Facing Christmas and building new traditions after loss

Lindsay Lucas shares how she coped with Christmas after her husband died.

After being together for 27 years, married for 20, parents of a glorious daughter for 12, my beloved Trevor died very suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at about 8pm on Wednesday 23 March 2011.

While he had clearly been unwell for some weeks, his death was a complete shock – I went out to collect our daughter, Bethany, from a choir practice leaving him happily playing on the computer, but on my return, found him dead on the bathroom floor.

Christmas came nine months later. It had always been a day where the family came to us – we decorated the house, dressed a tree, and put all the final touches to everything on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day was usually frenetic. I did all the cooking while Trevor was always in charge of keeping everyone in drinks and was also the ‘washer-upper’, working hard all day. We usually collapsed in front of his beloved Dr Who in the evening – all in all, Christmas was absolute teamwork between Trevor and I – a wonderful example of ‘us’ at our best.

We took it for granted and that was what hit me like a runaway train as my mind turned to this ‘first Christmas’ without him. I knew that without Trevor Christmas would be so completely different, but I didn’t want to give up on much of what was good about it. I knew we needed to ‘mark’ him yet also do some new things that would perhaps become ‘new’ traditions.

I set about preparing ways to remember him well in advance. He called himself ‘Daddy Bear’ to Bethany so I bought a lovely teddy candle holder and lit a tea light in it on the table for Christmas lunch – tough that first year, but easier the second. The second Christmas, we made a small tree decoration by putting his photo in a small picture frame on ribbon, hanging it on the tree on Christmas Eve. If Bethany had been smaller, we would have made a cardboard tree decoration with his photo on it – just a simple one that she could have written her message to him on the back. Making a new, personal decoration for him will be a new ‘tradition’ each year now.

As a family, we had never done anything special on Christmas Eve, so that first year, I found a Christmas concert that started at 3.30pm and bought tickets for just Bethany and I – something new for the two of us. We really enjoyed it because it was completely different from what we’d done before and it also occupied much of the time that I would have been feeling sorry for myself the day before Christmas. So we repeated that the second Christmas and in the following years – a new tradition for us that gets us singing along, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing.

On that first Christmas Day without Trevor, everyone descended and worked hard to overcome his absence. It worked quite well as the hustle and bustle did distract me although it was all a bit of a blur. As a change, we planned to go out for Christmas lunch at a local hotel the second Christmas, but the following year we stayed home as frankly, we preferred my cooking! The Christmas episode of Dr Who remains our big tradition, of course with tears as it brings back so many memories.

With a young child, New Year had become a much quieter occasion and so Bethany and I didn’t really do much without him either – watched the fireworks on the television as we always did. One year, we went skiing with WAY (Widowed and Young) so that Bethany could spend a week with other teenagers who had lost a parent. We are all families in the same situation and I felt it was the right time to do this, although it was difficult as four weeks before Trevor died we were skiing with friends, and it was our last holiday together. But it was a way of merging another big ‘first’ with a new way to celebrate a new year.

It’s now over a decade since Trevor died and Christmas is very different again, with Bethany married and me having elderly parents. But taking the Teddy bear candle to wherever ‘Christmas’ is being held keeps Trevor still part of our thinking on the day. And his Dr Who episode will appear somewhere over the holiday season … so we will never let him fully leave our memories at this time.

It goes without saying that Trevor’s death meant that Christmas has never been the same, but we commit to remembering our wonderful man, marking his absence, while also looking to the future perhaps with his grandchildren … and to creating new traditions together, thinking of ways to bring granddad into the Christmases to come.

It isn’t easy but it isn’t a time of deep anguish any more, either – I think he would be very proud of the way we have managed it!