Losing your husband or wife: the first months

Losing a husband or wife is not only a bereavement. It is the removal of the person you would have discussed the bereavement with.

That is the part nobody prepares you for, and the reason this grief behaves differently from others.

The first weeks

There is a great deal to do and almost no capacity to do it. Paperwork, notifications, a funeral, people in the house.

Two things help, and both feel wrong at the time.

Let people do specific tasks. Not "let me know if you need anything" — a friend who takes the car for its service, or sits with the paperwork for two hours, is worth ten who offer.

Eat and sleep badly but deliberately. Low bars. Something at roughly the same time each day. This is not self-care advice, it is the difference between coping and not.

When the house empties

Somewhere around week three, the visitors stop. This is the beginning rather than the end, and it is the point at which most people describe actually feeling it.

The hardest hours are usually not the dramatic ones. They are six in the evening, and Sunday afternoon, and the moment of walking into a house where nobody is going to ask how it went.

What people say helps

From people who have been through it, repeatedly:

• Keeping one fixed thing in the week. A class, a walk with someone, a shift somewhere. One appointment that exists whether or not you feel like it.
• Talking to other widowed people. Almost everyone reports this as more useful than talking to friends, because it requires no translation.
• Not rushing to be better. The pressure to be recognizably recovered usually comes from outside.
• Keeping the objects for now. Clothes in the wardrobe, the toothbrush, the chair. There is no deadline, whatever anyone implies.

Decisions to postpone

Grief is a poor state for large irreversible choices, and the first year is full of people encouraging them.

Where possible, postpone: selling the house, moving city, giving away possessions in bulk, a new relationship decided quickly, and any major financial restructuring beyond what is legally required.

Anything that must be done — probate, accounts, the practical estate — is worth doing with someone else in the room, not because you cannot, but because concentration is unreliable and mistakes at this stage are expensive.

The second year

Widely described as harder. The cards have stopped, everyone assumes you are through it, and the ordinary machinery of life has resumed around an absence that has not shrunk.

If you are the friend of someone widowed: this is the year to keep calling. The support in month two is abundant and the support in month fourteen is almost nonexistent, which is exactly the wrong way round.

When to ask for more help

Grief is not depression, but it can become it. Worth speaking to a doctor if, several months on: you cannot function at all in daily tasks, you are drinking substantially more, you are avoiding everyone entirely, or you have thoughts of not wanting to be here. None of that is weakness or a failure of love.

What tends to help in the long run

Not moving on — a phrase most widowed people dislike — but keeping them present in a way that is bearable.

Telling the stories to grandchildren. Keeping the letters somewhere they can be read rather than in a box that is never opened. Marking the date. Putting the photographs, the voice recordings and the words other people wrote in one place while everyone who remembers is still here to add to it.

That work is difficult in year one and much easier in year three, and it is almost always the thing people are glad they did.