The first year, roughly in order

What follows is not a set of stages, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

The five stages that people quote at each other were written about dying patients rather than about bereaved families, and they were a description of what somebody observed rather than a route anybody is obliged to take. They have been misapplied ever since. Grief is not a queue: you do not clear denial and advance to anger, nothing is ever completed, and nothing arrives in order. The worst consequence of the model is somebody lying awake at four in the morning wondering why they have not reached acceptance yet, as though they were behind on a course they had enrolled in.

What there is instead is a shape. It is common enough to be worth writing down in advance, on the theory that the hardest part is easier if it is not also a surprise, and it is a shape rather than a schedule. Skipping a part of it is not a failure and neither is taking three years over one.

The first fortnight, when nothing works

Sleep goes first, or goes strange — four hours, then an afternoon you cannot account for. Appetite goes. Memory goes: people put the milk in the cupboard, drive somewhere and cannot say how they got there, and read the same paragraph six times. Time distorts, so that the day of the death is both yesterday and years ago.

There is adrenaline in this fortnight and it is doing a job. It is what lets somebody choose a coffin on the second day and speak in front of a hundred people on the sixth. It is also why the advice everybody gives is the same: do not make a single decision you can put off. People sign things in the first fortnight that they cannot afterwards remember signing. Do not sell the house, do not clear the wardrobe, do not resign, do not move in with anybody and do not give the car away. None of it will be easier in April, but all of it will be yours rather than the adrenaline's.

Eat something. Drink water. Let people carry things. That is the whole of the advice for the first two weeks.

The first month, when the post arrives

This is the part nobody warns anybody about, and it is not the grief. It is the administration.

Every institution the person dealt with wants its own certified copy, its own form, its own telephone call. The forms are not the exhausting part. The exhausting part is that each call begins with you saying the sentence out loud — my mother has died — to a stranger who then puts you on hold with music, and you say it again to the next department, and it costs you something every single time.

Two things help. One box or one folder for everything that comes in, and one notebook with the date, the name of the person you spoke to and what they said, because you will be told three different things and will need to know who said which. And one nominated caller: it does not have to be the widow. A friend with the account numbers and a copy of the certificate can do a great deal of it, and this is the most useful thing anybody can offer in the second month. The order it goes in is on the paperwork page, and how many certified copies to order is on the death certificates page.

Three to six months, when everybody else has moved on

The food stops arriving. The cards stop. The telephone goes quiet. Everybody who came to the funeral has gone back to their own week, and — this is the part that catches people out — most of them genuinely believe the worst is behind you, because the funeral is done and the funeral was the part they saw.

Meanwhile the fact has finished arriving. The adrenaline has gone, the administration is mostly finished, and what is left is the shape of a life with somebody missing out of the middle of it. This is the stretch most families describe afterwards as the worst, and it is the stretch with the least support in it. If you are the friend of somebody in this stretch, the article about what to say is the one to read.

What helps here is unglamorous. One fixed thing in the week that you have to leave the house for. Daylight and walking, which sound like an insult and are not. Telling one person the true answer when they ask. And saying the name out loud, since by now nobody else is.

The first anniversary, and the dread in front of it

The run-up is usually worse than the day. From about a month out the mind starts a loop — this time last year we were doing this, this time last year he was still here — and the loop tightens through the last fortnight until the dread is a physical thing.

The day itself is very often smaller than the fortnight before it. Plan something for it, keep it small, and give yourself explicit permission to cancel it. Decide in advance who you want near you and tell them the date now rather than hoping they remember. Some families go to the grave, some go to the sea, some cook the meal he cooked, and some go to work because work is a floor to stand on. None of those is the correct one.

The things that ambush you

Almost none of the hard moments in the first year are the ones in the diary. They are these:

• A bank letter addressed to them, three months after you told the bank.
• Their handwriting on a shopping list in a coat pocket.
• Their voice on your voicemail, and the question of whether to keep it.
• The first birthday — theirs, and then your own, which is worse than anybody expects.
• A song in a supermarket, which is a cliche until it happens to you in the frozen aisle.
• Sorting the clothes, and the smell in the wardrobe when you open it.
• Somebody who has not heard, asking cheerfully how they are.
• The moment you go to tell them something, because they are the person you tell things to.

There is no right time to do any of the practical ones. The clothes can go next week or in three years and neither is a failure; the only bad version is doing it because somebody else has decided it is time. The same goes for the ring, the bedroom, the car and the telephone number. If you want the voice on the voicemail, get a copy of it onto something you own before the network deletes it, and then decide about it later, when deciding is possible.

A quiet warning about the well-meant clear-out: a relative who takes the clothes to a charity shop while you are out has removed a decision that was yours to make. If you are the relative, ask. If you are the bereaved one, it is entirely reasonable to say that nothing leaves the house yet.

When it is worth asking a doctor

Grief is not an illness and most of what is on this page needs no treatment at all. Some of it is a medical question, and the ones worth taking to a doctor are these: sleep that has gone completely for weeks rather than nights; eating that has stopped; drinking that goes up every week; being unable to work or wash or leave the house for a long stretch; and a feeling that is different in kind from sadness — flat, or blank, or frightening.

And if you find yourself thinking that you would rather not be here, that is not a grief question and it is not something to sit on until an appointment comes round. Tell a doctor today, or go to an emergency department, or tell one person in the house and ask them to go with you.

There is a page about what kinds of help exist and how to tell which one you want — a group, a counsellor, your own community, or a doctor: afterwards. None of it is counselling from us, and it is not called counselling anywhere on this site.

None of this is a schedule, and you are not behind on it.