The Death Light has been something of a theme for me in the last couple of months. It can be metaphorical or existential—working on a will, thinking about changing our life paths, or considering the legacy we want to leave after we’re gone. But sometimes it’s literal. We witness death, face a serious illness, or someone close to us has died. This last month, one of the ways Death came to my door was for my little orange fox dog Finnegan.

The holiday season is wonderful in so many ways. We get to see family, take a break from work, eat lots of delicious food, and end the year in style. But precisely because the holidays are about family and tradition, this is also a common time for grief to cycle back up. We think of the people who aren’t present, the people we aren’t going to see. We think of the traditions we wish we could share. As another year comes to an end, as much as we are thinking of New Year’s resolutions, we might also be thinking back to what the last year meant to us and what we lost.

This year, loss has been a major theme, not only in terms of the mortality of a long pandemic season but also in terms of our everyday routines and the many things we took for granted before. As the days get shorter and darker, we are moving into the fall and winter seasons, which are natural times to think about grief and loss.