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Dread or Hope for December

Already I hear the dreads of this month. The lack of funds to buy gifts, being alone for the holiday, embracing the pain of loss and trying to navigate the grief journey and the isolation and uncertainness that is felt due to Covid restrictions. Many are also feeling more depression and with less hope.

How can community support those who are feeling such deep pain and how can those grieving recognize their needs and find a safe and supportive friend or group.

Grief is hard work and those who grieve will feel some; physical, emotional, behavioural, and spiritual symptoms of grief. Many will experience role changes and there is a sense of confusion, isolation and depression, feeling hopeless and helpless. These feelings are increased and heightened by Covid. Many may fear what lies ahead and wonder if they will survive, or even care if they do.

Learn all you can about the Grief Journey, to empower and help you face each day.

• This month be kind to yourself, plan but don’t use all your energy in planning. Take some quiet time to reflect and remember positive memories.

• Put memories into action by preparing a favourite dish, sending a positive message to a friend or family and a memory of your loved one. Donate in memory of your loved one.

• Care for and value yourself. Eat nutritionally (even if you don’t have an appetite) , go for a walk or run (something we can do even during Covid), listen to music, play and instrument or sing, draw or paint or journal.

• Accept your limits. (Remember grieving is hard work and you may feel exhausted)

• Create a new tradition (a good year to try), Perhaps next year you can go back to what was comforting.

• Be honest with your feelings and recognize other family members may grieve differently.

• Recognize that loss has created a change in you. Embrace your change as you journey through grief and find hope and a gift of gratitude.

For those who support the grieving, you may wonder what can I do for them, what kind of gift can I give?

• Give them your hands to assist where needed and don’t predetermine what is needed. (What you determine needs to be thrown out might be of emotional value.)

• Can you give your heart of compassion? (seeing from behind the griever’s eyes). A heart that asks, “How would I want to be treated?”

• Give them the gift of a listening ear. Often people get weary of listening to those who grieve.

• Give the gift of your presence. Just being! The sacrifice of your time and yourself.

THEN REACH OUT AND GIVE and perhaps you can have a Christmas heart all year.

Exerts from The True Spirit of Christmas By -Henry van Dyke 1905

It is a good thing to observe Christmas day. The mere marking of times and seasons, when men agree to stop work and make merry together, is a wise and wholesome custom. It helps one to feel the supremacy of the common life over the individual life. It reminds a man to set his own little watch, now and then by the great clock of humanity, which runs on the sun time.

But there is a better thing than the observance of Christmas day, and that is keeping Christmas.

Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow men are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness – are you willing to do these things even for a day?

Are you willing to stoop down and consider the needs and the desires of little children; to remember the weakness and loneliness of people who are growing old; to stop asking how much your friends love you, and ask yourself whether you love them enough; to bear in mind the things that other people have to bear on their hearts; to try to understand what those who live in the same house with you really want, without waiting for them to tell you; to trim your lamp so that it will give more light and less smoke, and to carry it in front so that your shadow will fall behind you; to make a grave for your ugly thoughts, and a garden for your kindly feelings, with the gate open-are you willing to do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.

Are you willing to believe that love is the strongest thing in the world- stronger than death- and that the blessed life which began in Bethlehem nineteen hundred years ago is the image and brightness of the Eternal Love?

And if you can keep it for a day, why not always?



Submitted by: Shirley L Scott for Walking Through Grief Society

Supported by: FCSS ; City of Lloydminster, Towns of Vermilion and Wainwright, Villages of Kitscoty and Marwayne, County Vermilion River and donations.

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