Christmas without Helen: coping with the festive season after loss

Becky Garrod - 20 Dec 16

The first time a Christmas song broke my heart, I was in the local pound shop, weighing up whether holly print toilet roll (surprisingly tasteful) was a bad idea, when the first notes of that famous Mariah Carey song warbled from the sound system. At the same moment, a card in the display next to me caught my eye: ‘Happy Christmas, Sister’. It was an awful card: cartoon puppies in Santa hats, and a saccharine poem. I would only have bought it for Helen as a joke. But the combination of the card, and the song, and a sudden, shocking sinking-in of reality, hit me with a force that literally floored me.

 
It would be Christmas soon, and my sister was dead.

 
‘All I want for Christmas is you’, sang Mariah, and it was true, and I slid down among the tinsel and toilet paper, crouching with my fists balled into my eye sockets.

 
After that, throughout that first December after Helen died aged sixteen, I did all I could to avoid Christmas songs- walking into shops then walking out again as Bing Crosby crooned that next year, all our troubles would be out of sight (they wouldn’t, I knew).
 

I frequently found myself sweaty with panic. What were we going to do, at Christmas, without Helen? The women of my family are Christmas People. We flick through festive recipe books in October. Our Christmas trees have themes. We always, always cry happy tears at children’s crib services. How could we ever be Christmas People again, when this horror of horrors had occurred?

 
How could I enjoy the day without the four of us siblings- my brother, my two sisters, and I- getting into the same bed, and opening our stockings together? Helen’s would always include an item of festive headgear: glittery deely-boppers; a headband adorned with felt holly leaves. These small details formed part of who we were. Christmas is where we define ourselves as families, even as sisters and brothers become adults and lives change. Now the shape of our family was jagged and wrong- a corner knocked off our sibling square- so how could the shape of our Christmas ever feel right?

 
But as the dreaded first Christmas without Helen approached, I found comfort in the season in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

 
There was comfort in ritual. Just as we turn to ritual at times of grief- the well-rehearsed performance of a funeral, the lighting of candles with unsteady hands- so the traditions of Christmas soothed the grief I felt afresh. I baked mince pies, just as I had always done, long into the night with sad music in the background- anything but Christmas songs. I dried orange slices and tied red velvet bows for my tree, and I exchanged text messages with my Mum and surviving sister about the themes of theirs. Just as I always had done, however hard it felt.

 
There was comfort in the Christmas story, and the darkness inherent in it: a baby whose birth we celebrated, but whose death we would mark in a few short months. A child born to die, just like all of us. For the first time, I recognised the sadness at the heart of the magic.

 
And, when Christmas Day came around, there was magic at the heart of the sadness. There were novelty crackers with a game involving plastic whistles, and instructions too complicated for people dealing with not just bereavement, but several glasses of prosecco and copious amounts of red wine, to follow. There was Grandpa, a retired vicar, who had somehow held himself upright to conduct the funeral service for his granddaughter just five months previously, now with tears of laughter running down the sides of his face and a whistle in his mouth. There were party hats- lopsided, of course.
There were butterflies, that Christmas- peacock butterflies, alive and fluttering around the house, landing on curtains and resting on the Christmas tree.  Call it nature. Call it a premature awakening from hibernation caused by central heating use. Call it magic.

 
Eleven more Christmases have passed since then, and we have worked to shape a new sort of Christmas, with new traditions. Some of them have been fleeting. The year we had mulled wine gathered around Helen’s grave, the grim pain of it choked me so that I couldn’t swallow my mince pie. We didn’t do that again.  Some new traditions have lasted. Our cousin, a ceramic artist, crafted delicate decorations bearing Helen’s name, and mine hangs at the top of my tree each year.  We raise our glasses to Helen at dinner. And there are always candles, lit by hands sometimes steady, sometimes shaking.

 
But there is comfort, too, in the fact that so much of Christmas can never be new. Across the country, everybody does the same things, give or take a few details. We exchange gifts, we eat Christmas dinner, we sing the same songs, and we fall into a stilton and port coma in front of a TV Christmas special at the end of it. There is comfort in doing those things with my family, in still being a family, even with a Helen-shaped hole. There is comfort, and there is joy.

 
It has become easier (I say this to you, urgently, if you are reading this in the throes of new bereavement: it has become easier). I might still cry when Christmas songs play in stores- but now it’s a silent weep rather than collapsing in a snotty mess on the floor. My siblings and I have all had children, and so the shape of our Christmas has changed organically, as it always would have done. It’s impossible to feel too sad as I watch my children dressed as donkeys and angels dancing in their nativity plays- even as the memory of Helen, shy and perfect as Mary aged five, spears my soul. With the children, we can build a new sort of Christmas Future, which holds Christmas Past gently at its heart.

 
It’s easier, and it’s hard. It’s still hard, and God, we miss her. But we keep going, determinedly Christmassy. We throw cinnamon sticks and star anise into pans of hot wine. We build gingerbread houses and pretend it’s for the benefit of the kids. We deck the bloody halls. We even listen to Christmas music.  Even if, sometimes, we want no part in a festival that doesn’t involve Helen donning a pair of sparkly reindeer antlers.  Because it’s what we do. We’re Christmas People, and it’s Christmas, and we’re still living, while she cannot. And so we live.

Becky Garrod

TV producer, fiction writer, worrier, mum. Since having two children I'm usually to be found on the verge of tears of happiness or frustration.

View profile for posts, events and more info