A Long December

There’s an old Counting Crows song called A Long December, a song about looking back on a rough year that you can only understand once you get through it.

I hadn’t thought about that song in a long time.

I was already planning to write about grief this week; the sheer amount of loss this year has made it pretty hard to ignore.

But grief has a way of getting to you when you least expect it.

Grief is different for everyone, but there’s always that same rude awakening when your world stops and the actual world doesn’t.

Businesses stay open, people go about their day, and you realize you’re stuck in one of the worst seasons of your life - alone.

It creates this simmering, irrational anger that isn’t even about other people at all, but the fact that something devastating just occurred, and the world didn’t stop to acknowledge it.

And you think to yourself, “How can this be? Does nobody else feel this? Don’t they know what just happened?”

You know that they don't actually know, but it feels like they should.

I remember that feeling well.  

Years ago, I lost the person I was closest to at that time in my life: my grandmother.

She was the center of our family. The mediator, the peacekeeper. She was the glue that held the family together and the one we all went to when times were tough.

During this particular period, I was living with my grandparents again after my marriage collapsed and left me financially ruined.

Grandma was a vibrant, energetic woman with the usual ‘old age’ complaints, but by late summer of 2011, she seemed tired and occasionally complained of headaches, chalking it up to getting older.  

At first, that made sense. But soon her entire personality changed, and she became irritable and withdrawn.

I have a vivid memory of one particularly beautiful day in September: she was slumped at her dining room table, sunlight streaming in, her head in her hands, looking defeated.

None of this was like her at all, and that was the moment I knew something was wrong.

She saw doctors but made my grandfather and me promise not to breathe a word to anyone, especially her children. No doctor could pinpoint what was wrong, and she didn’t want anyone worrying about her.

Of course she didn't.

But as her health continued to deteriorate, neither of us could deny what we were seeing. With my grandfather’s permission, I told the rest of the family.

It went about how you’d expect.

Not long after, she was rushed to the hospital, where in the ER, scans revealed the cause of everything: a brain tumor that was bleeding and causing swelling.

Five-plus hours of surgery later, the doctors told us they'd removed as much of the tumor as they could.

Then they told us what it was: glioblastoma - aggressive and terminal.

Hearing the word “terminal” instantly changes everything. There’s just no easing into that.

Before her surgery, the doctors had asked her who should make decisions for her, and my grandmother named me in front of everyone.

I don't believe it was symbolic; I think she chose me for practical reasons.

At the time, I was in my thirties, a single mother, and suddenly her medical proxy. I knew next to nothing about this disease, and I didn't have the benefit of prior experience or guidance.

But my grandmother knew her family well; her husband and children loved her fiercely. She didn't need someone who 'loved her the most'. She asked for someone who could push past that when tough decisions had to be made.

And it changed everything.

I was told by someone outside the family that it was a death sentence, and the kindest thing possible would be to take her home and let her live whatever time she had on her own terms.

I tried to stop the treatment plan and argued against dragging her through pointless interventions. My mother supported that completely.

But my grandfather and others in the family wanted to pursue treatment, and I found myself stuck in a no-win situation.

If I pushed hard, I was "already giving up on her". If I held back, I wasn't doing the job she had entrusted to me.

I didn't yet understand the disease well enough to know, with absolute certainty, how hopeless it truly was. I knew it was terminal. What I didn’t understand was how fast it would actually take her.

In hindsight, I was making decisions under pressure, without a clear timeline, while everything, including the medical advice, kept changing on me.

What still lives in my head is this: who would have known her better than my grandfather? If he believed she would fight, I felt obligated to respect that - or at least, that's what I thought at the time.

So that one sliver of doubt was all it took to keep that whole shitshow in motion and leave me with the responsibility anyway.

Maybe I was too hopeful. Maybe I was trying to be the peacemaker when the one person who mattered most in that moment was depending on me to be clearer than I was, apparently, capable of being.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have brought her home immediately. I would have made the one decision she depended on me to make from the start.

I live with that.

What made that time harder than it ever should have been was the interference from my uncle's wife. She asserted authority she absolutely did not have and inserted herself into decisions that were never hers to make.

She routinely bulldozed her way into medical conversations, citing long-past nursing experience despite not being part of the care team.

She tried to override me as the decision-maker and challenged choices she had no legal standing to oppose, and she did it loudly and repeatedly with zero regard.

During one visit, she openly questioned my grandmother's mental capacity in her presence, undermining her stated wishes and suggesting everything be challenged.

That woman made my dying grandmother cry.

I will never forget that.

It was one of the most upsetting moments of that entire period because I know how much my grandmother gave of herself to everyone - especially to them.

She bent over backward for them, for years - emotionally, practically, and financially. There was nothing she wouldn't do for the people she loved, and she never asked for anything in return.

Except, in the end, to have her wishes respected. For some, that was too much.

I don't need to speculate about motives. The behavior speaks for itself.

And as if I didn't have enough to deal with, the care team pulled me aside to express concern about her behavior. They described it as disruptive and inappropriate and asked me to please put a stop to it.

My uncle deferred entirely to his wife. That brought even more outside opinions, prayers, and pressure.

All of it focused on comforting the wrong people.

One of those intrusions involved bringing in their own minister, who told my grandfather that God could still perform a miracle if He wanted to.

Look, I walk in faith, but that statement pissed me right off. It crossed a line.

This was not his minister, and it was not a conversation my grandfather needed while his wife was actively dying.

That message stayed with him much longer than it ever should have.

After that, presenting medical facts was dismissed by others as godless negativity. Acknowledging reality was scorned as a lack of faith.

The amount of unnecessary stress added to an already unbearable situation was staggering.

I remember far more than what I’m choosing to include here.
That day will come.

What we didn't know at that time, and wouldn't learn until the following spring, was that my grandfather was battling cancer.

He was getting noticeably thinner, and we all assumed it was stress and grief.

Halloween came, and we did our best to acknowledge it. I took my little one trick-or-treating and grabbed some photos along the way.

My mother left a bowl of Halloween candy in my grandmother's room for the nursing staff and housekeepers to enjoy.

It was treated as something communal, rather than what it was.

November was supposed to be when treatment began.
Instead, it became a month of start/stops, waiting rooms, setbacks, and of being told one thing and then another.

I still hadn’t fully grasped how futile this all was - how little chance there really was. My grandfather was insistent that she would fight, and I believe she would have if there had been a real chance to fight for.

What I don’t believe is that she would have wanted to be dragged through aggressive treatment if there was no meaningful possibility of improvement.

By then, plans for radiation were already underway. Her appointments were being scheduled, her mask was made, and the decisions were piling on faster than I could organize them.

I was getting conflicting feedback from doctors, and I didn’t yet understand just how quickly the window was actually closing.

I should have stopped it.
But I didn't.

I deferred to what was being presented as “a fighting chance,” even though part of me already knew better.

I live with that, too.

By mid-November, scans showed the tumor was already returning. By early December, another scan made it unmistakable: it was now more than twice its original size and still rapidly growing.

So much for miracles.

I was sick with the knowledge that I'd been right all along, and hadn't fully acted on it.
But we finally took Grandma home that day.

When we wheeled her into her house, we brought her first to her organ, the one she’d spent hours playing over the years. I placed her finger on a key, and she pressed it, tapping out a Christmas song one note at a time, silently mouthing the words.

It’s a bittersweet comfort to know that music could still move her, even then.

From then on, she slept more than she was awake. We were told what to expect, but that in no way meant that we were prepared.

My mother and I were her primary caregivers; I took a leave of absence from my job, my mother moved in, and we did what we could to keep grandma comfortable.

My stepdad filled in the gaps by helping Grandpa with his own grieving process while he was still getting shockingly thin. Taking him to a doctor only gave him the diagnosis of a stomach ulcer; again, that made sense given the circumstances.

We handled her round-the-clock care: feeding her, changing her, managing her medications, and keeping her comfortable.

My uncle and his wife would come to visit.

We tried to set basic house rules that allowed family visits without turning her final days into a clusterfuck.

My uncle was told by his wife that he didn't need to follow them.

Quelle suprise.

During visits, his wife treated the space as her own, talking loudly while my grandmother slept, propping her legs up on grandma's deathbed, and fidgeting in ways that literally shook it.

Yes, really.

My grandmother was dying. I don't know how much clearer I can make that.
That should have mattered more than everything else.

And somehow, in the midst of all that, here we were still trying to make the house feel warm and festive. It was an...interesting contrast, to put it mildly.

Grandma's house and bedroom were adorned with all of her favorite Christmas decorations, an effort to create a comforting, familiar atmosphere for her.

In a room with a hospital bed, feeding tube equipment, bed pads, and a whiteboard outlining shifts and medications, it felt like utter bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong, it was probably the right thing to do. She deserved to be surrounded by the things she loved, in the home she wanted to die in.

I’m just saying that for me, it was nauseating.

Through it all, I was still raising a child who witnessed far more than she ever should have, whether I wanted her to or not. I was trying to be strong and do what was right for my grandmother and for my daughter, and I’ve always felt like I failed both of them.

Exhausted, we managed grandma’s pain with a shared but unspoken assumption that we would at least make it through the end of the year. Maybe a little bit longer. She was a strong woman, after all.

None of us could fathom having one last Christmas without her. Surely God would give us this one small consolation, right?

But on December 22, 2011, we lost her. In my sleep-deprived brain, the timing felt almost intentionally cruel.

What felt even crueler was what happened next. After keeping vigil for months, my grandfather, my mother, and I were deliberately kept from her in her final moments by the same people who had complicated everything else.

We were all in the house. I was in the kitchen making something for my daughter. My mother was with me, and my grandfather had stepped away for a moment.

When my grandmother took her final breath, no one came to get us. No one called out to us, and no one got to say goodbye properly.

By the time we were actually told she was gone, the moment had already long passed.

And I can't stress this enough: this is about far more than my personal feelings. A selfish decision robbed my grandfather - who had kept a tireless vigil despite his own illness - of the chance to say goodbye to the woman he loved.

I know exactly why it happened. I have never forgiven that.

And that is something I damn sure will never forget.  

On Christmas Day, I sat with my daughter as she opened her gifts, my attention constantly drifting to my grandfather, sitting off to the side in his chair, looking sickly thin and cross-legged in a bathrobe, his face set in a stony expression.

He’d asked to be there but was still consumed by fury; anger at a God who could take away the one person he couldn’t live without, and at those who robbed him of his last chance to be there for her.

And now there was a funeral to plan.

I don’t blame him. I would have skipped the entire morning if it had been possible.

Christmas was unbearable.
New Year's wasn't any better.

I tried, as much as I possibly could, to shield my daughter from the worst of it. She adored her great-grandparents and knew what was going on, but she was still a child, and she deserved safe and joyful holidays, not ones full of death and grief.

I did what most parents do: sucked it up and compartmentalized. I made sure she had proper holidays and memories while I dealt with my own shit, along with everyone else's.

I don't know how much my daughter really remembers, and I'm not sure how much I actually managed to protect her.

I just know that trying to manage all of that at once, as a parent, was more than anyone should have to, no matter what time of year it is.

The following spring, the cause of my grandfather's ill health was finally correctly diagnosed: advanced-stage cancer.

The painful lessons learned from that horrible experience brought about a much quieter but still difficult process of care for my grandfather.

He spent the time grieving his wife, fighting his cancer, and trying to make sense of both.

Despite his rapidly declining health, he was determined to keep fighting it every step of the way, insisting it was what his wife would’ve wanted for him.

He doggedly fought until he just couldn’t anymore and died on November 11, 2013. And this time, we were right there with him.

Ten days later, on November 21, 2013, my stepfather died without warning. I made it to the hospital too late to say goodbye.

After that, I stopped looking forward to much of anything.
Especially the holidays.

And to this day, there’s a hole in my life that has never fully healed.

Not long after, what was left of my immediate family fell apart for good. There was no explosive argument or even a simple explanation.

My mother's brother simply stopped answering the phone.

I remember those stretches of time back then, too busy to feel too much because there was work to do and decisions that couldn’t wait. I’m not saying I never cried or anything, but it did make me numb as a whole.

When I returned to work after back-to-back funerals, I wasn’t up for conversations and sympathy. I just wanted the distraction of work.

But when my coworkers gave me a simple but beautiful Christmas ornament in memory of my loved ones, I sat there and bawled like a baby.

Now, well over a decade later, the pain doesn’t hurt like it once did, but it's not all better, either.

I don’t know that it ever will be.

I share these details not to rehash old arguments or compare tragedies, but to show how life has a way of reopening old wounds when loss is suddenly everywhere again.

I can only speak honestly about my own experience, but there have been many moments this year where the sheer volume of loss feels overwhelming.

When violence and death dominate the headlines, it brings back that same disorientation: the how, the why, and the sinking realization that some things will never make sense.

And no matter how a death touches your life, there’s something about December that just does this thing.

Some people are already in their first year of grief, just trying to get through that brutal succession of ‘firsts’.

Others have a loss that’s permanently associated with a holiday or season.

There are many struggling to make sense of deaths that never should have happened at all.

Sometimes, it’s all of that at once. December makes that particularly hellish.

Seeing so many other families torn apart brought back memories I thought I’d already made peace with.

It's been fourteen years now, and nothing has changed. We're still estranged. Writing this makes it clear how much of it I still live with.

I still have that simmering anger within me, but it's different now. My life today is blessed in ways I never dared imagine it could be back then. It's stable, full of love, and everything my grandparents and my stepdad wanted for me.

And they never got to see any of it.
Not even the wedding.

I never got a chance to share this life that finally worked out. I never got to give back even a fraction of what they gave me.

That unfairness still bothers me, and I don't think it's something time can fix. If this is an inkling of what grief looks like years later, with all of that behind me, it's not hard to understand how unbearable it must be for those right now at the beginning of it.

So I think about those families now - their loss and what comes next in the daily minutiae of their lives. Mornings, dinners, holidays, family dynamics...how to even keep going...

My heart aches for them.

My story is my own experience, but it's hardly unique. Plenty of people are living with grief right along with broken families, unresolved histories, old resentments, and relationships that don't magically heal just because it's the holidays.

The holidays just make it all suck that much more.

I don’t have a feel-good ending here; there just isn’t one to be had. No words of mine, or anyone else’s, can make it better or make it make sense.

There is no making sense of it. There’s only getting through it.

Related Reads:

• Beautiful Lies
• The Silence Was a Choice

Heather Papovich is a long-form essayist, cultural writer, and longtime ghostwriter whose work explores lived experience, cultural identities, and the emotional mechanics of everyday life.

She is the founder of Unfinished Business, an independent digital publication blending personal narrative with cultural commentary, currently read in 33 verified countries.

Her writing focuses on reinvention, the emotional weight of ordinary moments, and the role popular culture, particularly long-running franchises, plays in how people cope, connect, and create meaning.