How to Cope With Grief: What Actually Helps in the First Year

Grief is not a problem to solve. It is the cost of having loved someone, and it is paid over time, in a currency that changes month by month. What follows is not a programme. It is what people who have been through it say helped, what did not, and what to expect, written so you can read it at two in the morning.

What it is like

Grief comes in waves rather than stages. A good hour, then a song in a shop and you are in the car park crying. Numbness that feels like coping and is not. Exhaustion out of proportion to anything you did. Forgetting words. Anger at the person for dying, which is normal and tells you nothing bad about you. Relief, if it was a long illness, which is also normal. The famous five stages were written about dying, not about grieving, and the idea that you work through them in order is a myth that makes people feel they are grieving wrong. There is no wrong.

What helps

• Sleep, and eat, and walk. Grief is physical. Nothing else works on four hours' sleep.
• Say their name. Out loud, to people. Most people avoid it to spare you, and the silence is worse. Tell them you want to hear it.
• Tell the story. How they died, what the last week was, what they said. You will need to tell it many times. Each time it is a little more a story and a little less a wound.
• Have something to do with your hands. The garden, the shed, the sorting of the clothes, the writing of the obituary. The mind rests when the hands work.
• Keep one or two people close who can hear it without fixing it. One is enough.
• Mark the days. Birthday, anniversary, the date. Decide in advance how, and lower the bar.
• Make something. A memorial page, an album, a recipe book of their dishes, a tree. Something that exists because they did.
• A group, if your own circle has gone quiet. Where to find one.

What helps less than it is supposed to

Being busy, past a point: it postpones rather than prevents. Alcohol, obviously, and it also wrecks sleep. Big decisions in the first year: moving, selling, leaving. Platitudes, from anyone, including yourself. And "staying strong for the children", which teaches them to hide it. Children do better with a parent who cries and then makes dinner.

The shape of the first year

The first weeks are the emergency, and there is help everywhere. About the fourth month the casseroles stop, the calls thin out, the paperwork peaks, and many people say this was the worst time, because it looked from the outside as if it should be getting better. Then the firsts: the first holiday, the first birthday, the first anniversary of the death, each dreaded more than it turns out to be. The second year is quieter and in some ways stranger, because it is final. Years later, a wave still comes, out of nowhere, and passes. That is not a relapse. That is love with nowhere to go.

Children

Children grieve in short bursts and then play, which looks like not grieving and is not. Use plain words: died, dead. Answer what they ask and no more. Keep routines. Let them have a job at the funeral and a part in remembering. Watch for the quiet one. Children's grief centres exist in most cities and are very good.

When it is time to get help

If months in you cannot work, sleep, eat or get up; if you are drinking or using to get through; if the death was violent or you witnessed it and it replays; if you feel nothing at all for a long time; or if you are thinking about not being here. Any of these is a reason to see a grief counsellor or a doctor, and none of them is weakness. Hospices offer counselling, often free, whether or not they cared for your person.

One more thing

You will not get over it. That is the wrong shape. What happens, slowly, is that the grief stays the same size and your life grows around it, until it is a part of you rather than all of you. People who are years on describe something they did not expect: gratitude. Not for the loss, but for having had someone worth this much grief.