The Empty Chair

By Shayne O’Brien

THE EMPTY CHAIR

All our kids will be home for Thanksgiving this year. We can’t wait! For so many, the holidays are about the overflowing fullness of our lives. We certainly feel that right now. So, we are going to soak it all in, cherish the laughter, the food, and our family that brings so much joy, making life feel rich and worth living. For us it’s a time to look around and recognize the good things, the sweet moments, and the wonderful relationships we’re blessed with. 

Holidays are about celebrating presence. 

But that is NOT all that’s happening this year and perhaps that’s not your story either. 

Maybe, instead of fullness, this season feels marked by emptiness. Instead of abundance, you feel the weight of absence. 

You might be surrounded by noise and life and celebration, but your eyes, your heart—(like ours) keep drifting to the quiet space that’s unoccupied now: the cruel vacancy of the empty chair. 

I want you to know, you’re not alone in that. 

The past few years have left my home without my mom, my father-in-law, mother-in-law and a brother that was way too young to go. 

The truth is, as much as the holidays are supposed to stir up gratitude and peace, they also have a sneaky way of amplifying what’s missing. They remind us of who’s not here, what’s been lost, and what still aches. 

The empty chair is different for everyone and without respect for who you are, it invades your life. 

For some, it’s a chair of waiting—the hope for the prodigal to return, the relationship to be mended, the long overdue reunion to finally happen. It is a place of painful but patient waiting for what is unlikely, yet still possible.

For others, it’s a memorial. A glaring reminder of what was, but no longer is. A place of mourning and memory, like a household headstone, where we quietly hold the weight of a face we squint to see again, a hand we’d love to hold again, or a voice we can only hear in our minds. 

Sometimes, that chair is a fresh wound. Maybe it’s the fallout of a fight, a broken relationship, or a separation we didn’t choose but are left to carry. It is a place of sometimes a necessary but still agonizing separation.

And for some, it’s all of the above. 

Maybe this is your first time staring at that chair, or maybe you’ve been doing it for years. Either way, it hurts. It just hurts. And I want you to know—I see you. I hear you. 

Now, normally this is where communicators like to put a nice little bow or add in a silver lining to tie it all together. Like a closing reminder about how the empty chair is somehow a gift because it reminds us that we had something worth grieving over to begin with.

I’m not going to do that. 

The truth is, you’ll come to those lessons—in your own way, in your own time—or you won’t. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes healing comes. And sometimes it doesn’t. 

Sometimes, it just sucks. 

Right now, I just want you to know that I see your grief, your waiting, your pain, and that I wait and grieve and hurt too. In that way, we all sit together, gathered around the same incomplete table. 

Maybe that’s all we can offer each other this season: being compassionately present in the face of terrible absence. 

So here we are, learning to make peace with the holidays, with the fullness and the emptiness, the laughter and the tears, the joy and the ache. This is the messy paradox of loving and being wounded simultaneously. 

My prayer is: May we each make peace with this holiday season and the empty chairs. 

What kind of empty chairs are you facing this season? 

Let me know in the comments.