How many times have we heard it, or perhaps we’ve even said something like it ourselves: “Oh man, the first year after they died was hard, but I think the second year, in some ways, has been even harder.”
It doesn’t seem fair, and how can it be fair that the second year of grieving can feel more challenging than the first? If and when that happens for us, it can feel rather crazy-making. Did I do something wrong? Is this normal? How can this even make sense?
Good questions, and the answers to the first two are likely “no” (you did not do anything wrong) and “yes” (this is unfortunately not unusual). For the third question, here are some thoughts:
When someone important to us dies, we usually feel some amount of shock and numbness. This can be true even when the death is anticipated as the reality of the experience is different than the reality of anticipating and imagining. Shock and numbness can especially be present if we didn’t see the death coming. The impact of the death of a family member or friend can be so big, so heavy, and so upsetting that shock and numbness rush in to protect us from the full awareness of what has been lost. And we need that protection.
This protection also includes a sense of disbelief. We may know very well what happened in our heads, but our hearts cannot fully take it in. We may know it but not fully believe it. This dynamic is sometimes called “denial,” and for much of our experience of grief, it is a blessing. We need denial to give us time to get used to this new reality and to keep us from feeling even more overwhelmed than we are.
When denial does its job well, it gradually steps back to allow us to more fully come to grips with all that we have lost. It necessarily fades, and as it does, we more deeply understand how much our world has changed. Mostly, denial is not a problem but a help, and it only becomes problematic if it overstays its welcome and interferes with decisions that need to be made and the incremental adjusting to this new chapter in our lives.
In some ways, the first year is one of discovery that someone is truly dead and absent from the ways they were present when alive.
February comes and it’s Valentine’s Day—a hard day for missing those we love, and they’re still dead. Here in the northern hemisphere, spring comes with the world coming alive again and there are evidences all around of resurrection. But our dear ones are still dead. In May it’s Mother’s Day and graduation season. June brings Father’s Day and the pleasures of summer. But when those we lost continue to be dead, nothing and no season feels the same.
Late summer and fall bring “back to school” thoughts and memories—salt in our wounds, especially for grieving parents and grandparents. The beauties of autumn don’t look or feel the same when we are grieving and experiencing them for the first time without our special person. Halloween with its spooky fun is not the same. Thanksgiving can leave us feeling more absence than gratitude, and the year-end holidays accentuate who is not at the table. Even at Christmas, they’re still dead? Then the calendar flips and it’s a brand-new year without our person in it, at least not in the way they were before. Not in the way that we want and need them to be.
We understandably often focus on survival that first year of grief, and when we find ourselves still standing, or maybe “standing” feels a bit of an overstatement, perhaps still alive and breathing, it’s an accomplishment. We made it through a year of those painful firsts. We will never have a year like that again.
But now it’s another year without our person, and it’s still hard. We don’t feel prepared for how hard. Perhaps no one told us this was possible, and if they didn’t, they were probably trying to be kind. In the first year, getting through each day felt daunting enough.
For the second year, comforts of denial are more rarely found. This new reality feels more real than ever. Still a bad dream, perhaps, but also one for which there will be no escaping. We know that more deeply now.
The supports from others often have decreased, too. The meals and offers for help, cards, calls, and supportive texts happen less often if they happen at all. Well-meaning friends and family may avoid the subject of the one we are missing out of kindness or discomfort, and it can feel like they are acting as if nothing happened and our special person didn’t even have a life. This diminished support can leave us feeling isolated and lonely as the world keeps turning and life marches on with or without us.
No wonder the second year can be so difficult. We didn’t expect it, we’re receiving less support, and the awareness of what we have lost is higher than ever before.
There are no quick or easy answers for lessening the strain of our own personal “sophomore slump” in grieving. But as much as any time in our experience of grief, kindness is in order.
For all of us who are supporters of grieving friends and family, our kindness and attention is needed in this challenging second year for those left behind after someone has died. Supportive messages, invitations for companionship, sharing memories, a hand on the shoulder or a hug—you know the nature of your relationship—are expressions of the kindness needed for those facing what can be a lonely second year.
And for those of us doing the grieving, kindness towards ourselves is in order, too. We know better what comforts us and we know how we would extend comfort to others, so we can extend some back to ourselves. We are learning to live with memories, absence, and presence within absence as our traveling companions, and we are still very much in practice-mode. Grace and kindness are certainly needed.
It’s helpful, too, to recognize that we have resources in the second year that we didn’t have in that first year. We better understand how different our lives and seasons are and will be. We have more insights into what is helpful and what it not (and maybe who is helpful and who is not). It is not a small thing that we are still here with the opportunity for a second year.
As we go through the second year of grief and beyond, we, like writer Frances Weller, know more what it means to take one hand holding our grief and the other hand holding our gratitude and put them together in the “prayer of life”–the particular prayer of life only possible after we have experienced that strenuous and unrepeatable year of firsts.
