THE SECOND YEAR

Everybody writes about the first six months. Nobody writes about the second year.

The first year has a shape. There are dates in it and people brace for them and ring.

The second year has no shape at all. It is a Wednesday in March with nothing significant about it, you are in a supermarket, and the thing that undoes you is a brand of soup - and there is nobody to ring, because the ringing was last year, and everybody has quite reasonably concluded that you are through it.

It is worse and it is quieter and nobody warns you.

116 POEMS FOR THE PARTS NOBODY DESCRIBES

- The hospital car park, and the forty minutes you sat in it before ringing anybody - because the first person you told would make it a thing that had happened, and it was still a thing that was happening.

- The eleven organisations that need the certificate. Order six. You will get through five.

- Week eight, when the lasagnes stop - which is also, exactly, the week the shock wears off. Nobody designed this. It happens to everybody and everybody thinks it happened only to them.

- The two people who went quiet. Not the ones you expected.

- The woman who texted every Thursday for a year and never once asked how you were.

- The coat that has been on the third hook for nineteen months.

AND THE THINGS PEOPLE ONLY SAY IN ROOMS WITH BISCUITS

That you were relieved, and have decided this makes you a monster. It does not.

That you were bored - in the middle of a catastrophe, bored - and have told nobody.

That you are furious with him for dying, which is the least rational anger available to a human being and the one nobody admits to.

That you still talk to him in the car.

Each of those, said aloud in a room of eleven people who have been through it, produces the same response: recognition, from everybody at once, and the discovery that each of them had privately decided they were the only one.

WHAT IS NOT IN HERE

Stages. There are no stages - the woman who described them was studying dying patients, not bereaved ones, and said so afterwards, and nobody listened.

Closure. There is no door and nothing shuts.

Time heals. Everything happens for a reason. He would not want you to be sad. At least.

ALSO INSIDE

The losses nobody sends cards for: a parent at fifty-two, a sibling who becomes the one who copes, a friend in row nine, an ex you cannot go to the funeral of, a marriage, a dog, a mother who has not known you since 2016. And the estrangement - grief not for what he was, but for what he now definitively will not become, which weighs more than all the rest together.

Plus the sentence that was worth more than everything else said that year, from a man at the golf club, who shook a hand and said: "Well. This is rotten." And then stood there for a minute not saying anything else.

Grief and depression are not the same thing, and this book says so plainly, with the practical difference and the crisis numbers, twice.

For anybody in the second year who has concluded that they are taking too long.

You are not. There is no timetable, and nobody is keeping score.