The Second Year Is Harder

The last form went into the post box on a Tuesday in March, and that was when it started.

For thirteen months there had been things to do. There is an enormous amount to do. Certificates, and the bank, and the pension office who needed the same document three separate times, and the car that had to be dealt with, and the phone contract, and the sixty two people who had to be told, and the thank you notes, and the drawer of clothes she could not open until August and then did, all in one afternoon, on the floor, with the radio on. The first anniversary was organized. There was a rota. Somebody brought lasagne.

And then the paperwork ran out.

Now it is the second spring, and the tulips he planted have come up again, which is a thing she did not think about in advance and which took her legs out from under her at eight in the morning by the bins. Nobody rings on a Thursday now to check. The group chat has moved on to other things, quite rightly, because life does. When people ask how she is doing they use the past tense about him, gently, and they say she is doing so well, and she says thank you, because what else is there, and because they are kind and they mean it.

She has stopped saying the true sentence out loud. The true sentence is that this year is worse. Last year she was in shock and surrounded. This year she is clear headed and alone with it, and clear headed is much harder, because now she understands. Not the news. The permanence. Last year she was surviving an event. This year she is learning a fact, and the fact is that this is the rest of her life.

Nobody warned you.

They warned you about the first year. Everybody warns you about the first year. Not one person sat you down and said that the second one can be heavier, and so you have added a second grief on top of the first, and it is the belief that something has gone wrong with you.

Why nobody warned you

Nothing has gone wrong with you. Say that slowly, because you have been carrying the opposite around as evidence against yourself, and it is not evidence of anything. The Spirit did not put that verdict in you, and there is no line written anywhere that sets a term on a grief. Whoever started that clock, it was not God.

Here is what actually happened.

The first year gave your grief a job. Grief with tasks in it is still grief, but it has somewhere to put its hands, and it has an audience, and the world makes allowances for it. People came. The calendar was full of things that had to be arranged. Even the terrible parts had a next step, and a next step will hold a person up for a remarkably long time.

The second year takes all of that away and leaves the grief exactly where it was. No forms. No rota. No allowances. Just an ordinary Tuesday, and a supermarket, and the aisle with the thing he liked, and no reason you could explain to anyone for why you are standing very still in front of the tinned soup. You are not unaccompanied in that aisle. No rota ever kept the hours the Spirit keeps, and the word puts no season on a broken heart.

And the world reads the quiet as recovery. That is the cruelty of it, and it is nobody's fault. They see calm and they file it as healing, and so the calls thin out at precisely the point when the ground gets softer.

You have been keeping the true sentence to yourself for months, in a hall like the one in the picture, with a cup of tea going cold in your hands, while people say you are doing so well.

Say it here. This year is harder. It is allowed to be. It is not a relapse, it is not weak faith, and it is not you doing grief badly. There is no schedule. There never was. Somebody invented one and it has caused an enormous amount of unnecessary shame. Not one hour of that schedule came from Scripture. Nor has the Spirit ever once required you to be further on than you are.

Now hear what God actually says about the state you are in.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Look at the second half of that, because it is the half that tells you how He works. Binding up a wound is not a single act. It is care that comes back. It is a dressing changed and changed again, day after day, by someone who does not lose interest when the injury stops being dramatic. God is not a first responder who attended the emergency and moved on to the next call. He is still here in the second year, when the sirens are long gone and the house is quiet and nobody else is coming.

And Scripture says something else about you that I do not want you to miss. It says He is near to the broken hearted. Near. Not admiring from a distance, not waiting at the other end of your recovery for you to arrive in better condition. Near, now, in the state you are actually in, on the floor by the bins if that is where this morning found you. Near is not a feeling you have to produce. It is the Spirit's own doing, and He was out by those bins at eight in the morning before the tulips were.

Jesus stood at the grave of a friend and wept, and He wept knowing exactly what He was about to do. If tears at a graveside were a failure of faith, He would not have had any. Grief is not the opposite of trust. It is what love does when it has nowhere to put itself, and God has never once been embarrassed by it.

There is a line in the Psalms that says God keeps a record of our wanderings, and asks Him to put our tears into His bottle, and to write them in His book. Whatever else that picture is doing, it is saying that the crying is not spilled and lost. It is collected, and kept, and known, by Someone who has not stopped paying attention in the months since anybody else did.

And I want to say a word about the specific loneliness of this year, because it has a shape and it is worth naming.

It is the loneliness of being the only person in your life who is still living with it every single day. Everyone else has a memory of your loss. You have a household. You have the side of the bed, the second toothbrush you did not throw away, the recipe for the thing only he ate, the silence at half past six. And you have begun editing yourself in company, because you have learned which sentences make a room go careful, and it is easier to talk about the weather than to watch somebody brace.

That editing is exhausting, and you have been doing it for months, and it is a great deal of why you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch. There is one place where you do not have to edit anything at all. You do not have to be gentle with God about how much you miss them. He can take the whole of it, unpolished, at whatever volume it comes. You may say it at full volume. Psalm 147:3 stands under that. What you could never get into words, the Spirit has been carrying anyway.