This part might come sooner for you if you have children of any age, for me I didn't so it was not something I thought about until there was a little clearing of the fog. Five months after James died, I found myself thinking about something I hadn't had to face myself: what would this have looked like if there had been a child in the house? Since even in my work I don't work with children this sent me on a search and find mission and down a rabbit hole a little bit. It line

By month four, I knew I was grieving. I didn't always understand what grief was doing to me, but at least I knew what it was. There were words for what I was experiencing. Shock. Trauma. Brain fog. Anxiety. Anger. Loneliness. There were articles telling me that forgetting why I had walked into a room was normal. There were people telling me there was no timeline for grief. There were books explaining why I could be relatively okay one minute and completely fall apart the next

By month three, something strange starts to happen. The world decides you're coming back. Not because you said you were ready. Not because you woke up one morning and suddenly felt like yourself again. Not because grief packed its bags and politely left. Enough time has passed. Apparently. Somewhere along the way, anxiety had crept into my grief. The world suddenly felt less predictable than it used to. I had learned, in the most brutal way possible, that terrible things can

There is something nobody really tells you about the second month of grief. Everyone goes home. For the first few weeks after James died, there were people around me. There were things to do. So many things to do. Arrangements, phone calls, paperwork, government forms, insurance, finances, the estate. There were decisions that had to be made when I could barely remember what I had walked into a room for. People checked in. People came over. People asked what I needed. There w

Liminality is such a powerful frame for this series because what we're describing isn't simply sadness. It's the experience of being between lives: the life that existed before the death has ended, but the life that comes afterward hasn't taken shape yet. The First Month After Your Partner Dies: Living in the In-Between There is a word I recently learned: liminality. It describes the state of being on a threshold — no longer where you were, but not yet where you're going. And