In the weeks and months after someone dies, rebuilding life after loss can begin in surprisingly ordinary moments. It might be a bill you don’t know how to handle, cooking far too much dinner, not knowing who services the heater, or reaching for the phone before remembering the person you would have called is gone.
These can seem like small things compared with the enormity of a death. But grief doesn’t arrive in an otherwise unchanged life. The person who died was part of that life. Their absence changes things, sometimes in ways we don’t notice until we encounter them.
Alongside the grief, there can be a lot of work involved in simply learning how everyday life works now.
The things we didn’t know we relied upon
Most households, families and relationships develop their own ways of doing things. Usually, nobody sits down and decides all of this. Over time, we learn what we do and what somebody else does.
One person pays the bills. Someone else remembers birthdays. One cooks and the other cleans up. Someone knows when the insurance is due, which plumber to call or where the important documents are kept.
There are smaller rhythms too. Making two cups of coffee in the morning. A phone call on Sunday evening. Walking the dog together. Deciding what to have for dinner. Having someone to tell about the ridiculous thing that happened during the day.
We don’t always notice how much these ordinary things hold until they change.
A woman whose husband has always dealt with household repairs finds herself standing in front of the heater when it stops working. She doesn’t know who serviced it last time or where the paperwork is. Of course she can find a repairer. That’s not really the difficult part. What catches her is the thought: he would have known what to do.
Someone else keeps cooking too much dinner. He has cooked for two for decades. He knows he’s cooking for one now, but his hands haven’t quite learned that yet.
Grief can show up in places like this, in the middle of something that once was completely unremarkable.
When one loss changes other parts of life
The person who died is the central loss, but other things can change around that loss too. There may be changes in companionship, household responsibilities, money, family relationships, routines, traditions, caring roles or plans that had always included the other person.
Not every death changes who cooks dinner or pays the bills. When a close friend or sibling dies, everyday responsibilities might remain exactly the same. What changes may be where you turn when you need advice, who understands the family history, or who knows why something that happened twenty years ago still makes you laugh.
Sometimes it is only after someone dies that we realise what they had been doing all along.
After Mum dies, for example, everyone might gradually realise that she was the one who rang each of the children, knew what was going on in everyone’s lives and somehow made Christmas happen every year. Nobody called her the family organiser. She just did it. Now Christmas comes around, and somebody has to work out what happens.
For a person who has spent years caring for a partner or parent, even the shape of a day can change. Appointments, medications, meals and care may have occupied much of the week. After the death, there is grief, but there may also be hours of time that weren’t there before. That can bring relief as well as sadness.
Relationships aren’t always straightforward. We can love someone and be angry with them. Caring for someone can involve devotion and exhaustion. A difficult relationship can end with things unresolved. A death can remove the possibility of a conversation we thought there might still be time to have. All of that can carry into what happens next.
When ordinary life becomes harder to manage
There is something particularly difficult about bereavement asking so much of people at a time when concentration and energy may already be stretched.
There are forms, phone calls and decisions. Sometimes you have to learn unfamiliar responsibilities. Paperwork starts accumulating. The garden gets away. Meals become a bit haphazard. An appointment is forgotten. A room stays exactly as it was because dealing with it feels impossible. A five-minute decision sits there for three weeks.
For someone who has always managed things reasonably well, this can be unsettling.
Why can’t I get on top of this? I should be doing better than this by now.
A more useful question might sometimes be:
How much has changed that I am trying to accommodate?
The routines that worked before the death belonged to the life that existed then. Some will keep working and some won’t. Things that look quite simple from the outside can also carry much more weight than anyone else can see. The paperwork is paperwork, but it has a name on it. The wardrobe is a wardrobe, but the clothes belong to someone.
Working things out doesn’t always feel like progress either. You can be pleased that you finally managed something your partner always did and hate the fact that you needed to learn it. You can change a room and feel relieved, then wake up the next morning wondering whether you should have left it alone. You can enjoy some freedom after years of caring for somebody and still feel guilty. Grief has room for contradictions.
Who am I now?
We know ourselves partly through our relationships. We are someone’s partner, daughter, son, parent, sibling, friend or carer. There are also parts of ourselves that belong to particular relationships: the jokes nobody else understands, the stories we don’t have to explain, the version of ourselves that somebody has known for thirty or forty years.
A death can change our circumstances very quickly. Our sense of identity and the roles we hold may be slower to catch up. Someone who has spent years caring for another person may suddenly have a day to themselves and not know what to do with it. Retirement that was always imagined together may now have to be imagined differently. When a parent dies, there can be the strange realisation that you are now the oldest generation in the family.
When a lifelong friend dies, part of what is lost may be the person who remembered who you were long before you became who you are now. There isn’t always an answer to Who am I now? We may discover it by living for a while.
What does rebuilding life after loss mean?
I use the word rebuilding carefully. I don’t mean dismantling an old life and replacing it with a new one. Nor do I think doing well after bereavement means that the person who died should gradually matter less.
People remain part of our lives in all sorts of ways. Years later, you might make a decision and know exactly what your mother would have said. You might still cook something the way your father taught you, keep a ridiculous object that means nothing to anyone else, or continue a family tradition because of the person who started it.
Other things will change. You might decide you don’t want to keep doing something simply because you always did it together. You may change the house, stop a tradition or start another one. You might learn something the person who died always did, or decide you have absolutely no interest in learning it and pay someone else to do it.
There isn’t a correct combination of keeping and changing, and there isn’t a timetable for deciding. Grief and life transition often unfold alongside one another. A great deal of this happens without anyone else knowing how difficult it was. There is no ceremony for the first time you deal with something the person who died always handled. Other people may not know what it took to get through the first family occasion arranged differently, make a decision alone, change a household routine or finally deal with something that has been sitting untouched.
These ordinary moments can also reveal capacities that are easy to overlook. Learning something unfamiliar, asking for help, making a decision or finding a different way of doing something can bring a small sense of confidence, connection or possibility. Positive psychology draws attention to these strengths and resources, not as a way of finding a positive side to loss, but as part of noticing what supports us as we adapt. These experiences can sit alongside grief rather than replacing it.
From the outside, it can look like ordinary life. But grief is not only about learning to live with someone’s absence. Sometimes it is also about learning how to live in the life their absence has changed.
Perhaps that is part of what rebuilding a life after loss can mean: not leaving someone behind, but finding a way to keep living in a world that is different because they were here.
