Coping with grief in the first weeks

The funeral is over, the people who came have gone back to their lives, and you are in the house with the quiet. This is when grief actually starts for most people, and it is also the point where everyone stops asking how you are. What follows is not advice on how to feel. It is a description of what the first weeks usually contain, so that when it happens to you it is recognisable, and a short list of things that help and things that do not.

What the first weeks usually feel like

Numb, mostly, and tired in a way sleep does not touch. The NHS lists shock and numbness, tiredness or exhaustion, sadness, anger and guilt as the signs of grief, and the bereavement charities add the physical ones: broken sleep, an appetite that goes either way, and a memory that will not hold. Families describe the same things to us in the same words. You may find yourself reading the same form three times. You may forget you have eaten, or not eat.

The feelings arrive out of order and not on schedule. Sadness, yes, but also anger at the hospital, at a sibling, at the person for dying; guilt over something said or not said; and stretches of nothing at all, when you are making tea and it could be any Tuesday. None of that is a sign that you are doing it wrong. Grief in the first weeks is mostly a nervous system absorbing a fact it cannot yet hold, and it does that in pieces.

Is it normal to feel nothing, or to feel relief?

Yes, both. Numbness is the commonest thing families tell us about, and they usually say it as a confession. It is not one. Shock is protective, and it can last weeks.

Relief is the other one people are ashamed of. After a long illness, a death is also the end of the illness, of the hospital car park and the night calls and the watching, and feeling lighter for a day does not mean you loved the person less. It means you were carrying two things and one of them has been put down. Is it normal to feel relief, or nothing at all is a longer answer, if you need one.

What to leave alone in the first weeks

Four things, and they are the ones people regret.

Big decisions. The house, the move, the job, the relationship. The urge to act is real, because action feels better than sitting with it, but a decision made in the first months is made by someone who is not yet themselves. Anything that can wait until after the first anniversary usually should.

Their things. There is no deadline for clearing a wardrobe, and no prize for doing it quickly. Some people need the room emptied in a week and some need the coat on the hook for a year, and both are fine. Do it when you want to, not when a relative thinks you should.

Measuring yourself against a chart. If you have read about the stages of grief and you are checking which one you are in, stop. There is more on that below.

Drinking to sleep. It works for a fortnight and then it stops working and adds a second problem to the first. If you cannot sleep, tell your GP; it is one of the commonest reasons people see a doctor after a bereavement and there are better answers.

What helps, in practice

The unglamorous things, in roughly this order.

Sleep, food and daylight. Not because they fix anything, but because grief on no sleep and no food is grief with the volume turned up. A walk outside in the morning does more than it sounds like it should, and Cruse and the NHS both put it near the top of their lists for the same reason.

One person you can say things to. Not everyone; one. Someone who will let you say the same thing four times without trying to solve it. If there is no such person, that is exactly what the bereavement helplines below are for, and people ring them for that reason more than any other.

Saying their name. Friends will avoid it, thinking it will upset you. It is the silence that upsets most people. Tell them you want to hear it.

The paperwork in short sessions. There is a lot of it and it is not urgent after the first fortnight. Half an hour, then stop. What to do when someone dies puts it in order and says which parts have a deadline, so you are not doing all of it at once out of fear.

Accepting the specific offers. “Let me know if you need anything” is unanswerable. “I’ll bring dinner on Thursday” is a yes. If someone asks what they can do, give them a job: the school run, the dog, the phone call to the pension company. If you are the friend rather than the bereaved, how to support someone who is grieving and what to say when someone dies are the other side of this page.

Going back to work

There is no right number of days off, and the law in the UK gives you very few of them as of right; most employers offer some compassionate leave and then it is annual leave or sick leave, and a GP will sign you off if you need it. Some people go back within a week because the routine holds them up, and some cannot face a desk for a month. Both are normal.

What helps is telling one person at work what has happened and what you want: whether you would rather people mention it or not, and whether you are all right to be asked. Colleagues mostly want to do the right thing and have no idea what it is. If you are grieving for a spouse or a civil partner and you are under state pension age, Bereavement Support Payment exists for exactly the months when work is hardest; what support you are entitled to covers it.

Do the stages of grief apply to you?

Probably not in the way you have heard. The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, were written in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to describe people who were themselves dying, not the people they left. They were later stretched over bereavement, and then over a poster, and the poster is what most people know.

What clinicians and the bereavement charities describe now is closer to a tide than a staircase. You go in and out of it. A good week is followed by a bad Tuesday for no reason you can name, and that is not going backwards. The stages of grief, and why yours will not follow the list explains where the model came from and what has replaced it, if you want the longer version.

How long does it last?

There is no timetable, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What the charities will tell you, and what we see, is that the sharpest part is usually the first few months, that the first year is hard because every date in it is a first, and that most people find the weight changes rather than lifts. It becomes something you carry rather than something that carries you.

The question people actually ask is whether it is normal to still feel like this at six months, or at a year. It is. What is worth noticing is not how long it has been but whether you are able to function: get up, eat, work or manage the house, see people. If you cannot, for weeks at a stretch, that is the sign to read the next section. How long does grief last goes through the first year month by month. The weeks after the funeral is the point most people are at when they find this page, and grief at Christmas and on the first anniversaries is for the dates.

When to get help, and where

Grief is not an illness and most people do not need treatment for it. Some do, and the difference is not how sad you are but whether you can carry on with your life at all.

See your GP if you are not sleeping for weeks, if you are not eating, if you cannot work or leave the house, or if you are drinking to cope. The GP can refer you to bereavement counselling and to NHS talking therapies, both free.

Cruse Bereavement Support runs a free helpline on 0808 808 1677 and has local branches across the UK. Sue Ryder runs a free online bereavement community you can post in at any hour, and online counselling for over-18s behind a short online triage. Both are for anyone who is grieving, not only for people in crisis, and both are used most by people who simply have no one at home to say it to.

If you have thoughts of harming yourself, ring the Samaritans on 116 123 at any hour, or 999 if you are in immediate danger. That is not an overreaction. It is the right number.

When to get bereavement counselling, and where to find it in the UK lists every route, with what each one is for and how long the wait tends to be.

If you are grieving far from home

Many of the families we work with are grieving in one country for someone whose funeral was in another. That is its own kind of hard: you may have missed the funeral, the people who knew them are not around you, and the rituals your family would normally lean on are a thousand miles away. Grieving far from home is written for exactly that.

What to read next

If a child is in the house, telling a child that someone has died is the one to read tonight. If the physical side is what frightens you, how grief affects your body explains it. And if the weeks are turning into months without change, the counselling guide above is the next step, and you do not need anyone’s permission to take it. If there was no funeral to attend, or you missed it, saying goodbye when there is no funeral to attend and planning a memorial service are for making one; should children go to the funeral if that day is still ahead; funeral etiquette in the UK if you are a guest rather than the family; and when a death is expected if you are reading this before rather than after.