The Second Year Is Harder

13th August 2019

 

The man who’s wife is buried next to you said this to me at the start of summer, when I asked how he was.

“The second year is harder,”

He was right.

Everyone else’s life continues; the wider world progresses. People have stresses, joys, illnesses to deal with, as they always did. Other people’s lives soar, or stall; even implode. Or they simply plod on. As much as they might care and remember, the necessities of paying attention to their own lives means this grief that I have, or even the grief that they themselves have, takes a back seat, and becomes less salient in their every day. The focus on this loss can’t be sustained in their lives. So they ‘move on’.

For me or anyone at the centre of a loss though, time, here near the start of it, doesn’t make it better. It’s getting harder, not least because the further down the line you move in time, the further from your loved one’s physical presence you are. I find that terrifying at times. I wonder if with more time, will I remember you less? Less often, less vividly? When people say ‘It gets better/easier/less painful with time’, I wonder if they realise that what that translates as is, ‘Eventually, your loved one won’t be such a priority in every moment of you life’. Do they even realise that I don’t want it to be easier and better? I actually don’t want it to be less painful, because that would mean that my life had ‘moved on’, and that there’s less room for you.

So everyone else ‘moves on’ around us, as they must. I don’t mind that they do. Not when I’m in my rational, analytical mind anyway. (I’ll tell you about the shittiness of analytical grieving style sometime….) But the assumption is that moving on is a good, desired outcome for me too.

It’s not.

The jarring of that assumption with my reality, combined with the fear that there is less room in my head for you than I want there to be – that all makes this second year harder.

People see a mummy with the most delicious nearly-two year-old, going on adventures and holidays and day trips. Planning BBQs and play dates. Laughing and playing, talking (endlessly, as we all do) about every achievement and hilarity of our toddler. I even have pink nails at the moment. So I don’t look much like a grieving widow not quite two years in.

What they don’t see is that I cry in the car (more infrequently than I’d like; that’s the analytical grief’s fault). They don’t see our little girl saying, “Daddy! Love you!” to the photo on my phone instead of to the living you. Nor do they see the ghost of you walking with me on every trip out, or the conversations I have with you. Or me getting in to bed each night alone. I say goodnight to you every night, because I’m not moving on, whatever it might look like or however everyone else might be able.

I’m further away from you than I was, and it’ll only get worse. So while people/society at large might expect otherwise, I expect each subsequent year to be harder. There’ll be more that we’ll have missed and the hole you’re not filling will get wider and deeper every moment. I will fill my life with your little girl, and with things that I’m about. But however I do that, whatever others see outwardly, inwardly it is worse with time.

Time is an enemy, not a friend, when you live your life in grief.

xxx