About
Afterwards
The weeks after a funeral are usually harder than the week before it, and the callers stop ringing at about the point when it gets difficult. That is ordinary and it catches everybody out.
The week before a funeral has a shape. There are telephone calls to make, forms to sign, people arriving, a day to get to. It is exhausting and it is terrible and it is, at least, full. Then the day happens, and the relatives go home, and the casseroles stop, and everybody who rang twice a day for a fortnight assumes you are through the worst of it.
You are not, usually. The stretch that catches people out starts at about six weeks and runs for months, and almost nobody is warned about it. So this page is here rather than a leaflet, and it is written for the March after rather than for the week of.
Four kinds of help, and how to tell which one you want
These are different things that get called the same thing. Knowing which one you are looking for saves a month of looking in the wrong place.
A support group
A room of people in the same position, usually free, usually weekly. Some are general and some are specific — a group for people who have lost a partner is a different room from a group for parents.
One-to-one counselling
A qualified counsellor, usually paid, sometimes covered by insurance or by an employer's assistance programme. Ask a doctor for a referral rather than searching alone.
Your own community
A congregation, a temple, a mosque, a cultural association. For many families this is the most useful of the three and the one already at hand.
A doctor
If sleep has gone, or eating has gone, or the grief has turned into something that feels different from sadness. That is a medical question and it deserves a medical answer.
How to tell them apart
The rough test is what the difficulty is made of. If it is loneliness — nobody to say her name to, nobody who wants to hear it again — a room of people in the same position does more than an hour with a professional, and costs nothing. If it is something you cannot say in front of people who knew them, that is the one to take to a counsellor. If it is your body rather than your week — sleep gone, eating gone, or a flatness that feels different in kind from sadness — that is a medical question and it should go to a doctor first, not last.
Most people need more than one of them, at different times, and the order is rarely the one they expected.
What we do, in full
It is a short list and it is deliberately not padded. Everything on it is real and none of it is more than it sounds.
- We ring a month afterwards, and again at the year, unless a family asks us not to.
- We keep a list of what is available near here and we will go through it with you.
- We will sit with you in the reception room, without an appointment, if you would rather not be at home.
And what that is not
None of that is counselling and none of us is a counsellor. We are the people who arranged the funeral, and there is a limit to how useful that makes us in March.
We say that plainly because the alternative is worse than useless. A funeral home that puts the words grief support on its website is usually describing a telephone call and a list, and a family that reads it as therapy waits for something that is not coming instead of going to find the thing that is. If what you need is a counsellor, ask a doctor for a referral, and do it sooner than feels warranted.
We ring at a month and again at a year, and we keep a list of what is available near here. None of it is counselling and we will not call it counselling.
- We do not counsel — The longer version of that limit, and why saying it out loud is the useful part.
The first year, roughly
Not a schedule and not a set of stages. This is what families describe to us afterwards, often enough that it is worth writing down.
The first fortnight
Nothing works properly. Sleep goes. Do not make any decision you can put off.
The first month
The paperwork arrives, all at once, and it is exhausting in a way nobody warns you about.
Three to six months
Often the hardest stretch, and the one where everybody assumes you are fine now.
The first anniversary
Both worse and better than expected, usually. The dread of it is frequently worse than the day.
None of that is prescriptive and none of it is a target. Some people find the second month worse than the sixth, and some find the anniversary passes as an ordinary weekday. The reason it is written down at all is that people going through it frequently think they are doing it wrong, and knowing that the flat months are the usual shape is worth something on its own.
- The first year — The long version, month by month, including the paperwork nobody warns you about and the anniversary.
- What to say to someone bereaved — For the people around you, who mostly want to help and mostly do not know how.
- Talking to children about a death — Plain words rather than gentle ones, and why the gentle ones cause the trouble.
No organisation is named here. This page names no charity, no support organisation and no helpline, for the same reason the cemeteries page names no cemetery: attaching a real organisation's name to an invented business would suggest a relationship nobody has agreed to. A real funeral home would list them, and should.
If the months after are the part you are in
You may ring about this and nothing else. There is nothing to arrange and nothing to buy, and it is not a strange thing to do a year later.