I’m in the middle of my very own holy week, bookended at one end by Dalia’s birthday and the other by the date she died.
I know how to say all the pretty things about honoring my girl and her life and giving myself grace to feel what I feel, and on and on. I even wrote about it last year in an article for Psychology Today.
And I still believe those things.
But I also feel like total crap this week, physically and emotionally, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.
I planned to celebrate Dalia’s birthday by baking a cake (or cheering my husband on while he baked one, more likely).
Celebrating my people’s birthdays, whether or not they’re still here, is so important to me. President George Washington didn’t mean nearly as much to me as my daughter or my sisters or my parents, and we have a whole national holiday to celebrate his birth. You can bet I’m going to orchestrate some cheer to honor the people who made me who I am.
But I didn’t plan on having a yucky cold or spending the day ruminating on who a 20-year-old Dalia would be, or feeling cheated by her death. All of which goes to show, the best laid plans…
Next year I might take a page out of sisters Blair Kaplan Venables and Alana Kaplan’s playbook. Each year, they plan an entire Grief Week – with t-shirts and everything – to marinate in their grief during the anniversary of their parents’ deaths.
Blair and Alana were my guests this week on “I Don’t Know How You Do It.” Blair and Alana are co-hosts of the “Resilient AF” podcast, so you can surmise that our conversation was fairly irreverent.
We spoke about Grief Week, and also:
Why you should strengthen your resilience muscles before you need them
Real ways to go about strengthening said resilience muscles
The transformative power of Blair’s plant-medicine journeys
How to schedule time for your grief or anxiety
What it’s like behind-the-scenes at the Oscars Gifting Lounge
And so much more…
You can listen to the episode here.
How do you honor the special days of your people? Do you prefer the celebrate-the-heck-out-of-them mindset or the “wake me up when it’s over” kind of approach? Let me know in the comments.
With grit and grace,
Jessie
My son Henry loved Indian food and we'd go to an Indian restaurant each year on his birthday. So now my husband and I order chana masala, aloo gobi, and naan to celebrate his birthday.
On the anniversary of his death, it's still too hard for my husband and me to do anything festive. We just take a walk.
I am lucky to be a part of a group of women who lost their mums and we like to celebrate them together. For Mother’s Day and also my mum’s bday we go away for a weekend to reminisce and laugh and cry. For my mum’s anniversary, my sister and I and our husbands go to my mum’s grave and to dinner. We each bring a red rose for the grave and we dry out another one and put it in the vase each year. She always had a red rose in a vase on her mantle for her dad so it’s our version of that tradition.