Serenity Casket - Celebrating the Holidays Without A Loved One

It’s the New Year.

A new year.

You cannot believe the speed at which 2021 whizzed past. In the blink of an eye, it is 2022. You look around and cannot help but wonder: Where did the time go?

In 2021, there were days when it felt like time was slipping away from you, so busy with this and that you could hardly stop to take a breath. Family. Work. Family. Work. There never seemed to be enough time to do it all.

Then there were the days you felt frozen in place. When time slowed to an excruciating crawl and you inched along, minute after minute, waiting restlessly for nightfall so you had the excuse to climb into bed and call it a day. On those days, errant thoughts would invade your unguarded mind, unprovoked. Before you know it, you find yourself lying awake all night thinking about that family member or that friend who felt like family whom you lost, remembering the good, the embarrassing, the sad. Maybe it was recent, some time in the past year, or perhaps they have gone a long time, decades even; still, the memory of them remains fresh. The holiday season does that to you. First Christmas, now New Year’s.

At Serenity, we know loss intimately. Apart from dealing with the death of others every day, we have to grapple with the loss of our own. We have to make difficult decisions: To embalm them ourselves? Or will the pain be too much? To handle the minutiae of their funeral personally? Or let a colleague do it? In our experience, you don’t get used to it, no matter how frequent the losses. It gets even harder when special occasions roll around.

That is why for the new year, we hope to make it easier for you to celebrate without your loved ones. In this article, we bring you 3 ways you can continue to include them, in spirit, in this time of festivities.

1. Prepare their favourite food

Did your loved one have a favourite dish? One they always craved? Or something they enjoyed making for everyone? To ring in the new year, prepare their favourite food in their honour and share it amongst those who knew them.

Think back to the food they constantly talked about. It could be a uniquely-flavoured ice cream only they liked, noodles they would buy specially from a particular stall, or the porridge they ate as a child. Gather everyone to create this dish together. Besides remembering the departed through the food, family and friends can also take this time to reconnect and bond over the person they all loved.

A family eats a meal together | Photo by Debbie Tea on Unsplash

2. Toast to the ones that we lost

As you eat, get someone to make a toast to your loved one. Better yet, take turns giving toasts. Share a few words over the meal to remember them and what they meant to you. Trade anecdotes with each other so that even though they are gone, their memory is not.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. – Thomas Campbell

Tell the story of the time they did something embarrassing that you witnessed and had a good laugh over. Or the time they accomplished a goal they’d been working towards for a long time and you rejoiced with them. Or the time the two of you shared a tender moment and cried into each other’s arms. Kick off the new year holding them close to your heart.

A couple clinks their glasses of champagne together | Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash

3. Make a special trip down to their resting place

If your loved one was buried or have their ashes stored in a columbarium, take the new year as an opportunity to visit them and do some spring cleaning of their grave or niche. Bring a fresh change of flowers and replace the old ones to usher in a new beginning. Add some decorative items that mean something to you and your loved one and beautify the area the way you think they would have liked. These trips can become something of a ritual for you and your family, each new year a chance for all to remember those who have gone but remain close by in spirit.