This letter is being written on a specific Saturday in May. A year ago today, I lost someone I loved.
You may have lost someone too — on a different day, in a different month. The anniversary of your day may be next week, or next October, or it may have just passed without anyone noticing.
This letter is for you, too. Especially for you.
There are things no one tells you about the first year. Everyone has been told the stages of grief. Everyone has heard that grief comes in waves. Everyone has heard the well-meaning "time heals" — which is true and not true, in a way that takes about a year to start understanding.
But here is what no one tells you:
You will be standing in a grocery store, holding a Pearson's Salted Nut Roll, and grief will arrive without warning. Not at the funeral. Not at the bedside. In aisle four, on a Tuesday, because they liked that candy. Because it was the last snack they asked for by name.
You will say their name out loud, alone, in the car. And you will keep saying it. The world has stopped saying it for you, and you become — without meaning to — the keeper of their name. This is holy work. No one will tell you it is holy. You will do it anyway.
You will find their handwriting on a restaurant receipt in a coat pocket and you will sit on the floor for forty minutes. You will not be able to explain to anyone, later, what happened to your morning.
You will get angry at people for being happy. You will get angry at yourself for being happy. Both will pass. Both will return.
The lonely part is not the missing them. The missing them, you can hold. The missing them is love continuing — and as much as it aches, you would not trade it for not having loved them at all.
The lonely part is that everyone else's life has gone back to its normal shape, and yours has not, and will not. The world expects you to be okay by now. Some days you almost are. Some days you absolutely are not. And the gap between what you are and what you are expected to be is the lonely part.
It is not your imagination.
It is not weakness.
It is what it costs to have loved someone fully.
I want to tell you about a moment. It is mine, and it happened on a specific Sunday a year ago. But you have a moment like this too — a last clear afternoon, a last full conversation, the small sentence the person you loved said that you have been carrying ever since. If you do not have one, you have its absence, which is also a kind of carrying.
It was Mother’s Day. The last full day my father and I had together before he became unconscious. We were all at the house — my mother, my husband, my sister, my son, my father in his usual spot at the end of the couch. My husband had brought tulip bouquets for my mother and for me, and my father kept saying, all afternoon, how beautiful the flowers were. He said it over and over.
As the afternoon was quietly ending, it was just the two of us on the couch. He looked at me, and then he looked at the tulips, and then he said:
“I don’t think I have much longer, Kelli…
and it’s too bad that I never noticed how beautiful this world is
until it’s too late for me.”
That was the last full conversation we had.
I have been carrying that sentence for a year. I will be carrying it for the rest of my life. The world is beautiful. He saw it, finally, in the tulips on a Mother’s Day afternoon. Some days I think the whole point of being alive is to notice the tulips before the last week. Some days I just miss him so much I cannot finish the thought.
You have something like this too. A sentence. A look. A small specific thing they said or did near the end — or in the middle, or at the beginning, or in the most ordinary Tuesday of your life together — that you are now the only one in the world who carries.
It is yours now. They left it with you. It is part of what you are made of.
Anniversaries are strange. The body remembers what the mind has not been thinking about. You will wake up one morning and feel inexplicably heavy, and only later in the day realize: oh. it's today. or it's almost today. or it was last week.
The body keeps the dates. Trust the body. Even when she ambushes you, she is doing her job — which is to remember the people the calendar wants you to forget.
If today is your anniversary — of any kind, the loss of any person you loved — you do not have to do it well. You do not have to perform grief, or perform recovery, or perform anything.
You can light a candle if you want, or not. You can speak their name aloud, or not. You can cry on the kitchen floor, or not. The day will pass either way, and you will still be here on the other side of it.
Here are some things that have helped me. They may help you. They may not. Take only what is useful.
- Light a candle in the morning. Just one. Don't make a ceremony of it. Just light it, and let it burn while you do the dishes.
- Say their name out loud at least once today. To no one in particular. To the kettle. To the cat. To the empty chair.
- Eat something they would have liked. Not as ritual — as inheritance.
- Look at one photo. Just one. Not a whole album. Albums on anniversaries are too much. One photo is exactly enough.
- Tell someone today that you miss them. The one who has passed, the one you are estranged from. The living one will not always know what to say back. That is fine. You do not need the right response. You need to say it.
- Be unproductive without apologizing for it.
It does not get easier in the way people promise. What happens, instead, is that you get more accustomed to carrying it. The grief does not shrink. You grow larger around it. You become a person who can hold a great love and a great loss at once.
This is not a small thing. This is what humans have been doing for as long as we have loved each other. You are part of a long, quiet lineage of grievers. You are not alone, even when it absolutely feels like you are.
If today is hard, may it be allowed to be hard. If today is unexpectedly tender, may you let the tenderness in. If today you cry in public, may strangers be kind to you. If today nothing arrives at all and you just feel numb, may that also be allowed — numbness is the body's mercy when the alternative is too much.
I am thinking of you today. Of the person you have lost. Of the way they made you laugh, or argued with you, or made soup for you, or did the small specific thing only they ever did.
They were here.
You loved them.
That love is still doing its work in the world,
through you,
every time you remember them.