After the funeral, week three

On a Tuesday in week three I dropped my daughter at school, drove the eight minutes home, parked in the driveway, and then sat in the car for an hour and a half. I did not cry the whole time. I cried for about ten minutes of it, in stretches, and the rest of the time I just sat there with my hands on the wheel and the radio off and the engine ticking as it cooled, looking at the front door of my own house and not being able to think of a single reason to walk through it.

That was the morning I understood that the funeral had not been the worst part. The funeral had been the held part. The worst part was now, in the empty middle of an ordinary week, when the cards had stopped arriving and the phone had gone quiet and the world had gone back to its work, and I was supposed to go back to mine, and I could not.

If you are in week three and you are reading this from your own driveway, you are not broken. You are exactly on schedule.

Why week three is the worst

There is a shape to the month after a parent dies and almost nobody charts it for you, so I will try.

• Week one. The week of the death and the funeral. Adrenaline, logistics, family in the house, the phone ringing constantly, the freezer full of casseroles, no time to feel anything because the to-do list has its own gravity.
• Week two. The week of the deep sleep. You sleep ten hours a night and wake exhausted. You write thank-you cards. The lawyers ring about the will. Mum is still in shock. There is still scaffolding.
• Week three. The scaffolding comes down. The cousins have flown home. The casseroles are gone. The thank-you cards are written. Your boss expects you back. The world has resumed and you have not. This is when the actual grief begins.
• Week four onwards. The grief settles into its long residency. Sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, but no longer a guest; a tenant.

The reason week three hits hardest is structural, not emotional. In week one you have a thousand reasons to be functional (you have to). In week two you have permission to be broken (everyone expects it). In week three you have neither. The world says "okay, back to it" and the inside of you says "to what". The mismatch is the wound.

The hospice social worker rang me on day twenty-two of all things and asked how I was, which I now realise was not a coincidence. She had seen the calendar before. She knew which Tuesday would be the bad one. I cried on the phone to a stranger from Adelaide for fifteen minutes and she just made small noises occasionally and let me. I will be grateful to her for the rest of my life.

The "fine, then crying in the car" pattern

This is the dominant grief pattern for men our age in the first three months and almost nobody describes it to you, so here it is.

You will be fine in the meeting. Fine on the call. Fine at the school pick-up. Fine while you are making the kids' breakfast. Fine while you are putting petrol in the car. Then you will close the car door and turn the key and reverse out of the petrol station and you will drive about four hundred metres and you will pull over and you will sob for six to twelve minutes and then you will dry your face on your sleeve and keep driving and arrive at the meeting fine.

This is not unstable. This is not a sign that you are "not coping". This is the body's way of metering grief through a day that requires functioning. Your nervous system is running a quiet protocol where it bottles the feeling for the public moments and then opens the bottle, briefly, in the safe enclosed space of the car. The car is the wailing room. The car is the chapel. The car is where grown men in this country grieve, because there is nowhere else that is private enough and contained enough and ours.

Some practical notes from inside this pattern.

• Do not fight it. If you try to suppress the car cry, it will leak into the office at 3pm and that will go worse for you than just having the car cry on the way.
• Do not drive on the highway during a crying jag. Pull off. Two minutes in a side street. Then keep going.
• Keep tissues in the glove box. You will go through them faster than you expect.
• Do not be alarmed if the car cry shows up at random times for six to nine months. The frequency falls. It does not vanish.
• Some men do not get the car cry. They get something else. The driveway sit, the shower cry, the 3am stare at the ceiling. The container varies. The function is the same.

The body metaphor I keep coming back to is a kettle on a stove. The grief is the water. The day is the lid. The car is the spout. The whistle is going to come out somewhere, and the spout is where it is supposed to come out. Trying to plug the spout does not stop the boil. It just rattles the lid.

What helps in week three

I am wary of the "what helps" list because grief is not a recipe. But there are a few things that have moved the needle for me and for the men I have spoken to who have been here, and they are all small, and they are all unimpressive, and that is the point.

• Routine. Not a new routine. The old routine. The exact same alarm, breakfast, walk, work block, dinner, sleep. The structure does the carrying when the meaning has gone temporarily missing. Grief is exhausting; novelty is exhausting; do not stack them.
• The walk. Same time, same loop, every day. Forty minutes minimum. The body needs to feel that the day is moving even when the head feels stuck. I cannot stress this one enough; of every intervention I tried, the morning walk was the closest thing to medicine.
• One real meal a day cooked by you. Not for nutrition. For the action of doing one thing well with your hands. Chopping an onion is therapeutic in a way that almost nothing else is, and I cannot fully explain why.
• The friend who calls without asking how you are. The mate who rings on a Wednesday and says "I'm walking past your place at six, fancy a beer on your back step". This friend is gold. This friend is the entire reserve. If you have one, text them now and say thank you. If you have two, you are a lucky bastard. If you have none, this is the moment to recognise that you have not invested in friendship the way you should have, and to start, not because you have time but because you need to.
• Writing two pages before bed. Not a journal. Just whatever lands. Most of mine were lists of nothing. Some were the day. Some were a paragraph about Dad's hands. The writing is the metering.
• Sleep, even if the sleep is bad. In bed by 10pm. Up by 6am. The architecture of the day matters more than its quality.

What did NOT help, in case it saves you a fortnight.

• Pretending I was fine at work and "powering through". This added four weeks to the bottom of the grief by suppressing the bottom of it.
• The "let's get away for the weekend" suggestion. The trip itself was lovely; the return to the empty house on Sunday night was a hammer. Wait until month three or four for the trip.
• Drinking more than two beers in a sitting. The grief drink is one of the worst drinks you can have. The next morning is the lowest you will go.
• "Getting busy". The grief that cannot find you on Monday will find you on Saturday morning at twice the pressure.

The phone going quiet

I want to say one specific thing about the phone, because nobody warned me. By week three, the texts from people stop. Not all the people. The inner ring keeps going, and your wife or sister stays steady. But the wider ring (the cousins, the workmates, the old school mates who reached out warmly in week one) goes quiet. The cards stop. The casseroles stopped a while ago. You will check your phone and there will be nothing on it, and you will feel a strange specific loneliness that is not anger at the people who have gone quiet but a kind of grief at how fast the world resumes.

This is not a moral failing of those people. The world genuinely does resume. They have their own kids, their own back gates to fix, their own running orders. They were warm in week one and they meant it. They are not less warm now; they have just gone back inside their own days.

What helps is two things. First, do not text them complaining. They are not the problem. Second, text the inner ring more. Say "the phone has gone quiet and I miss him today, can I come round at six?" Make the move. The men who do worst in week three are the ones who wait to be rung. The men who do better are the ones who ring.

The long shape

Here is the honest map of the year, near as I can draw it from inside it and from talking to men further down the road.

• Months one and two. Wave hits. Functioning is patchy. The car cry is daily. Sleep is poor.
• Months three to six. Functioning returns at maybe 80%. The car cry drops to a couple of times a week. The grief becomes more ambient than acute.
• Months six to twelve. The grief moves into the furniture. You can go a week without acute episodes. Then a song or a smell or a phone call from Mum on a Sunday and you are back in the car.
• The twelve-month anniversary. A specific resurgence. Worth bracing for. (There is a separate piece on this site about year-one grief; read it when you get there, not now.)
• Year two and three. The softening. The grief becomes love that knows where the person used to stand.

You are in week three. The map will not feel comforting now. It will feel like an insult to the depth of what you are in. Read it once, close the tab, go for the walk. Come back to it in month four and the map will fit better.

Sit. Walk. Sleep. Repeat.