The archive
What you don’t share stays on a hard drive. And what you learned burying someone is no use to anyone while it stays in your head.
When someone dies, everybody wants to help and almost nobody knows how. This is an archive of people who have been through it, saying what worked and what didn’t.
Two questions. You don’t have to answer both.
What did people say that was no use at all?
And what did someone do — or what did you do — that was?
What we’ve learned so far
Condolences don’t fail because they are unkind. They fail because they remind you. One on its own weighs nothing: the problem is that there are hundreds, one after another, and each one puts you back inside it. Then it carries on at the bakery, and months later.
And what does help is almost never a sentence. It is someone making you laugh, the routine carrying on, someone turning up without asking whether they should.
The answer to “what do I say?” turns out, almost always, to be: don’t say. Do.
No use to me
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
The Spanish formula says, literally, “I accompany you in the feeling” — I’ll come down there with you. Nobody offers to get you out for a while.
“What a bastard.”
Someone said it to my father. They inform you of your own catastrophe and expect you to nod. Inside you think: you’re telling me?
“She was so young.”
“You have to be strong.”
“If you need anything, anything at all, just say.”
Nobody calls. Not because they don’t want to: because asking for help is one more errand, and you have none left in you.
This helped me
The one who made me laugh, or think about something else.
Not joining me in the pain. Getting me out of it for a while.
Carrying on doing what I was already doing. The routine.
Watching my mother slowly get better.
Therapy. I went until the end of 2024, about eight months.
And then it ended. If you are in month two thinking you will need help forever: you won’t.
Myself. On 3 October 2024 I stopped smoking, and I haven’t since. In April 2026, on the Camino, I stopped biting my nails and haven’t gone back.
The two things I did when I was nervous, both gone, in the year I had the most reasons to do the opposite. Grief can be managed too: with the tools you already have, and if you don’t have them, by going out and finding them. Therapy was one of mine.
Everything above is mine. Whatever you send will go right beside it, signed however you say.
How this works
- What you send me may end up published in those two columns above, on this same page. Nowhere else.
- Sign however you like: your name, an initial, or nothing at all. You choose, and the default is nothing.
- I publish nothing without telling you first. If you don’t reply, it doesn’t go up.
- You can ask me to take it down whenever you want, without explaining why.
- There is no form and no database. You send me an email, I read it, and I copy it across by hand.
- I don’t ask for your surname, your age, or the name of the person who died. Only if you want to tell me.
Tell me yours
It doesn’t have to be beautiful or in any order. Two lines will do. And if you just want to get it off your chest and have it published nowhere, say so and it won’t be.