For families in mourning, the season of cheer can intensify grief

The year before her husband, John, was diagnosed with cancer, Emmy Neilson mailed a typical Christmas card outlining her family's busy activities with a young daughter and toddler twins.

The next year there was no card at all, as the family was in Chicago while John underwent experimental treatment. The following year, seven months after John's death, the card held a picture of Neilson and her three children and a short note thanking everyone for their support and kindness.

"The Christmas cards are sort of a statement of our lives," said Neilson, whose husband died in 1999 of lymphoma.

Families who grieve a lost loved one during the holidays deal with an absence at a time when everyone else is celebrating the togetherness of family. Holiday music, the smell of turkey, commercials showing happy children opening gifts — all can be painful triggers for families still raw with grief.

"Grieving families feel like aliens on a planet geared to celebration," said Mel Erickson, program director for the Auburn-based GriefWorks. "With the lights and the glitz of the season, their hearts are just way out of sync."

The season is especially challenging for parents coping with the death of a spouse or child while still trying to maintain holiday cheer in some form for their surviving children.

In 2000, more than 40,400 infants and children under age 15 died in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Parents lost another 31,307 children age 15 to 24 that year.

Some 857,000 children under age 18 lived with a widowed parent in 2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"As a new family, you care so much about setting traditions," said Neilson, who serves on the board of directors for Safe Crossings, a program operated by Providence Hospice of Seattle for children who have lost a parent. "You do things that you think you're going to do year after year.

"What happens when a loved one dies is that all those traditions you set up are just a reminder of what you don't have anymore. You're not only grieving the fact that a loved one is gone — you're grieving that all those traditions don't matter anymore because your loved one isn't there."

Neilson took her children to Delaware, San Francisco and even South Africa to stay with relatives every Thanksgiving and Christmas after her husband's death. She just knew on a gut level that she didn't want to be home alone.

"The old norm doesn't exist anymore," said Rex Allen, grief support services manager for Providence Hospice of Seattle. "And beginning to discover what the new norm is can feel like a violation against the person who died. It feels like another loss of that person."

Experts suggest grieving families incorporate their lost loved ones into the holidays, whether through new traditions, such as making a remembrance ornament, or by continuing to acknowledge their emotional presence in existing rituals, such as still hanging up their stocking.

"Including the person in the holiday celebration is a healthy venue for expressing the love that continues to bubble up in us, even though that person is not here," Erickson said.

Neilson's husband loved to cook and entertain during the holidays; and they'd choose a tree together (rarely without a fight over which one). It wasn't until last year that she could return to the traditions from what she calls her "previous life."

"I get the tree now and lug it in the house," she said. She cooks the Thanksgiving turkey. The celebration this year will include her boyfriend, who supports the family's efforts to remember John.

But that first Christmas, "I basically let the energy of family members carry me," Neilson said. Outside, their Laurelhurst home had lights, but she didn't decorate inside or put up a tree. For her children — Susie, who turns 11 next month, and twins Jay and Ellie, now 8 — her parents picked up extra presents so she didn't have to shop.

The family spent the first Thanksgiving at his sister's house. The dinner prayer mentioned the absence of a husband, brother and son, "how it felt like a hole" in the family.

Now they mark her husband's birthday — Nov. 28 — by going to the Space Needle and reading a book of his values that John wrote before his death.

Those first years, it was important to be around close family, who appreciated being able to help, Neilson said.

"You need to feel like even though it's Thanksgiving Day, you can cry and it's OK because people understand and love you," she said. "If you're around people you love, you don't have to push away your feelings, which are powerful around the holidays."

Stephanie Dunnewind: sdunnewind@seattletimes.com.