The New Year arrives carrying a particular kind of pressure.
Reflect. Resolve. Reset.
Heck, become someone new and improved.
But grief does not recognize the calendar. For many who are grieving, the turning of the year can feel less like a beginning and more like a reckoning on a reckoning. Another year lived without them. Another year farther from before. Another reminder that time is moving even when your heart feels still. This is often when people feel it’s time to nudge us.
Move on, they say.
Look forward. Ahead. Good things are coming. And maybe they will.
Perhaps it is a time that feels hopeful. To declare your intentions. To name what’s next. And sometimes, we will.
And sometimes, some years, that’s simply not where we are.
Grief lives in thresholds. The New Year is one of them. A liminal space between what was and what is not yet known. It can feel disorienting, heavy, or quietly resistant to celebration. Maybe it’s been screaming to just get to the other side. This is where permission matters!
So here it is…
Permission to bow out of the narrative that says January must feel clean, bright, or motivating.
+Permission to skip the resolutions.
+Permission to ditch the word of the year.
+Permission to feel the urgency to improve.
Bowing out at the New Year doesn’t mean you’ve given up, it simply means you’re refusing to rush your heart.
You might bow out of:
• The expectation to be optimistic before you feel ready
• Conversations that frame grief as something to “move past” in the year ahead.
• Traditions that emphasize countdowns and fresh starts when you are still honoring an ending
• The idea that progress must be visible, measurable, or announced in some way.
Grief is not a problem to solve by January. Grief is not a problem to solve at all…
Sometimes the most honest New Year intention is simply this…stay. Stay with what is real. Stay with the love that remains. Stay with yourself as you are, not as you are supposed to be.
If others are running forward, you are allowed to be still. If others are celebrating, you are allowed to mark the moment quietly.
A candle.
A breath.
A name remembered at midnight.
This, too, is a way of crossing into the new year. You do not owe yourself or the calendar transformation. You do not owe anyone a version of hope that hasn’t arrived yet. You do not owe grief a deadline. So if this New Year finds you tired, tender, or unsure—let that be enough.
I invite you to begin gently.
Many of you know that this has been a year of firsts without my sweet Dad, Neil. I have been combing videos and photos of so many of the beautiful before days. It feels as if my next year or new year begins on the one year anniversary of the day he died.
Dad was a clever Mad Man. He worked in advertising my whole life. The kitchen table was often a hotbed for brainstorm sessions. Tag lines. A clever turn of phrase. New product names. He was a hell of a wordsmith. He was also a hobby camera guy. He’d haul a 35mm Nikon around on an embroidered strap, snapping candids and the forever setting up the perfect family shot. For as long as I can remember, he held that beauty up to his nose, revealing his squinty eye and shouted his world famous “bad dad joke” to try and make us smile.
1…..2….SEVEN!
We would giggle as little kids. No matter how many times he used the same old trick. And the guy got some great shots!
Dad lived with memory loss for nearly a decade. Often he would recall details of campaigns, clients or peek at photos and return to places deep in the “Neil Leiner Files” of his beautiful mind. Moments of clarity unfurled with ease. I grew to love those and appreciate them, and accept those lost with a bittersweetness many caretakers understand all too well.
He was surrounded by all four of his kids the day he died. It was quiet, peaceful and in the end, unbelievably clever. It seems the guy had one more idea up his creative sleeve. None of us clocked it that day. We held his hand. Played Ray Charles close to his ear. We listened to his every breath, until there was a last.
I fell into bed that evening, exhausted and broken. A world where Neil David Leiner no longer lived seemed unfathomable. Unreal. Even untrue. When he tucked us in at night as littles, he would often say, “have a good nightmare”. I woke with a start from what seemed like the worst bad dream of my life, and it hit me. Dad had died on January 27.
Yes. 1….2….7.
Begging us all for one last smile.
I have lived this year as a first of firsts without him. As the death anniversary arrives at the end of next month, I will honor it, sure. And thanks to his ever and always clever heart, I will also smile through a few tears.
