The holidays are supposed to be joyful. That’s what we’re told, anyway. Family, warmth, tradition, cheer - it’s everywhere, from commercials to conversations. But for anyone carrying grief, the holiday season can feel more like a minefield. A song, a smell, an empty chair at the table can hit you like a wave. Suddenly, you’re not in the room anymore - you’re in a memory, reliving the loss or a moment that never got to happen.
Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, understands this space well. He writes and speaks about grief not as a problem to fix, but as a sacred and necessary part of life. “Grief is not a distraction from life - it is life,” he says. It’s not just about mourning the death of someone we love. It could be other types of losses we’ve experienced: the childhood we didn’t get, the life we wish we lived, or the parts of ourselves we’ve had to leave behind.
During the holidays, all of that can come rushing up. And instead of making space for it, most of us are taught to push it down. Smile through it. Be grateful. Don’t ruin the mood. But Weller challenges that. Weller emphasizes “the need to tend grief”, not hide it. He calls this "apprenticeship with sorrow," a lifelong practice of learning to stay present with pain, rather than suppress or bypass it. When we try to bypass it, we not only dishonor what we’ve lost - we rob ourselves of real connection and deepening our experience of being alive.
In a talk he gave on grief and ritual, Weller says something striking: “Grief needs a witness.” It’s not something we’re meant to carry alone. And yet, in our culture, we often do. We isolate. We compare pain. We try to "move on" too fast. But grief, especially during the holidays, is asking for something else: acknowledgment.
That might look like lighting a candle for someone who is not with you anymore. Or speaking their name at the dinner table. Or giving yourself permission to cry in the middle of a celebration. It doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you’re human.
Weller also reminds us that grief and gratitude are not opposites - they’re companions. “The work of the mature person,” he writes, “is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by them.” That kind of emotional stretching hurts. But it also opens us up. It makes us more real. More tender. More able to love deeply, knowing loss is part of the deal.
So if you're grieving this holiday season, know this: you're not broken, and you’re not alone. Your sorrow is not an interruption—it belongs. Let it sit with you. Let it speak. Let it remind you of the love that made it so heavy in the first place.