The holidays are upon us and this presents dares for kin coping with baby loss. For the grieving, the overt and chronic stress on family and festivity may be both stifling and arduous. Several holiday traditions characterize light and birth, and for a family surviving with pregnancy or baby loss, the humors and friend absences can be too blunt to bear simply. On the flip side, it is plausibly difficult for considerate friends and family to know how to best line the painful and taboo subject of perinatal loss in the situation of the joy-on-overdrive-holidays.

My second son was Mark in December 2009. At that time, I had a 2-year- old son. I think of one evening I sat staring, overcome, into a crunching fire and pondered about my baby's cremation. Next to me, my 2-year old yelled, delighted in the finding of his face reproduced back in a glass pattern as notes from Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" hung in the air. It was snowing. The spaces I was essential to travel between true joy and abject anguish at each moment through that time were so vast, that if it is the case that I am still sane, I am left to sensation how that it so.

At Christmas dinner numerous days later, I stood near a fire aggressive food around my plate as my stretched family met to rejoice peace and joy. No one there struggled to talk to me about my loss. This was not, I recognize, for absence of love. In fact, it was because of love -- they did not need to remind me of my loss. They desired so much for me to be content, but negotiating this impracticality was complex and difficult.