My grandmother had a chair. Everyone in my family knew which one it was, and after she died nobody sat in it for a long time. We did not discuss this. We just did not sit there.

If you have lost someone, you know the chair I mean. It might be an actual chair. It might be a seat in the car, a side of the bed, a name that used to be on the group text. Whatever it is, December is when you notice it most, because December is when everyone gathers and the gap becomes a shape you can see.

The holidays are not neutral ground

From about the middle of November, the world starts insisting. Music in every store. Photos of other people's tables. Sentences that begin with the most wonderful time of the year. None of it is malicious. All of it assumes you are able to participate.

And so grieving women do what we always do. We show up. We cook. We wrap. We answer how have you been with a word that costs nothing, and we put the real answer somewhere behind our teeth and carry it home.

I am not going to tell you to skip the holidays. Most of us cannot. What I am saying is that you should not have to hold it alone the entire month with nowhere honest to set it down.

So make somewhere honest

You do not need a retreat or a perfect plan. You need a door that closes, something to write with, and permission to stop performing for one hour. Before the season gets loud, set aside an afternoon that belongs to the loss on purpose, instead of letting it ambush you in the middle of someone else's toast.

Write the parts of grief that do not get said out loud. Say their name, out loud, even if you are the only one in the room. If there is one person who can hear you without fixing you, ask for two minutes of being heard with no advice offered. And decide now what you will say when the questions catch you off guard at gatherings, so you are not improvising in your aunt's kitchen. Something as simple as, this season is tender for me, and I am glad to be here, is a whole answer.

Nothing you write has to be shared. Some of us will talk about our person all December. Some of us will sit and write the whole time. Both are the work.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

You do not have to walk it alone

If you want a companion for that hour, The Healing Girl is the workbook I wrote for grief, loss, and becoming. It pairs Scripture with guided journaling for exactly the pages of this that do not get said out loud, and it never asks you to be further along than you are.

If you are carrying a loss into this season, whether it happened this year or nine years ago, you do not need to have it together. You only need somewhere honest to set it down.

If grief is sitting on you in a way that feels dangerous rather than heavy, please reach out for real time support. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour.

With you on the journey,
Autumn