My mother and I had to survive the festivities somehow. We did, but my ‘rage-whisking’ needed months of physiotherapy
Grief doesn’t follow a timeline. Nor does the calendar make allowances for grief. My father died of lung cancer in February 2014. Following the initial months of intense sadness, I found that I could just about cope day to day by sticking to a routine. But holidays and special occasions – they served as acute reminders of Dad’s absence, and triggered painful waves. I was not interested in Christmas that December. But it came around anyway, and something had to be done about it.
Ours was a mixed-faith family – my father was raised in Reform Judaism, my mother the Church of Scotland, and my siblings and I were brought up with no formal religious affiliation – so our Christmas traditions were never that traditional, and pretty low-key. But they were ours, and my father was an important part of them: playing Handel’s Messiah on the stereo, carving the turkey with an electric knife, ripping his cracker’s paper crown because it was always too small for his head. Singing in Hebrew over the Hanukah candles in the years when the two festivals overlapped.
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