The anniversary of a death: what to say and what to do

The first anniversary is often harder than the funeral. At the funeral there were people, arrangements, things to do. A year later there is a Tuesday, and everyone else has moved on.

If you are the friend

Send something. One line is enough.

Thinking of you and your dad today.

People hesitate because they are afraid of reminding someone. You will not remind them. They have been aware of this date since the calendar turned over, and by now almost nobody else has mentioned it.

Practical version: when someone close to you dies, put the date in your calendar immediately, repeating yearly. You will not remember otherwise, and the message you send three years later will matter more than the one you sent in the first week.

If it is your person

There is no correct way to spend the day, and there is no requirement to do anything at all. But families who plan something small generally find it easier than families who let the day arrive undefended.

Things that work:

• Go where they are, if there is somewhere. Take something. Stay a short time.
• Eat what they ate. The meal they made, the pub they went to, the thing they always ordered.
• Say the name out loud with other people. A phone call between siblings who otherwise text.
• Write to them. A letter you never send. This one surprises people with how much it does.
• Do nothing, deliberately. Take the day off, go for a walk, refuse to perform grief for anybody. That is a legitimate plan.

Involving children

Children do well with anniversaries because they are concrete. Light a candle. Let them draw something. Look at photographs and tell them one story they have not heard.

Doing it every year turns the date from something frightening into something familiar, which is most of what you can offer them.

The second year

Less spoken about, and often worse for the person closest to the death. In the first year everyone is watching; in the second, the sympathy has gone and the absence has not.

If you are the friend: the second anniversary message is the one that is remembered.

Somewhere for it to go

Anniversaries produce things — a photograph someone finds, a story an uncle tells at the table, the letter you did not send.

Each year they are produced, and each year they scatter again. A family that keeps them in one shared place ends up, after five or six years, with something no single person could have assembled: the same life described by everyone who loved it, a little at a time.