Writing Through the Year After Someone Dies

I should say at the start what this piece is not. It is not advice on how to grieve, and it is not a replacement for the people, doctors or counsellors you may need this year. What I have to offer is smaller than all of that: what writing tends to do and does not do in the twelve months afterwards.

The thing people say most often about that year is how little of it they can remember. Whole months are gone. What they do have, if they wrote, are the pages.

Why daily journals fail in grief

Grieving people are often given beautiful notebooks with a line for every day. By the second week the notebook has become another thing they are failing at, on top of the forms, the phone calls and the house that needs emptying.

Grief is tiring in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not been in it. Some days a single sentence is a real achievement. A book that expects one every evening will sit on the bedside table and quietly accuse you.

What tends to work is a page a week. Seven days is long enough that there is nearly always one evening when you can manage it, and short enough that the week has not blurred away.

Some weeks the entry is one line. The line is still a record that you were there.

The year does not go the way people expect

Everyone around you has a rough picture of grief as something that is sharpest at the start and slowly fades. For most people the year does not look like that at all.

• The first weeks are full of tasks. There is no room to feel much at all.
• Around the third month the cards stop and friends go quiet, just as it begins to land properly.
• In the second half, everyone assumes you are through it. For many people that is the loneliest part.
• The weeks before the date comes round again can be harder than the day itself.

A weekly question that follows that shape is more useful than a generic prompt about feelings. In month three you do not need to be asked how you are. You need to be asked who has gone quiet, and whether you want to say something to them.

Write down the details you are afraid of losing

A few weeks in, many people find they cannot quite recall how a voice sounded when it answered the phone. It usually comes back, but that fright is common, and there is a simple practical answer to it.

Keep a few pages somewhere for the small, specific things. How they took their tea. The phrase they used when they parked the car. The jumper. You do not have to write them beautifully. You only have to write them down before the week in which you would have forgotten.

Reading back is where the year becomes visible

Every three months or so, turn back and read the pages you have. Not to check your progress, because grief does not really do progress. Just to see it.

People who read back in this way often find that the worst week of the year was not the one they would have guessed, and that they laughed out loud in some week in the middle and had forgotten it entirely. Both are worth knowing.

Some practical things

• Start in the week you are in. There is no right moment, and an undated book does not mind if you begin in July.
• An empty page is allowed. Write the date and nothing else if that is what the week was.
• Write by hand if you can. It is slower, and in grief slower is often kinder.
• Keep it private. This book is not for reading out, unless one day you decide it is.
• If the writing stirs up more than you can hold, stop, and talk to someone. The page will wait.

The book

The Year After is fifty-two weeks of this: one question on the left, an empty page on the right, questions that follow the year as it tends to go, four read-backs, and room at the back for the details. It is undated, so you can start in the week you are in, and it asks nothing of you on the weeks you cannot manage.