The first anniversary arrives with a weight nobody warns you about. It is not simply another sad day. It is the end of the year in which you did everything for the first time without them, and it carries the strange, unwelcome realisation that you have proved you can survive it.
There is no correct way to mark it. There is no obligation to mark it at all. But most people find that doing something deliberate is easier than letting the day happen to them.
The run-up is usually worse than the day
This is the most useful thing to know in advance, and it is close to universal.
The two or three weeks before an anniversary are often harder than the anniversary itself. Grief keeps its own calendar, and the body seems to remember before the mind does. People describe becoming inexplicably irritable, exhausted or tearful in early March and only realising afterwards that the funeral was on the fourteenth.
Anticipation does most of the damage. The day itself, once it arrives, is frequently gentler than the dread of it, partly because there is finally something to do rather than something to await.
If you know it is coming, plan lightly. Not a schedule. Just one intention, and permission to abandon it.
Quiet ways to mark it
- Light a candle in the morning and let it burn through the day. Simple, ancient, and it gives the day a shape without requiring anything of you.
- Cook what they cooked. Their recipe, their Sunday roast, the terrible curry they were unaccountably proud of. Food carries memory more reliably than photographs do.
- Write them a letter. Tell them what happened this year. What they missed. What you would have told them on the phone. Nobody has to read it.
- Play their music, loudly, all day. Or refuse to play it, if that is what you need this year.
- Take the day off. Book it now, before the calendar fills. Working through it is possible but it is not usually kindness to yourself.
- Do nothing at all. An ordinary day is a legitimate choice, and choosing it is not a failure of love.
Going somewhere
- The grave, or where the ashes went. Obvious, and for many people the whole answer.
- Their place instead. The pub, the beach, the football ground, the bench, the hill. Often better than the grave, because it is where they were alive rather than where they are dead.
- Walk a route they walked. Especially one you have avoided all year.
- Go somewhere entirely new. Somewhere with no memory attached, which for some people is the only bearable option in the first year.
Making something
- Plant something perennial. A tree, a rose, spring bulbs. Bulbs are especially good: they disappear entirely and come back, which is a more honest metaphor for the year than most things people say.
- Print the photographs. A year on, most of what exists of them is trapped on a phone. Choose thirty and get them printed properly.
- Collect what other people remember. Ask ten people for one memory each. What comes back is almost always things the family never knew, and it is the single most restorative thing most people do in the first year. A pack of memory cards is one way; a group message asking the question directly works just as well.
- Finish something they started. The half-built shed. The garden. The scarf.
- Fill the page. If there is a memorial page that has sat half empty since the funeral, because there was no energy for it then, the anniversary is often when there finally is. What to put in one is its own subject.
Doing it with other people
- Eat together. No speeches, no structure. Their favourite meal, the people who loved them, in someone's kitchen.
- Raise money. A walk, a run, a collection for the hospice or the ward that looked after them. Useful for people who cope by doing rather than sitting.
- Go to the pub. Deeply British and genuinely effective. Buy the round they would have bought.
- Meet at the bench, if there is one.
- Say their name. The one thing bereaved people ask for more than any other, and the one thing everybody is most afraid to do. Nobody has forgotten their dead person. You will not remind them. You will only show them that someone else remembers too.
When the family disagrees
This is common and it causes real hurt, because everyone assumes their own way of grieving is the respectful one.
One person wants everybody at the graveside. Another cannot face it and wants to be at work. Someone wants to make a proper occasion of it; someone else finds that unbearable. All of these are grief, and none of them is disrespect.
The practical solution is usually to stop trying to have one shared event. Let people mark it separately and share it afterwards: photographs in the group chat, a memory each added to the same page, a phone call in the evening. Shared remembering does not require shared attendance, and insisting on it turns a hard day into an argument.
If it is someone else's anniversary
The most valuable section here, because this is where people freeze.
Send the message. The fear is that you will remind them and make it worse. You will not. They have thought of nothing else for a fortnight. What you are actually doing is telling them they are not carrying it alone.
Name the person. "Thinking of you today" is kind. "Thinking of you and of Peter today" is much better. Use the name.
Offer something specific. "Let me know if you need anything" puts the work on them and is almost never taken up. "I am free Thursday, shall I bring lunch" is a real offer.
Say the memory. One concrete thing you remember about the person. Something small and true. Bereaved people keep these for years.
Do it again next year. Support is intense for a month and gone by six. The second and third anniversaries are frequently lonelier than the first, because everyone else has moved on and the family has not. Put the date in your calendar, permanently.
If this is the year you put something permanent in place
A great many families do it now rather than at the funeral, and there is good reason for that. The first weeks are for surviving. The first anniversary is when there is finally enough left over to think about what should last.
Our memorial plaque with memory page is £79.99, in 50mm and 80mm. It fixes to a headstone, a bench, an urn or a frame, and the page behind it holds everything a headstone has no room for. There is no deadline on filling it.
And afterwards
The day ends. That is worth saying, because in the run-up it does not feel as though it will.
Some people find the year after the first anniversary lighter, and are guilty about that. Some find it harder, because the structure of firsts is gone and what is left is simply absence without milestones. Both are normal and neither means anything about how much you loved them.
If the weight is not lifting at all, Cruse Bereavement Support offers free help, and a GP can refer for bereavement counselling. Struggling a year on is not a failure to cope. It is what a year on frequently looks like.