Written by Luciana, who married my second cousin Ben.

Today is National Grief Awareness Day. So I thought I'd share what grief looks like for me, a bit more than a year and a half after Ben's passing.

I read a fantastic book earlier this year, recommended to me by a friend, called The Grieving Brain, by Mary Frances O'Connor. I took away a lot of things from the book, but one of my favorites is O'Connor's distinction between the emotion of grief, which we experience in a given moment and will recur throughout our lives, and the process of grieving, which she defines as restoring a meaningful life. Grieving takes its own path for each of us, but has a beginning, middle, and end. And I feel like I'm at the point where I can at least see the end ahead, even if I haven't reached it.

I feel like I am fully experiencing my life again. I've planned trips focused on celebration or exploration rather than on processing my grief. I've made new friends who never met Ben, but are open to getting to know him through me. I'm feeling creative and tackling house projects again. I read more books by July this year than I did all of last year.

I still feel my loss keenly, but I am not overwhelmed by it. I talk about Ben often, frequently sharing his opinion on things with the people around me (whether they asked for that or not -- For example, at a fancy supermarket in New York with my mom earlier this week, I pointed out all the things Ben would have wanted to try). Many of his sayings have become my sayings (usually with proper attribution). Although I will never be as good as he was at telling his jokes.

I am crying as I write this, but I don't cry as much as I used to. When I do cry, grief is as strong as ever, but I know better now that the moments will pass. I don't wish those moments away. I appreciate the feeling of connection they bring.
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It was such a gift to be loved the way Ben loved me, and to get to love him in return. I will be forever grateful.
If you're wondering how to support someone like me in grief, please just keep telling me your memories of Ben, or being open to me sharing mine. Even if they're simple, like "we went to this place together one time", I value learning new things about him, and I value reminiscing. He's still one of my favorite people, and I'm still in love with him. So if you love him too, let's keep him with us. Thank you for listening.

I was widowed in a February, and the second half of that year was tough, with a run of firsts – my birthday and our wedding anniversary on the same day in mid-September, his birthday in December, Christmas, and then the New Year's Eve party that we'd both been going to since our twenties. After that, January and February felt like a countdown to his death date. I heaved a sigh of relief once I got into March – the firsts were all over. But I hadn't realised that firsts aren't all over in that first year. There are things that come around less frequently, such as weddings, funerals (hopefully), work trips, buying furniture or decorating, and these can bring on the grief attacks.
 
The second year of grieving is very different from the first. In some ways it is easier, and in some it can be a lot harder. The second year was the division between 'Tim died earlier this year', to 'Tim died last year', or 'Tim died just over a year ago'. The second year was the time that it was all real, and I had to accept that this was what my life was now. That that grief would be part of me for the rest of my life. And that I had to find out who I was again.
 
I was achingly lonely, even though I was surrounded by friends. I was often tired, and I still had widow brain, which made concentrating hard. I tried to fill up my time with work and took on too much, which led to a major crash in mood and having to drop a couple of freelance writing projects, which meant in turn I lost a couple of clients. I had flashbacks and nightmares going back to the morning Tim died, and I struggled with thoughts about what was happening to him after death. My depression hit a real low, and I struggled with thoughts of suicide, but wasn't able to access the mental health support I needed despite this.
 
The second year can be where the secondary losses become clear. As widows, we lose our past, our present and our future, and for some people this becomes more concrete in the second year as they lose homes, struggle to pay mortgages, are no longer able stay in their jobs, find their support circles are receding, or find that they have lost contact with friends and family.
 
Some widows I know found that people's expectations changed – they expected them to be 'moving on', and 'getting over it'. People who haven't been widowed don't always understand that there is no timeline to grief, and that, while we might move forward, we don't move on from the people that we have loved and lost.

Some things were easier, however. The pain of his death was a lot less raw. I cried less, and I could function more. I slept better, and started to cook some of the time, rather than live on ready meals and things out of tins. I also found that I could start to plan things to look forward to, provided they weren't too far in the future.
 
One of the things that's important about the second year of grief is that you need to be patient with yourself, and that you are still allowed to ask for help and support.
 
Moving into the third year of grief
The third year was a year of a lot of change. It was the year of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and while I felt the most alone I had ever been, and I lost a lot of work, it created a liminal space that allowed me to grieve and to think about what came next. It also allowed me to make the house into somewhere I wanted to stay. I managed to access psychotherapy and this made an amazing difference as well.