When a colleague or friend is grieving: how to stay longer than a week

There were a hundred and twenty people at the funeral. Three weeks later she wrote to me, because at four in the afternoon, when it was worst, there was nobody left to write to.

This is not a story about bad people. Everyone at that funeral loved her. Most of them also said the sentence – “let me know if you need anything” – and meant it. Only, three weeks later nobody knew it was still terrible, because to every question she answered “getting by”.

I have written separately about what to say to a grieving person and what not to. This post is about something else, and in my experience harder: how to stay beside someone once the funeral flowers dry, once your life returns to its track and theirs does not. So not about the first week, but about the third month.

What happens in the third week

In the first week there is a crowd. The phone rings, food arrives, someone is always sitting in the kitchen. Paradoxically this is the period when a person feels least – most describe the first days as a fog in which a funeral is organised and papers are signed.

Then the crowd disperses. Everyone goes back to work, the bereaved person included. And exactly then, when the organising falls away and the fog lifts, the loss shows its actual size for the first time. The empty house at seven in the evening. His cup in the dishwasher. The first Monday with nobody to drive anywhere.

That gap is the heart of the problem. Support from those around is greatest when the need is smallest, and disappears just as the need rises.

Why people withdraw

Almost never out of indifference. The Norwegian researcher Kari Dyregrov systematically gathered what communities get wrong after sudden deaths, and the reasons for withdrawal were strikingly consistent.

The first is a fear that mentioning the dead person will remind the bereaved and so do harm. That fear is groundless: he thinks about it all the time anyway, and your mention will call up nothing – it will only show him he is not alone with it.

The second is fear of the wrong sentence. Not knowing what to say, people say nothing; and having said nothing, a week later they are ashamed of not having been in touch, so they stay away further. It is a loop I see often, and one that breaks quickly if you name it out loud: “I didn’t get in touch because I didn’t know how. That was my awkwardness, not yours.”

The third is the most banal: assuming others are already there. Since everyone assumes it, nobody is.

The fourth is the one people admit least easily. Next to a grieving person, your own mortality comes uncomfortably close. If his father died, yours appears unbidden. If a child died, your child appears, and that is a thought the mind backs away from by itself. Withdrawal is not always a decision; often it is a reflex you notice only once three weeks have passed without a call.

Why “let me know if you need anything” does not work

The sentence is sincere and, in practice, almost unusable. Three things are missing from it.

First, it moves the burden onto the bereaved. To use it he must work out what he needs, judge how much he may ask, compose a message and carry the possibility of refusal. All in a period when working memory is loaded and many people cannot choose a loaf of bread in a shop.

Second, it demands that he admit a need. Plenty of people have spent a lifetime being the one who helps; asking means a reversal of role they have never practised. If he was always the strong one, he will say “getting by” even when he is not.

Third, it has no deadline. An offer without a date never expires and is never cashed in.

What works is the reverse: a concrete proposal with a day, a time and an easy way to say no. Not “tell me when you fancy a coffee”, but “I’ll come for you at ten on Saturday; if that doesn’t suit, we’ll go the next one”.

The work nobody does for him

After the first month a second layer of loss appears, and it is almost never discussed: the admin. Probate, the bank, the insurer, transferring the car, cancelling subscriptions, a phone number nobody dares to close. Each of these errands requires him to say out loud that someone has died, often to a clerk staring at a screen.

Here help is most tangible and least risky. You need no legal knowledge; you need only to sit beside him. “I’m coming with you, you don’t have to say anything, I’ve got the folder” is a sentence people remember for years.

The same goes for the household. In the first week everyone brings food, then nobody does. If your friend has small children and has lost a partner, the most useful thing is to take over one recurring task: the Tuesday lift to training, Thursday’s lunch, Saturday’s hoovering. Repetition matters more than size. A single grand gesture is soon forgotten; a small regular one becomes something to lean on.

The calendar nobody keeps

The most useful thing you can do for a grieving friend takes five minutes and happens on your phone. Open the calendar and enter a few dates for the coming year.

The date of the death – the same day each month, for the first half year. The dead person’s birthday. His own birthday, the first without the one who always rang first. A wedding anniversary, if it was a partner. The first Christmas, the first All Saints’ Day, the first holiday away. The end of the school year, if it is a child who lost a parent.

On those days you need nothing elaborate. “Thinking of you today” is enough, and for the person receiving it is often the only proof that he did not invent the significance of the date. Almost everyone who has described this to me remembered exactly who got in touch on the first anniversary – and who did not.

When it is a colleague

Slovenian employment law provides paid leave on the death of a close family member measured in days; collective agreements sometimes give a little more. Grief is not measured in days. Which means a person will almost certainly return to work before he is ready, and will spend every day there pretending.

The first day back is the worst, because everyone knows and nobody knows how to behave. What works best is a short, direct sentence in the corridor – “I know your mother died, I’m not going to pretend I don’t” – and then ordinary work. The mistake is not mentioning it; the mistake is avoiding his eyes.

What helps practically is not conversation at all: take over the meeting where he would have to present, do not hand him a task needing long concentration, and do not comment if he leaves mid-afternoon. And expect no linear progress. Someone fine for three weeks can break in the fourth over something trivial – that is not a relapse, it is how grief moves.

His name is not a forbidden word

Among the most widespread misconceptions is that the dead should not be mentioned. In fact most bereaved people describe the opposite distress: that nobody speaks of him any more, and that he is disappearing a second time.

Say his name. Tell a memory the person may not have – how he laughed at that wedding, what he once said to you in a car park. Memories the bereaved has never held are a gift he can get nowhere else. If he cries, you have not harmed him; he would have cried anyway, only alone.

Where this does not hold

Now against myself. Everything above assumes that support eases grief. That assumption is less solid than it sounds.

In 2005 Wolfgang Stroebe and colleagues tested exactly this – whether social support buffers the impact of a loss – and did not find the effect. People with more support were generally better off, but the loss hit them just as hard. The conclusion I draw is not that support is pointless. It is that your presence will not heal the loss, and if you expect it to, you will be disappointed and he will be burdened.

Second, some people genuinely want to be left in peace. A proportion grieve best alone, and daily concern takes from them the one thing they need – quiet. The difference between persisting and imposing lies in whether you accept a “no” without offence and get in touch again a week later anyway.

Third, too much care can harm. If you make every decision for him, you signal that he is not capable – a particular trap with older widows and widowers, whom their children unintentionally declare helpless.

And fourth: you are not his therapist and do not need to be. Your job is to be the friend who turns up at ten.

How you last

Support that runs for months has a price. Pay it from a reserve you do not have and you will last until January and then vanish – which is worse for him than offering less from the start.

So promise little and keep it. One walk a fortnight that actually happens is worth far more than daily availability that collapses after a month. You are allowed limits here too – on how to set them without wrecking the relationship I wrote in my post on setting boundaries. A limit here is not a refusal; it is the condition of staying.

And if his loss opens your own – which often happens if you have lost someone too – that is a sign you need your own place to talk, not that you must step back.

When to suggest professional help

The great majority of bereaved people do not need therapy. Research by Samar Aoun’s Australian group suggests most rely on their own networks and would gain little from formal services; a smaller group badly needs help and most often does not get it.

Signs that would make me speak carefully: if after roughly a year the yearning and the inability to accept the death have not eased at all and are taking his functioning – the current term is prolonged grief disorder; if he has withdrawn entirely and is not working, eating or getting up; if drinking has begun; if he speaks of not wanting to live. That last is not a matter for tact – ask directly and stay beside him.

How to suggest it without sounding like a diagnosis: “I’m not sure I’m enough on my own. Shall we look together at who works with this?” For choosing, my post on how to choose a therapist is useful, as is the one on the difference between sadness and depression.

What to remember

The first week is not the one that counts. The support your friend will remember happens in the third month, when everyone else has moved on.

“Let me know if you need anything” is not support but a transfer of the task. Support is a proposal with a date and a time, which he may decline without explanation.

Five minutes with a calendar does more than an hour of compassionate words. Anniversaries, birthdays and holidays are the days a person is most alone and least expects to be remembered.

Say his name. It will not remind him – he never forgot.

And do not promise more than you can give. A friend who turns up every other Tuesday for a year is worth more than ten people who said at the funeral that they were there for anything.