Anniversaries, holidays and the empty chair: getting through the dates

“I’m already tense from November onwards. Not because Christmas is terrible in itself. Because I know it’s coming.”

This is how a woman described it to me a year after losing her mother. Her winter didn’t begin with December but with the first advent window display she noticed in mid-November. From there everything led towards one day on which one chair at the table would be empty.

Dates are a particular kind of burden in grief. They are not a surprise — we all know when the anniversary comes, his birthday, the first Christmas, the first spring without him. And that is exactly why they are hard in their own way: ahead of them lies a stretch of time that fills up with anticipation, and that stretch is often worse than the day itself.

Why a date does anything at all

Part of the explanation is fairly simple. Our memories are not stored as free-floating facts but together with the setting in which they formed. The smell of cinnamon, a particular song, the way the sun falls into the kitchen in April — all of it becomes a key to a whole bundle of memories. When the setting repeats, the bundle opens. Which is why on an anniversary what strikes a person is often not the thought of the death but something entirely small: the same dish, the same place, the same sound.

The second part is anticipation. If you know a date is approaching, you start rehearsing. You picture the table, you picture the question someone will ask, you picture the moment when you’ll have to say something. Every rehearsal is a small dose of distress — and because you do dozens of them, by the day itself you are already exhausted.

The third part is social. Holidays are the only days of the year on which how you are supposed to feel is clearly prescribed. Every other day is neutral. Christmas, New Year, Mother’s Day and birthdays carry a rule about mood, and if yours doesn’t match, you feel either broken or as though you are spoiling it for everyone else.

The dread is often worse than the day

This is the most useful finding I can offer, and I hear it in my room again and again: the anticipation was worse than the day itself.

Research on predicting our own feelings consistently shows that we overestimate how strongly and how long an event will affect us. We underestimate how quickly small things intrude into any day and distract us — food, a child getting into trouble, a phone call, laughter at a memory. The day is rarely what we pictured, even when it is hard.

It doesn’t follow that there is no point preparing. Something else follows: you also need to prepare for the week before. If you know the tension will build, don’t load those days with a house move, an annual report and visiting relatives all at once. And if you feel weak because your chest has been tight for a fortnight already — you aren’t. Your body is simply counting the days, because the calendar taught it to.

Why holidays are harder than anniversaries

The anniversary of a death is private. A holiday is public and has a script: who comes, what gets cooked, who sits where, when the toast is made. It is precisely this script that hurts, because the person who died was named in it. Someone carved the roast every year. Someone was always late. Someone told the same joke. When that person is missing, it isn’t only the mood that collapses but the construction of the day.

This is why at holidays it is often more useful to change the form than the content. If lunch is at the same table at the same hour every year, this year the hour can move, you can sit somewhere else, or you can go to someone else’s house. People resist this, because it feels like a betrayal of tradition. In fact changing the form removes exactly what sets things off — the precise repetition of a scene in which the missing person is most visible.

Holidays also bring people. Some of them will ask how you are, and some will avoid exactly that. Both hurt, differently. And because it is all compressed into a few hours, there is no room for what usually helps: withdrawing, silence, crying when it comes.

The empty chair

The question I most often get in December is entirely concrete: should the chair stay at the table or should we take it away?

There is no answer that holds for everyone. For some families an empty chair means the person still belongs at the table, and they leave it. For others, catching sight of it every five minutes is unbearable, and they move it. What matters more than the decision is two things: that the decision is spoken aloud in advance rather than left to the moment when everyone is already standing in the dining room, and that it holds for this year only.

The same goes for every other object that surfaces at the holidays: his glass, his ornament on the tree, his handwriting on an old card that falls out of a box. None of it demands a decision now. You are allowed to shut the box and open it in a year’s time, and that isn’t avoidance but pacing. Nobody can take all of it at once, and there is no reason they should have to.

That second part brings people the most relief. Decisions about holidays are not for life. If you can’t manage the church service this year, it doesn’t mean you’ll never go again. If you can’t manage decorating the tree, it doesn’t mean you’ve given up on Christmas. Every decision has a shelf life of one year.

A plan that isn’t a timetable

When I prepare with someone for a difficult date, we don’t make a timetable. We make three lists that are short and deliberately incomplete.

The most important is the third column, and specifically its first two items. A fire exit means saying in advance that you may leave early, and that you won’t be explaining it. An ally means one person who knows why you are there and who will walk out with you without a word when you glance towards the door.

Rituals work better than you’d think

At holidays people are often embarrassed at the idea of “staging” anything. Lighting a candle and saying a sentence feels theatrical. Yet research on rituals after loss shows that simple, repeatable acts genuinely reduce distress — and, interestingly, they work even when a person doesn’t believe in them and even when they invent them themselves.

The explanation that seems most plausible to me is a sense of control. After a loss there is no action available that would change anything. A ritual is the one act you can actually perform — small, bounded, yours. So it makes no difference whether it is a glass of his wine, a walk along the same path, or a sentence you say aloud every year.

In practice I suggest keeping the ritual short and placed at a particular moment of the day rather than spread across it. Ten minutes with a clear beginning and end is easier to bear than twelve hours of vague expectation that something significant will happen.

When the family disagrees

The most painful arguments I see in December are not about inheritance. They are about whether the person who died will be spoken of or not. One part of the family wants to raise a glass and tell stories; the other wants to get through lunch without a mention, because they know that otherwise they will fall apart.

Neither side is wrong. People really do grieve differently, and the same table can hold two ways at once. What mostly works is an agreement about time rather than content: five minutes before lunch in which anything may be said — a toast, tears, a candle lit. After that, lunch goes on with no obligation. The one who needs words gets a place for them, and the one who can’t bear them knows when it ends.

If your family pressures you to come when you can’t, or to stay longer than you’re able, this is a question of boundaries and not a question of love. I’ve written about that in the piece on setting boundaries.

Where this doesn’t hold

Now against myself. Everything above assumes you have at least some control over how the day will go. Many people have none.

If you have small children, you can’t avoid the holidays and you can’t leave early either. If you work shifts, in a shop or in healthcare, you may be working on the date itself and your plan is beside the point. If you live in a house with a mother-in-law who prepares everything every year, your “I drop” column isn’t realistic. Then the only thing left is lowering your expectations of yourself: the day will be what it will be, and getting through it is enough.

The second limitation is that planning itself can turn into a form of rumination. If you notice that two months ahead you are running scenarios in your head every evening, that isn’t preparation. It is a form of the distressed rehearsal I’ve written about in the piece on catastrophising — and for that kind of churning, postponing worry to a set time works better than yet another version of the plan.

And third, the most uncomfortable: for some people anniversaries are not hard at all, and that is equally fine. If your mother’s birthday surprised you this year by passing unnoticed, it doesn’t mean you didn’t love her. For many, grief doesn’t organise itself around the calendar but around entirely random moments — a smell in a corridor, a stranger with a similar walk. If you feel you “ought” to feel something on the anniversary, that sense of duty isn’t your grief but a script from outside.

When a date is more than a hard day

Some tension before an anniversary and some hard hours on the day itself are expected. What I pay attention to is when the bracing stretches across months, and when avoiding the holidays gradually drops a person out of every relationship they have.

If thoughts appear around these dates that you would rather not be here, that isn’t something to sleep off until January. It is a reason to talk to someone straight away — your GP, a crisis line, or a professional.

What to remember

Dates hurt because you see them coming, and the weeks before them are often worse than the day itself. Knowing that, what you can most usefully lighten is the run-up, not only the day.

For the day itself, three things are enough: something you keep, something you drop this year, and an exit agreed in advance with one person who knows. A short ritual at a set moment helps more than it seems, even if it feels contrived.

And most importantly: every decision about the holidays holds for this year only. You are not deciding what your life will be like, only how you will get through one day. I’ve described how grief reshapes itself over the years in the piece on sadness as a process, and how to be less harsh with yourself on days like these in the piece on self-compassion.