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Let there be light: What helps mourners at Christmas?
Photo: Boris Schmalenberger / plainpicture
Festival of love, festival of family, festival of hope, festival of light, festival of joy.
Christmas will come even after someone has been lost.
Even if many mourners hardly notice the season and environment: These days in the year in particular can neither be suppressed nor hidden.
In the pandemic year 2020, not only mourners have to struggle with these days.
In existential times it is difficult to set up the tree and pretend everything is as always.
To the author
Nadine von Kameke, 58,
is a journalist and grief counselor.
Her father died when she was still a teenager, she lost her son shortly before he was born - that is how she learned that grief is inevitable.
Today she takes the subject benevolently through her life.
After years in South America with her family, she supports grieving adults and young people with the association Verwaiste Eltern und Geschwister Hamburg eV and accompanies them back to their changed everyday life.
I still remember my older sister calling me on December 23rd, when I was 16 years old and doing a student exchange in Ohio.
Our seriously ill father was dying, she told me on the phone.
Staring in shock, I fixed the flashing Christmas decorations and the knitted boots that were embroidered with our names on the fireplace.
It was then that I suddenly realized that Christmas would change forever for me.
I didn't really understand it until many years later.
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