How to handle Father’s Day if you’ve lost a loved one
Grief is highly individual, and while some will enjoy company, others may want to be left alone
Holidays and other occasions — especially of the greeting-card and gift-giving variety — have long posed a problem for the bereaved.
The firsts are often the worst. The first time the birthday of the deceased rolls around. The first Eid or Christmas. The first time they’re not there to see a child graduate, or to walk a bride or groom down the aisle.
Before we’ve had a chance to get our bearings in a world without the person we so desperately miss, these occasions arrive, inconvenient reminders festooned with marketing messages about how to make it special with the gift of a smartphone or weed whacker.
This year, Father’s Day is arriving just as we begin a return to a more normal post-pandemic existence. However, it’s not an easy time, not only for the loved ones of all the people we typically lose over the year to cancer, heart disease
and other causes, but those of some of the approximately 26,000 Canadians who have succumbed to COVID-19.
Janet Fanaki’s husband, Adam, died in February 2020 from glioblastoma, a terminal form of brain cancer. He was 51 years old.
This will be the second Father’s Day that she and her two university-aged children have marked since losing Adam.
“I think staying off of social media for Father’s Day last year was very helpful,” said Fanaki, who lives in Toronto. “I find that there’s so many things that can trigger emotions, you know, commercials and marketing … like, ‘barbecue things for Father’s Day’ and ‘have you thought about Father’s Day?’ And as soon as I see that, I just scroll past or I just put my phone down, and I just go and take my mind onto something else.”
Fanaki feels her family’s grieving process began with Adam’s diagnosis in 2016, giving them a chance to make as much as they could of Adam’s last few years and giving them notice that this outcome was on the horizon. That’s something that isn’t afforded to those who lose a loved one suddenly or after a short illness like COVID-19.
She used those years to start thinking about how people get through major challenges, an idea she now explores on her blog and podcast, “Resilient People.”
Fanaki encourages people who are grieving the loss of a father, spouse, brother or other loved one this Father’s Day to choose their own approach to the day and communicate their wishes to others. She and the kids will mark the occasion the same way they did last year.
“I consulted the kids first … I wanted to have a conversation with them just to see where their heads were at, just for all of us to kind of be on the same page,” Fanaki said. “They just want to keep it quiet. We decided that we were going to order dinner from his favourite restaurant and raise a glass to him. And we thought that that was very fitting and it was enough for us.”
People wanted to come by that first Father’s Day, just as they did when Fanaki’s birthday rolled around — a birthday she shared with her late husband.
For both occasions she let people know that she was planning a low-key day and to please not drop in. “People still came, but they quietly would leave something on the porch. And that was amazing to feel that love,” she said, even though it was too much that day to come face to face with others who were also grieving Adam’s very recent loss.
Grief is individual, though, and others may prefer to have the company of others to occupy them — or to help keep their loved one’s memory alive.
Kathy Kortes-Miller, author of “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You,” said it can be helpful to connect with someone who will share stories of the man you’re missing this Father’s Day.
“Find someone who will talk with you about your dad, who will use your dad’s name and let you share a couple of stories just as a way to honour them,” said Kortes-Miller, who is also an associate professor of social work and director of the Centre for Education and Research on Aging and Health at Lakehead University.
“We worry that we’re going to make someone more upset or that, God forbid, that they would cry if we use somebody’s name, but really, what that does is that it lets people know that the person might have died but … that they’re remembered,” she said. “It brings some of that internal experience that people have, in terms of the social isolation around grief and loss, to the outside, and it normalizes it and validates it.”
Kortes-Miller is currently doing a research study that examines the experience of people who have lost someone close to them during the pandemic, whether from COVID or any other cause.
“Lack of after-death rituals, or the inability to be with somebody if they were dying in a long-term-care facility or a hospital during a quarantine period, has been really hard for many people.”
For some that has meant that their grief is “almost put on hold,” she said, while they’re waiting for important social rituals such as funerals. “So people are almost becoming a little bit stuck.”
Those who feel like marking Father’s Day in a way that honours their loved one might listen to his favourite music or look at old photo albums but should, above all, take care of their own needs, she said.
“One of the things to remember is that Father’s Day is going to be 24 hours.”