When a family member dies, we may imagine the surviving family members leaning on one another, sharing memories, and finding comfort in their common loss. This doesn’t always happen, as grief doesn’t always bring families closer. In some cases, it creates more distance between the people who might understand our loss best.
In Hallmark’s “A Season of Promises,” sisters Heidi and Sophie have grown apart following their mother’s death four years ago. We see their obvious differences while we watch a home video from 30 years ago. Viewers may expect the sisters to have their issues, but we soon learn that they no longer interact after the death of their mother. They reach out to one another only after their father, Ed, experiences a health scare. After realizing how alone he is, they decide to help him find love again while also encouraging him to seek out grief support.
While the movie follows their matchmaking efforts, its more interesting story is about what happens to family relationships after a significant loss. It portrays three family members who experienced the same loss and who are grieving in three very different ways.
When One Loss Changes Every Relationship
The death of a family member doesn’t simply remove one person from a family. Instead, it changes the relationships among everyone who remains. Family systems theory suggests that families are interconnected systems. When something happens to one member, the effects ripple throughout the family. The loss of a parent, for example, may change how siblings interact, how responsibilities are distributed, and how family members understand their new roles. Family members grieve not only the person who moved on but also the role they no longer occupy.
The Double ABC-X model of family stress can also help explain why some families struggle following a loss. Families must manage not only the original stressful event but also the additional demands that accumulate afterward. Their ability to adapt depends partly on available resources and how family members interpret their circumstances. Sometimes, the difficulty isn’t that family members don’t care about one another. It’s that they don’t know how to support one another when their needs are different.
Sibling Relationships: Our Longest Relationships
For many people, sibling relationships are the longest-lasting relationships in their lives. Siblings often know us before our friendships, romantic partnerships, and professional identities develop. They share family histories, childhood experiences, and memories that no one else can fully replicate, but the length of a relationship does not mean its closeness will remain constant.
Sibling relationships often move through periods of connection and disengagement. Geographic distance, different life circumstances, competing responsibilities, and unresolved disagreements can all influence how frequently siblings interact. Heidi and Sophie are examples. Although their relationship has become strained, the distance isn’t permanent, as their concern for their father brings them together again. Sophie’s love interest made a particularly meaningful observation, after listening to her discuss her complicated sibling relationship: “Families are messy. It doesn’t mean you stop loving each other.”
I appreciated Hallmark including this interaction because so many of us feel like having messy families signals trouble, but it’s a reality of having complex and interdependent relationships that can be impacted by stressors. Sophie’s and Heidi’s relationship captures the reality of relationships. They also demonstrate the notion that love and closeness are not necessarily the same thing. We can love family members deeply while needing distance from them. We can disagree about the past without erasing the relationships that shaped us. Disengagement is not always a sign that a relationship has failed. Sometimes it reflects a period when family members need space to manage their own lives, emotions, or identities.
Closeness Needs Flexibility
The Circumplex Model of Marital and Family Systems identifies two important dimensions of family functioning: cohesion and flexibility. Cohesion describes the emotional bonds among family members. Flexibility refers to a family’s ability to adjust its roles, relationships, and expectations when circumstances change.
Healthy family relationships generally require a balance of both. Too little cohesion (i.e., disengagement) may leave family members feeling disconnected, while too much cohesion (e.g., enmeshment) may make it difficult for individuals to develop independence or establish boundaries.
Similarly, families that struggle to adapt may find themselves expecting relationships to remain exactly as they were, even after significant life changes. For Heidi and Sophie, rebuilding their relationship doesn’t necessarily mean returning to the closeness they experienced before their mother’s death. Instead, it may require recognizing that they have changed and allowing their relationship to change with them.
Connection leaves room for individuality. Family members do not have to experience grief identically, make the same decisions, or maintain constant contact to remain important to one another.
Sometimes Love Means Sitting With Grief
Perhaps one of the movie’s most insightful moments occurs when one of the daughters confides in a new love interest that she wants to fix her father’s grief. He gently suggests that perhaps her father doesn’t need someone to fix his grief and that maybe he needs someone willing to sit in it with him. This distinction is important.
When someone we love is hurting, our instinct is often to make the pain disappear. We offer solutions, encourage new activities, or try to help them move forward. These efforts usually come from a place of love, but they may also reflect our own discomfort with watching someone suffer. Grief, however, is not a problem that another person can solve.
Social support can help people cope with loss, but support doesn’t always require action. Sometimes it means listening without offering advice, acknowledging difficult emotions, or simply being present. The sisters’ efforts to find their father a romantic partner reflect their desire to see him happy again, but his grief cannot necessarily be resolved by introducing someone new into his life. A new relationship may bring joy, but it doesn’t erase the significance of the relationship that was lost.
Making Room for a Different Relationship
Hallmark movies typically offer satisfying resolutions, and A Season of Promises is no exception. The movie raises a question that extends beyond its Christmas setting: What does it mean to remain a family when our relationships no longer look the way they did? Families experience periods of closeness, conflict, loss, and disengagement. Not every disagreement can be resolved immediately, and not every relationship will return to its previous form.
Maintaining family relationships can mean accepting that people grieve differently, need different amounts of connection, or require time apart. What matters is whether family members can make room for one another’s needs while being honest about their own. Perhaps the lesson of A Season of Promises isn’t that families must always come back together. Instead, it’s that relationships can change without losing their significance.
Hallmark vs. Psychology
Hallmark says: A loved one’s health scare can be the catalyst to bring a family back together, along with the help of Christmas magic.
Psychology says: Family relationships don’t have to remain consistently close to be meaningful. Healthy families make room for different experiences of grief, changing relationships, and the understanding that supporting someone doesn’t always mean fixing their pain.
The verdict: Hallmark captures the complexity of grief and how differently it can be experienced within the same family. The movie portrays a family struggling with loss, the ways grief can strain relationships, and the challenges of grieving both individually and together. Ultimately, the family comes to recognize that moving forward doesn’t mean returning to how things were before their loss. Instead, they learn to embrace a new normal, one that makes room for grief, changing relationships, and continued love.