Coping: Tis the season to be stoic, especially after a loved one has died

This time last year, I was facing the prospect of the first Christmas without my mother. She had died four weeks before, and my brother and I hadn’t expected it. She had terminal pancreatic cancer at just 58, and though we knew she was going to die, she had rallied a few days before. She got out of bed for the first time in weeks, and I got to take her out of the hospice into the pleasantly sharp November air. I watched my mother bloom and glow under the sun, and allowed myself to hope in the moment that she might be one of those luckier people who outlasts their prognosis.

I was asleep across the road from the hospice when they called me in the early hours to say that she was gone. My brother and I were so confident that my mother was doing better than expected that he had gone to Galway with his fiancée to look for an engagement ring. They had brought the wedding forward in the hope that my mother could go, and there was a slight rush to find a ring – it was also a welcome distraction for us all in a fog of pain and finitude.

My mother, who had always been a little suspicious of the idea of us pairing off with anyone, now seemed to feel a sudden urge to know that we would each have someone when she was gone. The knowledge that my brother was getting married visibly soothed her. When the call came to say that she was gone, a fractured cacophony of sad revelations flooded my ears – each surfacing in the wave only long enough to glimpse and sting before sinking again under the roiling waters of confusion and despair. I remember thinking, as I picked up the phone again to call my brother, that my mother would never celebrate at his wedding. I felt nauseated by the idea of delivering that news to him.

I called to tell him shortly before wandering through the foggy pelt of black morning freeze over to the hospice. When I called him, he spoke quietly in murmured shock, and I could almost hear something delicate in the centre of him being squashed beyond recognition.

Pretty awful

The following few weeks passed as they generally do after a death – you have the most to do when you are least capable of doing it. A funeral was arranged, a house emptied, legalities dealt with. Then, suddenly, it was Christmas. We didn’t know what Christmas was without her, or how to do it, so my brother, my partner and I went to a hotel in Galway and waited it out. We all did our best but it was pretty awful. The strange surroundings seemed only to enhance my mother’s absence rather than insulate us from it.

This year, I am doing my best to remain stoic about Christmas, which by its nature always places a microscope over any issues within a family. I refer to stoicism quite literally in this sense; not a taciturn, unfeeling approach in an attempt to set myself at a remove, but a conscious awareness that Christmas cannot ever be what it was. When Epictetus said “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things”, he wasn’t thinking about making an inspiring quote to fit onto a fridge magnet. He was making a genuinely useful point which is universally applicable. In this case, once a person you associate strongly with Christmas is gone, you have to let go of the version of Christmas you knew with them, and accept that you will only make yourself unhappy by trying to recreate it without them, or comparing now to then.

This Christmas does not have to be unpleasant for my brother and I. It will be sad, but it can still be lovely. We have to make new traditions in the knowledge that setting aside some of the ones that my mother practised might feel a bit like leaving her behind. They will always be hers, and I can remember them tenderly, but recreating them will only freshen her absence. In order to avoid a bad Christmas, we just have to think differently.