The Empty Chair: Honoring First Holidays After Major Life Transitions
By Jen Bennethum
Merry Christmas to all of you navigating your first holiday season in a life that looks nothing like last year's.
I see you staring at the traditions that no longer fit, the photos that tell a story that's ended, the muscle memory of reaching for someone who isn't there. Whether your empty chair holds the ghost of death, divorce, estrangement, diagnosis, or the person you used to be before everything changed—this season asks you to celebrate while grieving, to find light while honoring the darkness that brought you here.
"Your body keeps the receipts from every December you survived. This year, honor the accountant within—she's been working overtime to keep you safe." - Jen Bennethum
When November Becomes a Thief
Anticipatory grief doesn't wait politely for the actual holiday. It starts creeping in with the first fall decorations, the first holiday commercial, the first time someone asks about your plans. November becomes a thief, stealing your present moments with flash-forwards to an empty chair at the table, silence where laughter lived, or the exhausting performance of being okay.
Your body starts grieving before your mind admits what's coming. The dread in your chest, the exhaustion that sleep can't fix, the irritability at cheerful strangers—this is anticipatory grief doing its invisible work. You're not being dramatic. You're metabolizing a future loss in real time, and that takes enormous energy.
For those facing holidays after diagnosis—whether your own or a loved one's—the anticipation carries a particular cruelty. You're grieving certainty itself. The body you trusted, the future you planned, the identity you wore so easily. Every "Merry Christmas" feels like a mockery of the plot twist you didn't see coming.
When Gratitude Becomes Violence
Here's what nobody tells you about navigating major transitions during "the season of gratitude": Traditional gratitude messaging can feel like violence when you're hemorrhaging losses. Being told to "count your blessings" when you're counting empty chairs feels like being asked to perform joy at your own funeral.
The cultural insistence on holiday happiness becomes a kind of gaslighting. Your grief is real, your loss is valid, and your inability to feel grateful for what remains doesn't make you broken—it makes you human. Toxic positivity is still toxic when it's wrapped in tinsel.
The friends who disappear when your life stops looking Facebook-ready, the family members who want you to "move on" because your pain makes their holidays uncomfortable, the relentless messaging that you should be over it by now—these are all forms of secondary loss that compound the original wound.
The Particular Grief of Estrangement
If your empty chair exists because of estrangement, you carry a grief that many don't understand. Society has rituals for death, processes for divorce, but estrangement lives in a liminal space. The person exists but not for you. The relationship breathes somewhere else while you hold its ghost.
Estrangement during holidays brings unique torture: knowing they're celebrating somewhere, perhaps painting you as the villain in their version of the story. Or worse, knowing they're not thinking of you at all. The complicated grief of estrangement—love tangled with anger, relief braided with sorrow—defies the neat categories that sympathy cards offer.
For those estranged from family of origin, the holidays can trigger cellular memories of why you had to leave. Your body might be flooded with the same feelings that made estrangement necessary, even as you grieve what could have been. This isn't regression—it's your nervous system reminding you why you chose survival.
Creating Meaning in the Void
When everything has changed, creating new meaning isn't about replacing what was—it's about honoring the transformation you're surviving. This might look like rituals that acknowledge the both/and of your experience.
Some people create an honoring ceremony for their empty chair—setting a place, lighting a candle, speaking the name or the loss aloud. Others find meaning in the opposite—removing chairs, changing tables, eating somewhere that holds no memories. Both are sacred responses to absence.
For those navigating identity transitions, whether through diagnosis, divorce, or other life upheavals, meaning-making might focus on meeting yourself where you are now. This could involve writing a letter to who you were last Christmas, creating art that expresses what words can't hold, or simply allowing yourself to not know who you're becoming yet.
The key is releasing the pressure to make it meaningful in the way others expect. Your meaning might be surviving the day. It might be crying through dinner. It might be booking a trip to somewhere that doesn't celebrate Christmas. All of these are valid ways to honor your transition.
For Parents: Modeling the Full Spectrum
If you're navigating this while parenting, you carry the additional weight of modeling healthy grieving while managing your own pain. Children need to see that grief and joy can coexist, that sadness doesn't ruin celebrations, and that feeling multiple things at once is human, not confusing.
Name the empty chair simply and honestly. "Daddy won't be here this Christmas because divorce means we live in different houses now." "Grandma's body was too sick to stay alive, so she died. We feel sad because we miss her." "Mommy's brain is sick in a way called depression. That's why she seems different." Clear truth serves children better than comfortable lies.
Let them see you cry, then let them see you find moments of lightness. Show them that grief isn't a problem to solve but a love with nowhere to go. Create new rituals together that honor what's missing while building what's possible. Maybe you all share one memory before dinner, maybe you donate to something the missing person cared about, maybe you do something completely new that belongs only to your transformed family.
Remember that children often grieve in spurts—devastated one moment, playing the next. This isn't callousness; it's developmental appropriateness. They're showing you that grief and life can dance together. Learn from them.
The Unexpected Gifts of Forced Transformation
This might feel impossible to believe right now, but first holidays after major transitions can carry unexpected gifts. Not silver linings—those diminish the loss. But genuine gifts that exist alongside the pain.
The gift of dropping pretense because you simply can't maintain it anymore. The gift of discovering who shows up when your life stops looking pretty. The gift of learning you can survive what you thought would kill you. The gift of finally being honest about what wasn't working, even if it took disaster to reveal it.
Some discover that their empty chair held someone who was already absent—the diagnosis just made it visible, the divorce official, the death final. The transition forces a reckoning with what was already true but unspoken. This doesn't minimize the loss, but it can bring a strange relief alongside the grief.
Moving Forward: Not Moving On
As you face this transformed holiday season, remember that moving forward doesn't mean moving on. You get to carry your love, your grief, your anger, your relief—all of it—into whatever comes next. Integration, not abandonment.
Maybe this year's holiday gift to yourself is permission to do it badly. Permission to cry at inappropriate times, to leave gatherings early, to eat cereal for Christmas dinner, to tell the truth when someone asks how you are. Permission to honor your empty chair in whatever way feels survivable.
Your new life doesn't have to be better for it to be worthy. It just has to be yours. The empty chair will always be part of your story, but it doesn't have to be the only story you tell. This Christmas, you're writing a new chapter with a protagonist who's been transformed by loss. That character—bruised, brave, becoming—deserves compassion, patience, and space to discover what celebration means now.
The chair is empty. You are still here. Both truths matter. Both truths deserve witness. And in that witnessing, perhaps you'll find not healing—that's too neat, too final—but a way to be whole that includes the break. Please feel free to reach out to us at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective if you want more information or if you want us to walk with you on your journey to wholeness.
