Whilst there is the phenomenon of seasonal affective disorder that affects so many people this time of year (and at other times of year as well), there is also the phenomenon of penetrating grief for losses intruding on people’s Christmas season this year and every year.
Of course, grief is a seasonal catastrophe where loss has ripped through the heart of a person who has no answer for what life has come to be. It is ironic that seasonal affective disorder has the acronym S.A.D. There is no worse sadness than the compound depression, anxiety, fear, amid panic attacks of that grief season that engulfs the person and consumes their hope, particularly as the annual season approaches and the descent is made once more into an abyss.
Grief is what we feel when we experience loss amid a world that is celebrating.
What a scourge it is for the lonely and overwhelmed. There is no way to make the loneliness lonelier than ever than to put the lonely in the presence of the joyous.
And a person only needs to live this reality once in their lifetime to be convinced that it’s the worst time of year for those who are grieving, for those who are triggered, for those battling their S.A.D. grief, than Christmas.
When everyone is getting together and having wonderful meals amid the merriment of Christmas, or Thanksgiving for that matter, it sheets home the calamity, and the strain and stress of that struggle cannot be communicated with words. The affect is polarising.
Loneliness is a riveting kind of grief that sends a person into the estrangement of disconnection when a simple intimacy would do wonders. Blessed are they who genuinely appreciate and like their own company, but if there’s too much of it, or that aloneness is forced upon a person, it means all agency is taken away, and that can be incredibly disempowering.
Christmas can be the worst time to be reminded of what you don’t have, especially when it’s so apparent that many people seem to have all their lives together.
And because Christmas happens exactly a week before New Year’s Day, it’s a double whammy of peace and joy that are missing, plus the fresh hopes of a new year dashed at the prospect of more pain. Then there’s the quietness of new year which paradoxically can prove just as much if not more a burden especially in our loneliness than the ‘feeling lonely in a crowded room’ scenario the lonely face at Christmas.
If it’s you who is quietly reading these words, perhaps teary because they’re all too true, know my empathy goes out to you, for I had 2003 and 2004 as my worst Christmases. I was beyond lonely, and it didn’t matter how much family I had around me. Indeed, with family around it was too much of a reminder of what I was missing out on, not that it was their fault.
For those of us who are enjoying life, those for which life is great, we could spare a moment, a prayer, a kindness, a reaching out, for the one who is struggling. We may not be able to do much about another person’s pain, but at least we can connect with the reality of their pain. It is something.
Whether it’s true seasonal affective disorder or a seasonal bout of grief for a fresh or ongoing loss or the annual cycle of loss on repeat matters little. The pain of grief is astonishing, as much as loss is strikingly the loneliest of states.
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