Happy New Year? Exercises to Honor Your Loss and Set Gentle Goals When You’re Grieving
For many people, the turning of a new year is a time of celebration, resolutions, and hope.
But if you’re grieving, the new year can feel like an unavoidable reminder that time is moving forward without your loved one. Even if your loss isn’t death-related—such as a divorce or a major diagnosis—the new year is a milestone that makes the passage of time seem especially loud.
If you’re navigating grief in the new year, here are four tools and exercises to help you honor your loss, carry your loved one’s memory with you, and set goals that accommodate the reality of your grief.
Create a Grief Calendar for the Year Ahead
Grief has its rhythms, and certain dates—like birthdays, death days, anniversaries, and holidays—can carry a sense of extra heaviness. Instead of coping with each grief wave as it comes, consider creating a grief calendar for the upcoming year.
How to Do It:
Start by identifying dates that feel griefy to you. This might be your loved one’s birthday, their death anniversary, or shared holidays. For non-death losses this might be the date of a breakup, a diagnosis, a job loss, or a traumatic event.
Add these dates to your calendar and make a plan for how you’d like to honor your grief on each day. This might mean taking a day off work, planning a group or solo activity, or simply performing a quiet ritual.
Why It Helps:
Knowing these dates and taking time to mindfully prepare for them can help you feel more grounded entering the new year. Even if you end up doing something different on the day, you made a plan to honor your grief in advance and made space for it to exist, rather than being blindsided by it.
Want help creating your grief calendar?
Join my grief support course + community, Life After Loss Academy. In Module 4: Establish, I’ll show you step-by-step how to create a Grief Dates Calendar, highlight potentially grief-activating holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and graduation season, and give you 13 unique ideas of how to commemorate your losses throughout the year, including rituals for death and non-death losses.
Commit to Taking Your Loved One Into the New Year
Grieving doesn’t mean leaving your loved one behind. Many grief theories—such as continuing bonds theory—note that it’s healthy to continue your relationship with your loved one into the future.
How to Do It:
Dedicate a small space in your home to your loved one—a photo, a candle, or a special keepsake. Visit it often and reminisce about happy memories. You might also use this space to talk or write to your loved one, regularly updating them on your life.
Practice a regular activity that honors them, such as making their favorite recipe or supporting a cause they cared about.
Speak their name often, or share stories about them with people who knew them (and even those who didn’t). You can do this in real life or digitally on social media.
Why It Helps:
This practice keeps your connection alive and reinforces the reality your loved one is still part of your life. They may no longer be alive, but they can still hold a place of priority and prominence in your life.
For Non-Death Losses:
Consider drawing inspiration for the new year from someone you admire. This could be a real-life person such as a public figure, author, a celebrity or someone from a fictional universe. Try asking yourself for example, “How could I emulate the humor, sass, and goodwill of Dolly Parton in the wake of my divorce?” or, “How would Sophia from The Golden Girls cope with a life-changing diagnosis?” You might hang pictures of your role model in your home, read a book they’ve written, watch a movie or show they starred in, or listen to their music library!
Create a Jar or Journal to Collect Positive Moments
Grief can make it hard to see beauty or joy in the world, but that doesn’t mean those moments don’t exist. Creating a “positive moments” jar or journal is a small, hopeful practice that allows you to gather glimpses of light—what many grief experts call “grief glimmers”—throughout the year.
How to Do It:
This is the December 31 excerpt from my nonreligious daily devotional, Your Grief, Your Way:
Decorate a clear, empty jar and place it next to your bed. Each night before you go to sleep, recollect one positive moment you experienced that day. This could be as small as “Noticed the birds in my backyard” or as big as “Survived [loved one’s] birthday.” Write your positive moment on a slip of paper, fold it up, and place it in the jar. Do this every day for a year. Then, this time next year, dump out and unfold your year’s worth of positive moments. Not only will you experience an outpouring of warmth recalling positive memories from the previous year, you’ll also form a more positive outlook toward the year ahead. Saturating your brain with evidence that positive things happened in the past gives it permission to dream up more positive experiences in the future.
Want a day-by-day guide to living life after the death of a loved one? Grab a copy of Your Grief, Your Way here.
Why It Helps:
This exercise doesn’t ask you to ignore your grief; it simply makes room for positivity to coexist with your loss. It helps your brain—and your heart—recognize that yes, while grief is most certainly happening, small moments of beauty and joy are happening too.
Set Gentle, Grief-Aware Goals
Traditional New Year’s resolutions can feel impossible to reach when you’re grieving. Instead of forcing yourself into set ambitious or overly-rigid goals, consider setting intentions that take your grief and energy into account.
Questions to Ask Yourself:
How would I like to travel, explore, or experience life as a griever?
What topics or skills would I like to learn while honoring my emotional bandwidth?
How can I prioritize rest, connection, or creativity in ways that feel healing?
Examples of Gentle Goals:
Take one new class or workshop related to a personal interest. Many grievers enjoy gardening, dancing, hiking, painting, and learning about a new subject.
Visit a meaningful place or explore a quiet, restorative destination. This could be somewhere you’ve always wanted to travel or a hidden gem in your neighborhood.
Create a morning or evening routine that prioritizes self-care. Bonus points if you can incorporate your grief in some way.
Why It Helps:
Setting grief-aware goals acknowledges that your priorities, energy, and purpose have been changed by grief—and that’s okay! It’s a way of embracing the New Year while honoring where you are on every level: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Want help setting goals with grief in mind?
Join my grief support course + community, Life After Loss Academy. In Module 3: Integrate, I’ll show you how to see yourself as a grieving person in every facet of your life and track your progress in ways that feel compassionate instead of shameful.
Entering the New Year With Care
The New Year doesn’t have to be “happy” to be meaningful. By honoring your grief, carrying your loved one forward, and setting gentle intentions, you can move into the new year with compassion for yourself and the losses you’ve faced.
If you’re looking for more support as you enter another year with grief, join me for my upcoming workshop: New Year, Same Grief. We’ll explore how to carry your grief into the new year while finding hope and purpose in the months ahead.
