The Empty Chair: How We Gather When Someone's Missing

There's a particular ache that arrives with the holiday season, uninvited but expected. The holidays have a way of making empty spaces feel enormous. Maybe the people you're missing are gone forever. Maybe they're across an ocean you can't afford to cross this year. Maybe the fear of dealing with immigration authorities and visa denials has kept you from home so long that you've stopped counting. Maybe the distance isn't measured in miles but in silence, in relationships that frayed and never quite mended. Whatever the reason, the season amplifies what—and who—we've lost.

For those of us in the diaspora, this longing is layered. We miss specific people and entire homelands. We grieve for ancestors we can't visit and living relatives celebrating without us. And for all of us carrying absence—whether through death, distance, or displacement—the Western holiday season expects cheer when what we're feeling is far more complicated.

The Alchemy of Coming Together

Here's what I've learned: we don't heal from longing by ignoring it. We heal by making space for it, and then filling that space with other people.

Community doesn't erase absence. But it does something almost as miraculous—it reminds us we're still here, still capable of connection, still worthy of gathering around. When your chosen family shows up with wine and terrible holiday sweaters, when your diaspora siblings bring jollof from three different countries to argue about whose is best, when your neighbor who also lost someone sits with you in the quiet understanding that this season is hard—you remember that love isn't finite.

You know the gatherings I'm talking about. The ones where someone's apartment smells like both pumpkin pie and egusi because we've all brought what reminds us of home. Where the playlist jumps from carols to Afrobeats to the songs your mother used to play. Where we're a chaotic assembly of people from different backgrounds, different stories, but united in the understanding that we all needed to show up rather than sit alone with our grief.

These gatherings are lifelines. They're the village some of us had to build from scratch because the one we were born into is thousands of miles away, or because death has reconfigured what family means. We become each other's cousins, aunties, and uncles. We hold space for complicated emotions—loving two places at once, missing someone terribly while still laughing at terrible jokes, feeling the hole someone left while also feeling grateful for who remains.

What Happens Around a Table

And then there's food…

I'm not being corny when I say that feeding people is a form of love so ancient it predates language. Every culture on earth has understood this: breaking bread together creates bonds that transcend words.

When you're missing someone during the holidays, cooking their recipe becomes an act of remembrance. You measure out the same ingredients they did, and suddenly, they're there in the kitchen with you. We cook the way we were taught because food is our most powerful time machine, our DNA memory.

But cooking for others transforms individual longing into collective healing. When you host a potluck for friends who also can't go home, when you bring fufu or your grandmother's dressing to share, when we teach each other our recipes—we're creating new memories while honoring old ones. We take the tenderness that loss has created in us and use it to soften the world for someone else.

These meals will never be exactly like the ones we're longing for—’cause the ingredients aren't quite right. Someone important is missing from the table. But they're sacred anyway, because they're what we have. Because we made them with love and longing and the determination to hold onto ourselves and each other.

The Permission to Feel It All

If you're heading into this season carrying the weight of absence—whether it's death, distance, or both—let me offer you this: you don't have to choose between honoring your grief and embracing joy. You don't have to perform gratitude when your heart is breaking. You don't have to pretend you're not angry about the systems, the borders, the diseases, the circumstances that keep you from the people you love.

You can miss home desperately and still find joy here. You can grieve someone and still laugh. You can feel guilty about the family you can't support enough and still celebrate your survival. Bitter and sweet together—that's the fullest flavor of being human.

Find your people, whoever they are. Say yes when someone invites you over. Let someone cook for you. Cook for someone else. Set a place for the person who can't be there and tell their stories. Call home even when the timing is terrible. Speak your language loudly. Play the music that makes you cry and dance anyway.

The holidays will always be bittersweet for those of us who've loved and lost, who carry multiple homes in our hearts, who understand that family is something you're born into and something you build. But we were never meant to have this weight alone.

So we keep gathering. We keep cooking. We keep finding each other and building these imperfect, beautiful, resilient whānau/families out of shared longing and shared meals. We keep showing up even when someone we love can't.

That's not a solution to grief. But it might just be enough to carry us through. Because home isn't just a place or a person—it's the people who know your language, literal and metaphorical. It's the food that tastes like memory.

It's the community that reminds you who you are when loss threatens to make you forget. And that? We can make that anywhere we gather. 

Happy Holidays!