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Time after time, the Bible promises comfort from sorrow, healing from hurts, and peace in place of pain. Tap into the promises of God's Word such as these and claim them for yourself:

• "He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak … those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength" (Isa. 40:29, 31).

• "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit" (Ps. 34:18).

• "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" (Matt. 5:4).

Let such passages soothe your spirit. Ask God to protect you from being "consumed" by grief and to give you strength when you are feeling "crushed."

Marta Felber offers that advice in her book Finding Your Way After Your Spouse Dies (Ave Maria Press). "My loved one died on January 25. Almost immediately, I began to dread the next Christmas without him, exactly 11 months away!" she recalls. Her way of reducing that anxiety was to plan carefully and keep expectations realistic. "Try to have reasonable expectations," she says. "There are important ways in which celebrations will not, and cannot, ever be the same again. So it is okay to plan for them to be different. Be realistic about what you can handle, both physically and emotionally. Be kind to yourself and nurturing."

According to Harold Ivan Smith, a minister and author of A Decembered Grief: Living With Loss While Others are Celebrating (Beacon Hill Press), becoming involved with others in a grief support group can help you discover that you are not alone, that mourning is not an illness or self-indulgence, and that there are people to whom you can open your heart.

The worst thing a family can do is to try to ignore the reality of a loss. It is simply impossible to hide the fact that a loved one has died and is painfully absent during the holiday. Rather than try to minimize the absence, remember the loved one who died by offering a moment of silence at a meal, lighting a candle in his or her memory, placing his or her favorite ornament on the tree, tucking a memorial card into your holiday cards to distant friends, decorating the grave, etc. One 12-year-old, whose older sister died two months before Christmas, made an ornament at school with her name carefully printed on it along with her year of birth and death.

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