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Living with loss

The first year

Nobody’s year runs to a template. But there are patterns common enough that knowing them takes some of the fright out of the bad weeks.

Published 4 min read

The first fortnight

Shock does a good deal of work in the early days, and a lot of people are surprised by how functional they are. There is a funeral to arrange, people to tell, food arriving, the house full. Some of it is even oddly companionable.

Underneath, sleep is usually going, appetite has usually gone, and nothing is being retained. This is the period in which people sign things they later cannot remember signing — which is the practical argument for taking somebody with you to the arrangement meeting and for not agreeing to anything on day one .

Weeks three to eight

The stretch almost nobody is warned about.

The funeral is over. The visitors have gone home. Compassionate leave has run out. The cards have stopped. And the death, which until now has been a set of tasks, becomes a fact you have to live in.

Most people find this the worst part of the first year, and most people believe they are failing because it is happening after the point when they were supposed to be “getting back to normal”. They are not failing. The support falls away at precisely the moment the reality lands, and it is the reason supporting someone who is grieving is mostly about what you do at week six rather than week one.

This is also when the estate administration starts producing letters, which is a particular species of misery: bureaucratic, repetitive, and requiring you to say “my husband has died” to a call centre eleven times in a fortnight.

Months three to six

Life resumes its shape without resuming its content. You are back at work. People have stopped asking. Grief goes underground and becomes private, which is both a relief and extremely lonely.

The firsts begin: the first birthday, the first anniversary of the wedding, the first holiday, the first Christmas, the first time somebody asks how many children you have. Each is a small ambush, and the anticipation is usually worse than the event.

What helps, according to almost everybody who has been through it:

  • Decide in advance. An unplanned significant date is far worse than a planned one.
  • Tell one person it is coming. Even a text on the morning changes it.
  • Change the shape. A different meal, a different house, a different country. Attempting the normal version with a hole in it is the hardest option.
  • Give yourself an exit. From the party, the dinner, the office. Arrange your own transport and leave when you want to.

Months six to twelve

Most people report the beginning of a shift somewhere here — not the pain reducing so much as the gaps between the worst hours lengthening. Ordinary things become possible again. You laugh at something and get a lurch of guilt about it, and then you do it again the following week with less.

The anniversary approaches, and the fortnight leading up to it is very often harder than the day itself. People re-live the final illness hour by hour, which is exhausting and entirely common. Plan the day. Do not spend it alone unless you have thought about it and genuinely want to.

After the first year

The idea that the first year is the hard one and then it is done is a myth that does a lot of damage, mostly to people in year two who conclude they are broken.

What tends to be true is that grief stops being the weather and becomes the landscape. It is still there. You are not braced against it every hour. It comes back sharply and without warning for years — at a wedding, at a birth, at a smell in a corridor, at the moment you realise you cannot remember exactly what their voice sounded like, which is one of the worst of the delayed shocks and one nobody mentions.

Most people, in their own time, find they can hold both the loss and an ordinary life at once. That is what recovery from grief actually looks like. It is not the loss becoming smaller.

If it is not shifting

If, at around a year, nothing has moved at all — you cannot function, the longing is as intense as it was at the start, life feels meaningless — that is worth taking to a GP. It may be prolonged grief disorder, which is recognised, common enough not to be strange, and treatable. See what grief actually feels like and where to get help .

  • Week six is often worse than week one

    The funeral gives structure and company. What follows gives neither, and the support drops away at exactly the point the reality arrives.

  • Postpone the big decisions

    Selling the house, leaving the job, moving nearer the family, giving away everything they owned. Nothing that cannot be undone should be done in the first six months if it can wait.

  • The anniversary is usually easier than the run-up

    The fortnight before is frequently worse than the day. Plan the day itself, tell somebody it is coming, and do not spend it alone unless you genuinely want to.

Questions people ask us most

Why do I feel worse now than I did at the funeral?
Because the funeral had structure, tasks and people, and shock was still doing a great deal of protective work. When the practical business ends and everybody returns to their own lives, the reality arrives with nothing left to muffle it. Week six being worse than week one is one of the most consistent things bereaved people report, and it is not deterioration.
When will I start to feel better?
Most people describe the acute phase easing somewhere in the second half of the first year, though not steadily and not permanently — it comes back hard at anniversaries and at nothing in particular. What tends to change first is the frequency of the very worst hours, rather than their intensity. If nothing at all has shifted by around a year, that is worth mentioning to a GP.
Should I clear out their things?
There is no right time and no obligation. Some people need the wardrobe emptied within a fortnight; others cannot face it for two years, and both are fine. The useful compromise is to do it in stages, keep a small box of things you cannot decide about, and not let anybody hurry you. Where a landlord or a care home is imposing a deadline, ask for longer — you will usually get it — and if not, box everything and sort it later rather than deciding under pressure.
How do I get through the first Christmas or birthday?
Decide in advance rather than letting it arrive. Say plainly what you can and cannot do, change the shape of the day if the usual shape is unbearable, and give yourself permission to leave early. Doing something completely different — going away, eating at a strange time, spending it with different people — works better for a lot of families than attempting the normal version with a gap in it.
Is it disloyal to have a good day?
No, and having them is how this works. People frequently feel a lurch of guilt the first time they laugh properly, or realise they went two hours without thinking about it. That oscillation between grief and ordinary life is precisely what the research describes as healthy grieving — not a betrayal, and not the start of forgetting.
When should I start dating again, or take off the ring?
Whenever you want to, and the only opinion that counts is yours. Other people’s timetables for widowed and bereaved partners are notoriously unforgiving in both directions — judged for being too quick and pitied for being too slow. Whatever you do, somebody will have a view, so it may as well be your own.

Keep reading

Other pages in this guide

You do not have to work this out in one sitting

Very little has to be done on the first day, and almost nothing has to be decided tonight. Start with the step-by-step guide, and if you need a person rather than a page, the helplines are free and answered by people who do this every day.

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