It’s late and I’m gazing with tired eyes at my Christmas tree, laden with ornaments, decked with stories of years past. The grief mingles with happy memories as my eyes slide over the Peter Rabbit glass ball from the year of my birth, miraculously whole after 46 Christmases. I miss my aunt Sally whose noodle angels light up Ceci’s face when she takes them out of the wrapping each year, delighting in their macaroni hair. I think about the ornaments I still don’t know what to do with, but can’t seem to discard: the house with the number of the first home I bought with my first husband, the reindeer grouping that bears the names of a family unit that doesn’t exist anymore.

This is a season where tradition reigns, from ornament collections with storied histories to Christmas letters that strive to strike a positive note no matter the actual tone of the year they reflect. And every tradition holds within it a grief, anticipated or realized, because none of them remain unchanged for long. There is so much to love this season, and so much that is painful. I’m finding it tricky to hold that love and pain together, again and still, this year.

I suspect I’m not alone in this. Maybe you look at ornaments your parents gave you, wishing they were still around to celebrate with you. Maybe you cradle in your hands amateur art created by children you can’t hold any other way. Maybe you hang pieces from your boughs as fragile as the relationships they represent. Maybe you still decorate with the mementos of holidays past, when your life was something other than it is now, and you feel a longing and an ache as you do.

We are tempted to push away this pain, which a colleague reminded me this week is only human. Our bodies and our brains are designed for pain avoidance, a mechanism to ensure survival. The irony, of course, is that survival is the best we can hope for as long as we gloss over our pain.

The certification for Grief and End of Life Coaching I’m currently pursuing has reminded me of the hard won wisdom of my grief experience: feeling bad is actually doing well in grief and mourning. Loss hurts, and the only way to make the pain recede is to just give in and feel it. I hate this truth, and resist it too often. Yet every time I give in again to the hurt and the sorrow, the anger and the despair, I come out the other side relieved of the burden. Or part of it, anyway.

All this is to say: feel what you feel this season. Give into the darkness when it covers you, knowing there is solace to be found inside it. Let the tears come, for these are cleansing waters. Face the fear, and savor the joy for as long as you possibly can.

And maybe, if you’re feeling especially brave at year’s end, allow someone else to witness the fullness of your grief. It is a sacred wonder to be let into the particulars of someone else’s pain, which is always so much like and so incredibly foreign to your own. And often, in that witnessing, we catch a glimpse of the Divine love that exists both within and beyond our grief.

P.S. If you need a witness, I am willing. Plus I need the hours toward my certification. ; )