Last year, my brother lost his lifelong battle with addiction and complications from diabetes. He passed away on my mom's birthday, November 30. We also share the same birthday, November 10.
Which means that for the rest of my life, we will grieve him on my birthday, her birthday, and Christmas.
I wanted to write something soft and comforting. Something that would help you survive the first holiday without them. But the truth is, grief is a f*cked up, deeply personal beast. The way it shows up for me will not look like the way it shows up for you.
My brother's death came wrapped in a confusing mix of sadness, relief, guilt, shame, embarrassment, love, anger, and long stretches of numbness. In many ways, I had already been mourning him my entire life. Addiction had taken him away long before his body did. I carry more painful memories than joyful ones, and that's a complicated thing to admit out loud.
When you love someone with addiction, you carry a specific fear in your chest at all times. You learn to walk a delicate line: cheering them on without enabling, holding hope without losing yourself, loving deeply while bracing for the worst. If you know, you know.
I gave the eulogy at his funeral, and it captured the full spectrum of that relationship. Love and loss. Pride and grief. Relief and heartbreak. All existing at the same time.
So this first Christmas without him feels… oddly familiar. Because he wasn't here for many Christmases before this one.
The difference now is permanence.
This year, we're not just dealing with absence. We're confronting the truth that he will never come back. He will never make things right. There will be no redemption arc, no future holiday where things are different. This is it.
I'm also watching my mom grieve in ways that cut deeper than I expected. We're also Jewish, and every Friday during Shabbat, when the names of loved ones who've passed are spoken aloud, she cries. I watch her mourn not just the son she lost, but the life she wished he could have lived. I watch her question every decision she ever made, wondering if a different path might have saved him.
And I carry my own complicated grief alongside hers.
I feel sad for myself, and then I feel ashamed for not feeling sad enough. I feel embarrassed when I say, "Yeah, my brother passed," and don't feel the kind of devastation people expect. I'm grieving a relationship that was fractured, heavy, and shaped by addiction, and that doesn't fit neatly into the version of grief we're taught is "acceptable."
I'm also reckoning with my childhood, with how growing up alongside addiction shaped me, and with how my mom's enabling—rooted in love—also impacted who I became.
All of this is to say: if you're grieving this holiday season, whatever that looks like for you, please hear this.
There is no right way to grieve.
Grief is one emotion every single one of us will face at some point. Whether you're mourning a parent, a sibling, a partner, a friend, or someone you had a complicated relationship with, whatever you're feeling is valid. You don't need to explain it. You don't need to justify it. You don't need to perform it for anyone else.
As Tuesdays with Morrie so beautifully puts it: allow yourself to feel an emotion fully, then detach from it equally, and move on to the next one when it arrives.
Life is meant to be lived in all of it. The joy. The pain. The confusion. The love that doesn't disappear just because someone does.
If this is your first holiday without them, hang in there. Do the best you can. That's enough.
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