A Portkey to Grief

Objects That Carry Us Back

This time of year transports many of us back to childhood, where memories, attachments, and losses sit next to each other at the dining table. The smells, sounds, and sights orient us toward how culture, especially family culture, binds us to the past. Some of us find ourselves face-to-face with the most challenging givens of existence, as Irvin Yalom calls them—responsibility, finitude, perhaps even a sense of meaninglessness.

More than any other time of year, late December seems to bring an enduring process of grief closer to the surface. Perhaps this is so because we’re not as alone with our losses at this time. We connect around a sense of longing for those who came before. To me, the season of joy and peace seems as much associated with grief.

I remember the way it felt as a young girl at Christmas time, coveting the once-a-year, shiny, beaded ornaments on our tree—decorations that return to my hands each year. These objects are familiar in a way that still lives in the body of a younger version of me. Holding them and placing them back on the branches brings up a particular way of being with what has been lost.

Facing Finitude

Borrowing from Harry Potter, where a portkey abruptly transports someone from one location to another, philosopher and psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow uses the term to name moments that fully transport a person through time and space to the very same physiological state that marked a particular trauma. In this way, these tree ornaments are a kind of portkey—not to trauma, but to grief. They take me instantly to something I experience as the Welsh describe with an utterly untranslatable word: hiraeth.

Many of us encounter these kinds of portkeys during the holidays—moments when the present opens directly onto the past. Memory does not arrive as a story we choose to tell, but as a way the world suddenly feels again. Past becomes present through ritual, repetition, and sensory detail. Loss registers, and grief feels more like a lifelong process—akin to learning or growth. Yet, re-entry into the grief process often, paradoxically, pauses time, even as life continues to move on all around us.

It’s no wonder, then, that the holidays bring us into closer contact with questions of finitude and meaningfulness. Our shared stories reflect this recognition. Think of Dickens’ Scrooge, confronted by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, forced to face his life through the lens of its end. This nighttime encounter is not comforting, yet it resonates with holiday themes. Layers of cultural metaphor build on one another here.

The Darkest Days

Today, December 21, is the darkest day of the year. The stretch from Winter Solstice to the New Year has long invited reflection on the meaning of life. In these dark days, something shifts in how time is felt. We might even begin to remember that the days will once again become longer, brighter, and ready to grow. The future comes, even as grief remains a part of us.

Therapy can be a place to meet grief like an old friend. A place to sit with how it reorganizes a life over time, to notice what returns each year, what it brings, and what might now be possible to carry differently.

Books to Explore

·       R. Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (2007). Routledge.

·       Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843). Penguin Classics

·       Matthew Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds: A Phenomenological Study (2022). MIT Press.

·       J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000). Bloomsbury.

·       Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Knopf.