Healing

Since it seems impossible to go through life without being emotionally hurt by self and/or others, we often find ourselves dealing with the various processes of healing.

Handling the lost of family and friends during the holiday season is a special hurt that the season tends to make more difficult for many of us.  The holiday period of Thanksgiving through Christmas tends to focus us on the happiness that comes from being with others who are special to us.  If one does not fit this pattern due to his or her feelings of losing someone close, these days can be most difficult with healthy healing being stressful.

Our world does change when we lose a loved one.  There are many possibilities on the type and degree of change that occurs, but there is no doubt that changes of some type will take place in our world.

Any study of group dynamics will demonstrate that the addition and/or deletion of a person within a group will alter the way the group acts as individuals as well as a group.  How the group and the individuals within it decide to manage this change is usually an evolving process and can be short or long in its implementation.  Our family is in the middle of that process.

This past fall my sister passed away.  The birthday month of October began the process of change for us as a family and as individuals.  The value and manner of celebrating birthdays started to change.  Without the presence of my sister, our group celebration was different as were the feelings of the individual family members.

November brought the ‘family’ holiday of Thanksgiving.  With a key member of our family not present, we appeared to be without a common direction.   There seemed to be no one available to replace the role that my sister has played in how our family celebrated this holiday.  While other family members and friends supported us, our new ways of managing our loss have not evolved.   We still hurt and our healing continues to affect our feelings even in a season where the focus is on family blessings.

December brings the Christmas holiday season, supposedly the most joyous holiday of the year.  As our family’s prime motivator of this season, the loss of my sister is already being felt as we prepare for Christmas.  So many ‘traditions’ that we experienced as a family unit will never be repeated with her absence.  We face the challenge of building new ways of celebrating this holiday. 

December is also a difficult month because this is the time that Evelyn and I lost our mother to cancer on 21 December 1982.    It took us a long time to rebuild our holiday joy after that loss.  I expect a long time to rebuild my emotions managing my sister’s loss.

Part of our family’s healing process is going to be structuring new ways for us to celebrate our blessings and joys during these months of October, November and December.  We will do part of it as a family unit.  Each of us will develop unique and individual ways to heal as we manage our thoughts and feelings during this part of the year.  


The relationships I have with my nephews will evolve as we respond to the changes that come from losing their mother as a member of our family unit.  As her sons, they will decide on what type of relationship they want as brothers without the presence of their mother.

Our family is not alone.  Many of Evelyn’s friends will also be adjusting to life without her presence.  Her Sunday school class will miss her helpful and encouraging spirit.

Our healing for this and other losses is always a personal and usually a private process.  Some of us will use a primarily internal process.  Some will turn to the support and interaction of being with other people.   Others will turn to a spiritual and religious focus. 

Regardless of the time or method that we take to do so, each human seems to have his or her own way of healing from the hurt of loss.  I remain most thankful for this blessing of being able to heal as a human from the hurts I do experience in life.

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