It is early in the month and the date is at the end of it. You have started sleeping badly again, you are irritable, and something is sitting on your chest that was not there in the summer.
That is not the anniversary going badly. That is the anniversary approaching, and the approach is generally the difficult part.
Why the run-up is worse than the day
Anticipatory dread is doing most of the work. For weeks the mind rehearses the date, and rehearsal is remarkably good at producing the physical state of the thing being rehearsed without any of the resolution that actually experiencing it brings.
On the day itself, several things change at once. The waiting stops. Other people frequently reach out, which is the one day of the year when they reliably do. And there is usually something to do with it: a visit, a gathering, a marking of some kind. People consistently report the day being more bearable than the fortnight that preceded it, and being slightly bewildered by that.
The practical consequence is that most of the planning energy should go into the two weeks before rather than into the twenty-four hours. Almost everybody does the opposite.
The body remembers first
Many people describe a period of feeling inexplicably terrible and only afterwards realizing what the date was. This is a recognized anniversary reaction and it is more common than the literature suggests.
It makes sense given how memory encodes. The circumstances of a significant loss are stored with a great deal of sensory context: the season, the quality of the light, the temperature, what the air smelled like. When those conditions return, they act as retrieval cues regardless of whether you are consciously tracking the calendar. A particular kind of October afternoon can produce the physical state of the loss before any thought about it arrives.
If the death was sudden or traumatic this tends to be more pronounced, and can include intrusive material returning in the run-up. Our post onsudden death and traumatic griefcovers why.
The useful thing to do with this is simply to know it. Unexplained heaviness in the weeks before a date is information rather than deterioration.
Making a plan
The single most reliable finding here is that a deliberate plan beats getting through it unnoticed, and it is worth making three weeks out rather than the night before.
Four decisions, made in advance and written down.
- Where you will be.At work, at home, somewhere else. There is no correct answer. Working can be genuinely steadying for some people and unbearable for others, and knowing which you are is worth more than a general principle.
- Who you will be with.Alone, with family, with one person. Also no correct answer, and worth deciding rather than defaulting.
- What you will do to mark it.Something rather than nothing, and it does not have to be significant. A visit, a meal they liked, a walk, a candle, a message to someone else who loved them. The marking gives the day a shape.
- How you get out.Whatever you plan, give yourself explicit permission to abandon it. Knowing you can leave makes it far more likely you will manage to go.
Also worth doing in the run-up: tell one or two people the date is coming. Most people will not know, and almost nobody will register it independently. A message on the day from someone who did not have to be reminded is one of the things people remember for years, and it only happens if someone was told.
What tends to help, and what does not
- Doeshelp: doing something rather than waiting.Passive endurance is harder than an activity, however small.
- Does help: including other people who loved them.Grief shared on the day is considerably lighter than grief held alone, and it gives everyone else permission to mention it.
- Doeshelp: giving the body something.Anniversary weeks show up physically before they show up emotionally, and something that works on the nervous system directly is more use than talking about the date. Our sister practice, theCenter for Mind Body Balance, is in the same building.
- Doeshelp: lowering expectations for the surrounding week.Do not schedule anything demanding. Treat it as a week where less gets done.
- Does not help: trying to have a good day.The pressure to be alright on the anniversary produces a second layer of difficulty on top of the first.
- Does not help: pretending it is an ordinary Tuesday.Some people try this and it very rarely works. The body knows.
- Does not help: a big first anniversary you did not want.Some families organizesomething significant. If it is not what you want, you are permitted to say so, and it is easier said three weeks out than on the morning.
- Does not help: comparing it to last year.A number of people arrive at the anniversary and measure themselves against where they expected to be by now. That measurement produces nothing useful, and the expectation was never based on anything to begin with.
The anniversaries after the first
A widely held assumption is that the first is the worst and the rest get progressively easier. It is frequently untrue, and the second anniversary catches a great many people off guard.
The reason is that the first year carries a certain momentum. Everything is a first, everyone is still paying attention, and simply surviving each milestone counts as an achievement. By the second, the support has gone, the shock has fully lifted, and the absence has become the arrangement rather than an emergency. We wrote about this at length inwhy the second year is often harder.
Anniversaries do generally soften over the longer run, and they rarely disappear. Most people find they retain a marked quality for decades, which is not a problem to be solved. What tends to change is the character of the day rather than its weight. Early anniversaries are largely about the absence. Later ones frequently become about the person, and a number of people describe eventually looking forward to the date as the one day a year when remembering them is the point rather than an intrusion. TheAmerican Psychological Associationhas a general overview of how grief changes over time, and theColumbia Center for Prolonged Griefis the reference point for when an anniversary reaction has tipped into something that warrants clinical attention.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I take the day off work?
If you can, and if being at work would be worse. For some people work is the structure that makes the day survivable, so it is genuinely individual. What is worth avoiding is deciding at 7am, since that decision is much harder in the moment than in advance.
Is it bad that I forgot the date was coming?
No, and it does not mean anything about how much they mattered. Some people track it precisely, others realize afterwards why the week was so difficult. Both are ordinary.
What do I say to someone on their anniversary?
Something short that uses the person’s name. "Thinking of you and of David today" is enough, and it does not require a reply. Our post onwhat to say to someone who is grievingcovers this more fully.
Start with a conversation
If a date is coming and the run-up has already started, that is a good reason to call rather than a reason to wait until afterwards.
Fifteen minutes, no charge, no obligation. We can talk through what the day might look like and what would actually help, and whether ongoing support makes sense at this distance from the loss.
Call(201) 708-8448orbook a free 15 minute call. We see clients in Saddle River and across New Jersey by video and in person.
This blog post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment.