Eleven Months, and Everybody Stopped Asking

The kettle is the one that gets him, which he would not have predicted, and which he has never told anybody.

Two mugs. He still gets two mugs out. Not every time, and not on purpose, and he has stopped being surprised by it, and he puts the second one back and gets on with the morning.

The casseroles stopped in about March. The phone calls thinned out around June. There was a stretch, early on, where he could not get an hour to himself and half wished people would stop, and he has thought about that stretch a great deal since, because he would take it now.

Eleven months.

Here is the thing nobody tells anybody, and it is the reason this page exists. It is worse now than it was at four months.

At four months he was in something. It had a shape and a name and other people could see it. There were things to be arranged and forms and a house full of her handwriting and a kind of terrible momentum that carried him from one week into the next.

At eleven months there is nothing to arrange. Everybody has, entirely reasonably, gone back to their own lives. And he is sitting in an ordinary Tuesday, in an ordinary house, with the whole thing still exactly as heavy as it was, and now nobody is asking, and there is a new thing on top of the grief which is that he has begun to think he is taking too long.

That is you, and nobody has told you that the second year is like this.

Two griefs, and only one of them was expected

Let me lay out what has actually happened, because I do not think anybody has said it out loud to you.

The first is her, and I am not going to explain that one to you. It is yours, it is enormous, and you know it better than any page could.

The second is smaller and it arrived without a name. It is the loss of the company. For four months you were inside a community that had organized itself around a death, and then, gradually, without any decision, that structure dissolved, and it dissolved at exactly the point where the shock wore off and the actual absence began. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 56:8, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

Which means the support arrived at the loudest part and left before the longest part. Nobody planned that. It is simply what human beings do, and the people who stopped calling are not callous; they are people with their own weeks who assumed, kindly, that time was doing its work.

You are not taking too long, and there is no schedule you are behind on. Scripture keeps the plainest possible record of grief that runs and runs and does not tidy itself, and the Holy Spirit does not attach a timetable to a widower's Tuesday.

The verse where God does the collecting

There is a line in Psalm 56 that is one of the strangest and most useful images in the whole book.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest means counts. God counts the wanderings, which is an odd thing to count and a very specific one: not the achievements, not the prayers, the walking about. The pacing. The going upstairs for something and coming back down without it.

Then the bottle. David asks God to collect his tears and keep them, and the picture is of something small and personal being kept deliberately rather than wiped away.

And then the question, which has its answer already inside it: are they not in thy book?

There is a record being kept of this year, and it is not the one you have been assuming. You have been assuming the record is a calendar and that eleven months on it means something. The record God is keeping is of the mugs and the pacing and the Tuesday afternoons, and none of it has been lost, and none of it is being timed.

You are being counted, in the only book that matters. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings, put thou my tears into thy bottle, Psalm 56:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that into a kitchen where a second mug has just gone back in the cupboard.

Nothing here is going to tidy this

Let me say what this page will not do, because you have probably had it done. It is written, in Psalm 56:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

I am not going to tell you she is in a better place as though that were the answer to what is in your chest, because that answers a question you did not ask. You know what you believe about where she is. That is not the same as this.

I am not going to find a purpose in it. Scripture is entirely willing to sit inside a loss and not explain it. There is a psalm that ends on the word darkness with nothing resolved, and nobody edited it out and nobody appended a lesson to the bottom of it.

And I am not going to tell you that time heals. It does something, and what it does is more complicated than healing, and at eleven months you already know that better than the person who says it.

What I can say is that He is in the room and He has not moved on with everybody else. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it puts no month limit on the sentence anywhere, and the Holy Spirit was in that kitchen this morning when the second mug came out.

The thing to say to one person

Here is the only practical thing on this page, and it is small and it is hard.

The people who stopped asking are not going to start again on their own. Not because they do not care. Because the social machinery for asking has a shelf life, and it expired around June, and now everybody assumes that raising it might be unkind.

So it has to come from you, and that is unfair, and I am sorry.

One person. One sentence: it is harder now than it was at four months.

That sentence does two things at once. It tells the truth, and it tells them something they almost certainly do not know, because most people have no idea that the second year is the harder one. You will very likely watch somebody's face change.

You have not been asked to carry the second year with nobody. Scripture says weep with them that weep, Romans 12:15, and the instruction assumes somebody knows there is weeping going on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets one plain sentence out of a man who has been managing since March.