The grief burst, twelve months later

On a Wednesday eleven months and three weeks after my old man died, I was in the queue at the Norton Street Bakery in Leichhardt buying a loaf of sourdough and a sausage roll for the kids, and I caught a smell I could not place for about four seconds. Then I placed it. It was the soap he used. Some specific combination of the bakery oven and the cleaning product the staff had just used on the bench gave me, for one second, the exact smell of the bathroom in my parents' house when I was nine. And I started crying in the queue. Not a tasteful welling. The full thing. Loaf in one hand, sausage roll in a paper bag in the other, sobbing in front of a teenager working the till who I will say handled it with extraordinary grace for someone who was probably about seventeen.

Welcome to the burst. The thing they do not tell you about year one.

Why the body remembers

Anniversary grief is biologically real, and the literature on it is reasonably settled, near as I can read it. The body keeps time in a way that the conscious mind does not. Your endocrine system, your sleep architecture, your stress response, the small chemistries of your nervous system, all log seasonal markers (light angle, temperature, the smell of the season). They do this whether or not you are paying attention. So when the calendar comes around to roughly the same time as the death, the body says "ah, this. We remember this." It does the remembering before the head does.

In practical terms this shows up as a cluster of small symptoms in the four to six weeks running up to the anniversary, and a sharper episode either on the day or in the week of it.

• Sleep fragmenting again. Even if it had stabilised. Even if you do not consciously know why.
• Heightened irritability. Things that did not annoy you for ten months suddenly do.
• Dreams about the dead person. Often vivid. Often confusing. Often not "about" them in the literal sense but with their presence somewhere on the edge of the dream.
• A drop in motivation. The same flatness you had in months two and three, returning briefly.
• The burst itself. A short, intense, often public episode of grief triggered by something small (smell, song, shop, phrase).

This is not regression. This is the system completing a circuit. Your body is finishing a year of work. You did not know you were doing it. You were doing it.

The triggers, and why they are weird

The triggers for the year-one burst are almost always sensory and almost never the things you expect. The expected triggers (looking at a photo, listening to his voicemail, reading the eulogy you wrote) tend to be milder, because you have braced for them. The actual triggers ambush you at minute eleven of an ordinary Wednesday.

A short list of triggers I and other blokes I have spoken to have caught.

• Smells. Specific cleaning products. The smell of cut grass at a particular time of year. Diesel from a particular sort of tractor. His aftershave, of course, but also the soap. The smell triggers are the strongest because the olfactory bulb wires almost directly into the limbic system, bypassing the polite parts of the brain.
• A song. Often not "his" song. Often something he disliked, that was on the radio in the car on a particular afternoon you were driving him somewhere. Songs are time machines.
• Walking past the house. Not just your parents' house. Any house with the same paint, the same fence, the same letterbox slot, the same general arrangement of the front yard.
• A man of his approximate age and build, seen briefly from behind in a Bunnings car park. Twice now. Both times my body has done a small ridiculous thing where it thinks for half a second that he has come back, before the rational parts catch up.
• The weather of the season he died in. We tend to forget that we encode the death not just by date but by light angle, temperature, the texture of the sky. The morning the year-one date arrives, the sky may look like the sky did the day he died, and the body knows.
• Phrases. Specific Australian idioms he used. "Fair dinkum." "Yeah, nah." "She'll be right." Hearing a stranger say one in his cadence in a queue.

If you are in the run-up to a year-one anniversary, expect a burst. Not "if". When. The trigger will be small and weird and will not be the thing you were watching for.

Through, not around

The single most useful instruction I got from a grief counsellor (one session, seven months in, I went in for what I told myself was "just a check-in") was this: when the burst comes, let it through, not around.

The instinct, especially for men our age, is to clamp down on the burst. You are at a barbecue. You are in the office. You are in a queue at a bakery in Leichhardt. The rising wave hits and the instinct is to swallow it, change the subject, look at your phone, push it sideways. Get around it.

Do not do this. The burst that gets pushed sideways gets longer. The grief water has to come out somewhere; if you redirect it now, it will arrive at 11pm in your kitchen with the lights off and a beer in your hand and it will be twice as heavy.

Through, not around, looks like this in practice.

• If you are in public when the burst hits and you can step away (go to the loo, walk to the car, leave the queue), do that. Five minutes of full feeling is shorter than thirty minutes of contained feeling.
• If you cannot step away (you are in a meeting, on a call, at the school pick-up), put your hand on the side of your leg and press, hard, for five seconds, then breathe out slowly through pursed lips for a count of six. This is a small autonomic trick that gives you about ninety seconds of runway. Use the ninety seconds to wrap whatever you are doing and excuse yourself. Then go through it properly.
• When you have privacy, do not scroll, do not call anyone, do not write anything. Just sit. Let the wave come up. The wave will crest in three to nine minutes if you let it. The wave will crest in three to nine HOURS if you fight it. I have tested this empirically and the data is clean.
• Afterwards, drink a glass of water. The body sweats during a real cry, more than people realise. Replace the water.
• Do something gentle and slightly physical for ten minutes. Walk to the end of the street. Wash a dish. Fold a shirt. The body needs to come back into the room.

The body metaphor I keep coming back to is a wave breaking on a beach. If you stand sideways and brace, the wave knocks you over. If you face it and let it move through you, lifting your feet briefly off the sand, you come down again on the same beach, slightly rearranged, mostly fine. The water always wins. The trick is the angle.

The gradual softening

Here is the part I am writing in year three, about year two and year three, for the man who is reading this in year one and cannot believe it gets softer.

It does. Not because the grief diminishes. Because the grief changes shape.

In year one, grief is acute. It is a wound. It bleeds when struck. The bursts are sharp and disorienting and you are still, secretly, surprised every time they arrive.

In year two, grief is ambient. It is in the furniture. You can spend a whole afternoon in his garage, which is now just a garage, and feel only a soft humming in the chest. The bursts still come, but they are slower and rounder, and you can usually feel them about ten seconds before they hit, which gives you time to find a chair.

In year three, grief is integrated. It is part of how you walk through the world. You catch yourself doing things he taught you (using a specific word, holding a hammer a particular way, telling a specific kind of joke at a specific kind of moment) and you do not feel sad. You feel inhabited. The grief has become a kind of inheritance.

What does not change. The smell. The smell will still get you in year ten. I know men in their sixties whose fathers died when they were thirty who can still be levelled, briefly, by a particular pipe tobacco in a particular doorway. The smell does not soften. The smell is forever. That is fine. That is, in fact, the gift; it means the dead person is not so far away that you cannot still be ambushed by them in a bakery queue.

The other thing that does not change is the date. The date will always have a small weight. You will always notice when April comes around (or May, or whichever month yours is) and the light in the afternoon goes that particular shade. You will always feel a small drag in your sleep architecture in the week leading up. This is not damage. This is memory doing its job.

A short final list, the things I would say to the man in week one of year one who is bracing for the anniversary.

• The day itself is often less bad than the week before.
• Have something simple planned for the day. A walk to a place that meant something. A meal with the inner ring. A short visit to the grave or the urn or the place you scattered him. Not a big production. A small act, marked.
• Take the day off work if you can. If you cannot, take the afternoon.
• Ring your mother in the morning, even if you have nothing to say.
• Let the burst come. It will come. It is meant to.

Year one ends. Year two begins. The water keeps moving.

Through, not around. Sit. Breathe.