The thing about grief at holidays like Thanksgiving is that it arrives not as a single emotion but as an atmosphere. Everyone else seems to be leaning into gratitude and abundance while your own heart feels tight and uneven, like it’s keeping a different beat.

You can love the people still here and still long for the ones who aren’t. You can laugh over mashed potatoes and still feel your throat catch when someone lifts a glass. Grief and gratitude can share the same table, they just eat from different plates.

For those of us carrying loss, the holidays often ask too much. Gratitude can feel like a performance, one that leaves little room for the truth of longing. The cultural script says to focus on blessings, to count them, to smile for family photos. But sometimes the most honest blessing is to simply name what hurts, to let absence be part of the feast.

by Shawn Carney for Thin Veil Death Collaborative

The calendar doesn’t need to remind the body. Sometimes, grief arrives like weather: sudden, insistent, without warning. One minute you’re washing dishes or standing in line at the grocery store, and the next you’re ambushed by the scent of nutmeg or the sound of a song that used to fill the house. A season turns, a chill enters the air, and the ache returns before you’ve even named it.

Grief has its own almanac. Even when the loss feels integrated, when you’ve cried the tears, told the stories, built new rhythms, some part of you still tracks the light and air of the time when everything changed. The week your father died, the month you buried your friend, the last cuddle with your soul-pet, the heartbreaking moment of pregnancy loss, the first frost after the last goodbye. Our cells remember what the mind tries to file away.

For many of us, the approach of the holidays sharpens this awareness. The world turns toward festivity, toward glitter and gatherings, and suddenly we’re aware of the split between our inner and outer landscapes. The invitations feel heavy, the decorations too bright, the songs intrusive. We’re living in two calendars at once: the cultural one that insists on joy, and the personal one that carries the memory of what (and who) is missing.