Is it normal to still be grieving this much a year later?

As the first anniversary of a death gets closer, you may find yourself looking back over the year and wondering how you got here.

From the outside, it may look as though you’re managing. You’ve gone back to work, kept the house running and turned up for the people who need you. Others may assume you’re starting to adjust. But inside, the absence can still feel enormous.

You might be wondering why it still hurts so much, whether this is what life will be like now, and how you’ll feel when the anniversary date arrives. These are understandable questions, and asking them doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

Why does part of me still expect them to be here?

You know they’ve died, and yet you still listen for their key in the door, or reach for your phone to tell them something before you remember.

Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor, a psychologist who studies grief and the brain, offers a helpful way to understand this. In her book The Grieving Brain, she describes grief as a kind of learning. Over years together, your brain learned where this person would be, when they’d come home and what they might say. Those expectations run quietly in the background of everyday life.

When someone dies, knowing it and living it don’t change at the same pace. Your brain has to learn, moment by moment, how the world works without them. That learning happens in ordinary places: waking up, making a cup of tea, coming home to a quiet house.

So those moments of expecting them aren’t a sign that you haven’t accepted the death. They’re part of how a deep attachment adjusts to a changed world.

When the anniversary brings it all back

The weeks before the anniversary can mean living through the end again. If your loved one was ill for a long time, you may find yourself retracing each stage: the appointments, the conversations, the moment you realised time was shorter than you’d been told. If the death was sudden, you may keep going back to the last ordinary day, when they were here, and then they weren’t.

Either way, guilt can creep in. If only I’d noticed sooner. If only I’d said something different. If only I’d been there. These thoughts are very common, and they often say more about how much you cared than about anything you did wrong.

And if you have children, you may have spent this year holding their grief alongside your own, keeping things steady for them while finding your own way through something you’ve never faced before.

Before, on and after the anniversary

Many people dread the first anniversary for weeks. They plan how to get through it and brace themselves. Often they cope with the day itself better than they feared. Then, a few days later, something gives. They feel flat, exhausted or tearful, and can’t understand why, because the hard part was supposed to be over.

This is something I see often. When you’ve been holding yourself together for a long time, the moment you stop bracing is when feelings finally have room to come through. Health research has a name for something similar: the let-down effect, where the body reacts just after a period of pressure ends. If this happens to you, it isn’t a setback. It may simply follow a long stretch of holding on.

The second year

There’s a common assumption that once the first year is over, the worst is behind you. Friends check in less often. People stop mentioning the person’s name.

For some people, though, the second year is harder than the first. I notice this a great deal in my work. The shock has worn off, the practical tasks are finished, and the support that surrounded you early on has quietly drifted away. It can be a lonely time.

If that’s your experience, you aren’t going backwards. It may be the first time you’ve had room to really feel what has happened.

The story beneath your grief

Much of what is written about grief focuses on the death itself. In my work, I’m also interested in what lies beneath it: what has shaped how you grieve.

Each of us learns about loss long before we face one of our own. Perhaps you grew up in a family where no one talked about grief, or where someone had to stay strong for everyone else. Perhaps that someone was you. Many of the women I work with are the ones who organise the funeral, look after everyone else and go back to work, and only later realise they’ve had no space for their own grief.

A death can also stir up earlier losses. Sometimes the feelings seem to reach further back than this one bereavement, which can be confusing until you see the connection.

Some of what shapes us goes back further still. The psychotherapist Mark Wolynn, in his book It Didn’t Start with You, writes about how patterns of loss and survival can pass down through families, often without anyone putting them into words. You may have inherited ways of coping with loss from your parents or grandparents, along with their strengths.

I call this the story beneath: not only what has happened to you, but what has shaped you. Understanding it doesn’t take away the pain. It can help you make sense of your grief and see yourself with more compassion. You don't have to carry everything handed to you forever.

What remains of the relationship

A death changes a relationship but doesn’t end its significance. You may still hear what they’d say about something, or notice their influence on the choices you make.

The relationship may also have been complicated. Things may have gone unsaid, and you may still have regrets or difficulties you’re trying to understand. Looking back doesn’t mean idealising the person. It means making room for the truth of your own experience.

You might ask yourself: What do I miss most? What do I understand differently now? What do I want to keep carrying with me?

Looking ahead

Some people worry that wanting something for their own future means leaving the person behind. It doesn’t. The person who died can remain deeply important while you work out what you want from the life you’re still living. You don’t need a plan. You might simply ask: What would feel like my own next step, and not one someone else expects of me?

Finding space to talk

The first anniversary isn’t a deadline for feeling better. But it can be a moment to pause and look at what this year has really been like for you.

That can be hard to do alone, especially if you’ve spent the year coping for others. Bereavement counselling can offer space to talk about the death and its ongoing impact, and to explore what has shaped the way you’re grieving, without anyone expecting you to be further along.

You don’t need to know what you want to say before you start. Many people begin with nothing more than “I thought I’d be doing better by now.” That’s enough.