, Ohio, cathedral. We were late for our reception, as the limousine driver got lost. Perfect, no. Funny, yes. Especially in hindsight.
It is not morose to reminiscence, to describe a beautiful day, even if the relationship ended much too soon. Memories and tears are bridges connecting us to those we've loved and lost. People who mourn are not stuck in the past; they're living into a future without their person.
Someone whose husband died this month wrote a comment under my anniversary photo. "I just lost my husband Monday. It is so hard. How do you do it?"
That's like asking how do you parent? We all do it differently. I had no wise words, suggesting she cut herself a massive amount of slack, especially in the first year of shock and awfulness. Read more. Rest more. Lean on friends. Another widow wrote, "I lost mine four years ago and it's never easy and you just learn a new normal, sadly...it is still hard but...we keep on living."
Which is what we've all been doing in 2020. Left foot, right foot - keep living, keep going. In some cases, we have found new jobs, new passions, new loves. We have reconnected with the people who matter most. Worrying about an overseas parent living in a country where the virus is rampant is a powerful incentive to call your mother.
Realising what we could lose can help us appreciate what we have. There's a case for negative visualisation advocated by ancient Stoics. American philosophy professor William Irvine, author of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy says periodically during the day, Stoics believed we should spend a few moments imagining that we had lost something we value: "maybe our job, our health, or our spouse. We shouldn't dwell on the possibility of such losses; that would be a recipe for a miserable existence. We should instead allow ourselves to have a flickering thought about them. One consequence of doing this is that we stop taking our job, our health, or our spouse for granted. In fact, we might find ourselves appreciating them to an unprecedented degree."
Irvine says from a Stoic point of view, the pandemic has a silver lining: By showing us what it is like to lose the things we take for granted, it can transform us from jaded individuals into people who realise just how wonderful their "everyday life" used to be.
Another Stoic exercise is engaging in last-time meditation. It's pausing to consider that whatever we're doing, there will be a last time we do it. A last dinner. A last sunrise. The last hug. Irvine writes, "Doing this can make us savour our daily activities rather than ploughing through them in a distracted state of mind."
Being stoic does not mean denying grief and loss. It's about coexisting with our emotions knowing we have the strength to continue. It's understanding that things change without our consent.
Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote that grief should be grieved rather than treated as a problem to solve.
"It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed forever." Seneca warned against diversions to escape grief. "I would rather end it than distract it." He argued studying, especially subjects like philosophy, can comfort, delight and ensure the safety of those who mourn.
Another ancient Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, said, "The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing."
Maybe you're not dancing in the magic of the holiday season. Wrestle instead.