Welcome Guest
Join here
Members Log-In
Privacy Policy

Friday July 30,2010

The Empty Chair at Christmas

by Lili Kehler

The longing for our child always becomes more pronounced on special family holidays. These days there is much talk about alternate families, blended families, traditional families, global families...the list goes on and on.

Those of us who have lost a child don't care very much about the interpretation of a family; all we want is to have our family intact, every head accounted for, every set of feet under the table at family celebrations. The empty chair at family functions is intensely visible to us. We always wonder why others cannot see its glaring presence because sometimes it is all we see. We mark time by "occasions," and each occasion without our child is a sharp reminder that life is no longer what it used to be. Sometimes, in our despair, we would like toabolish them all: these occasions that have such power to haunt and hurt us.

Probably one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, of these occasions, is Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is supposed to be one of all-pervasive peace, joy, and love. Even the scrooges of the world manage to fan their tiny, grudging flame into a roaring fire of abandoned giving.

Unfortunately, parents who are grieving the loss of their child are so preoccupied with the empty chair in their lives that they probably wouldn't notice if the fire burned their house down. For them, peace has become pain, joy has turned to ashes, and love is a perpetual longing. They are still "in" this world, but don't feel a part "of" this world. At the same time, Christmas, being no respecter of persons, indomitably marches on with its carols of hope, its timeless traditions, and its glitzy decorations. Since it will not go away, it seems we must learn to live with it.