After a loss
When someone close to you dies, the weeks afterward can be hard to get through. Here’s some company for those days, and how to tell when it’s time to call your doctor.
The first weeks after a death
In the first weeks after someone close to you dies, most people feel some mix of numbness, sadness, tiredness, and a strange busyness, and all of it is a normal part of grief. Someone you loved is gone, and the rest of the week still has to happen. The trash goes out on Tuesday, the mail keeps coming, and the cashier at the store asks how you’re doing as if it’s an ordinary week. Maybe it was a parent whose voice you’ve known your whole life, a brother or sister who remembers the same kitchen you do, or a friend you never had to explain anything to.
The early days often run on paperwork and phone calls. There are forms to sign, relatives to ring, a service to plan, and casserole dishes to return to neighbors whose last names you’ve half forgotten. Some people stay oddly calm through all of it and then fall apart three weeks later, when the house empties out. Others cry at the funeral home and then feel almost nothing for days. Neither pattern says anything about how much you loved them.
People sometimes say a parent lived a long life, as if a number should settle the matter. You’re allowed to miss them as much as you do, however long they lived. A friend’s death can be brushed aside in a different way, because friends don’t get the same days off work or the same stack of sympathy cards. A loss that hit you hard counts, and every one of those griefs belongs on this page.
If you’ve lost a husband or wife, the page on widowhood fits that loss more closely. If the hard part is the date coming around again a year or more later, read anniversary of a loss. This page covers the weeks and months right after any death that knocked the wind out of you.
What grief can do to your body and your days
Grief shows up in the body as much as in the heart. Many people sleep badly for weeks, wake at 4 a.m. with their mind running, or sleep far more than usual and still wake up tired. Food can lose its taste, and you may notice at three in the afternoon that you haven’t eaten since yesterday. You might lose your keys twice in one morning, read the same paragraph four times, or walk into a room and forget why you came. This fog and tiredness are common in the months after a death, and for most people they ease slowly as the months go on.
Grief also tends to arrive in waves. You can have a fairly ordinary morning, then hear their favorite song in the grocery store and need to leave your cart in the aisle. You might pick up the phone to call them about the ball game before you remember. Some people catch the smell of a parent’s aftershave on a stranger, or hear a familiar laugh in the next booth at a diner, and feel the loss all over again. These moments can be sharp, and they usually pass within minutes or hours.
Feelings you didn’t expect can come along too. Anger is common. You might be angry at the doctors, at the person for not taking better care of their health, at a sibling who didn’t help, at God, or at the neighbor who keeps saying everything happens for a reason. Guilt is common as well, especially the late-night list of what you should have said or noticed. After a long illness, relief can show up on the same afternoon as sadness, and feeling relief doesn’t make you a bad person. Usually it means you watched someone suffer and you’re glad the suffering is over.
If the relationship was complicated, the grief can be complicated too. You might be mourning the parent you had and the parent you wished for, or a friendship that ended badly before the death. You’re allowed to be sad without tidying it into gratitude first, and you’re allowed to feel more than one thing about the same person.
How to tell grief from depression
Grief and depression can look alike from the outside, and the two can overlap, so sorting them out is your doctor’s job. Still, a few differences are worth knowing, because they can help you decide when to make the call. Both can keep you home, put you off your food, and make tomorrow feel like a chore. The differences tend to show in the pattern of the days and in how you feel about yourself.
In grief, the pain usually comes in waves tied to the person: a photo, a holiday, their handwriting on an old birthday card. Between the waves, most grieving people can still enjoy a grandchild’s visit, laugh at a story about the person who died, or look forward to a meal with a friend. Good memories mix in with the sad ones. People in grief also tend to keep their sense of their own worth, even when they feel guilty about one particular thing they did or didn’t do.
Depression tends to feel more like a steady flatness that colors everything, whether or not you’re thinking about the person. Interest drains out of the things you used to like, including the people who are still here. Many people with depression feel worthless, hopeless, or like a burden, and those thoughts reach far past the loss. Doctors usually look harder when a low mood or a loss of interest lasts most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more.
Some grief stays intense and keeps getting in the way of daily life long after the death. Doctors call this prolonged grief disorder, a condition in which the longing and the pain stay strong and disruptive for a year or more, and it can be treated. None of these names is a test you have to pass or fail on your own. If you see yourself in the description of depression, or you aren’t sure where you fit, that’s reason enough to make an appointment.
When to see a doctor after a loss
Call your doctor’s office and ask for an appointment if any of these describe you. You don’t need to be sure it’s depression first, and describing your days is enough to start.
- A low, flat mood or a loss of interest in nearly everything has lasted two weeks or more.
- You’re sleeping much less or much more than usual, and it isn’t getting better.
- You’ve stopped eating regular meals, or you’ve lost weight without trying.
- You feel worthless or hopeless, in a way that reaches beyond missing the person.
- You’re drinking more than you used to, or taking sleep aids more often than the label says.
- Many months have passed and the grief still keeps you from getting through ordinary days.
It helps to write a few lines before the visit so you don’t freeze in the exam room. You might write: “My mother died in March. Since then I sleep about four hours a night, I’ve lost 10 pounds, and I don’t care about anything, even my grandkids. I’d like to know if this is grief or something more.” Those three sentences give a doctor plenty to work with. The page on talking with your clinician has more on getting ready for the appointment.
Grief can be hard on the body, especially in the first months. Call 911 right away for chest pain or pressure, trouble breathing, sudden confusion, weakness or numbness on one side, trouble speaking, or a sudden severe headache. Those can be signs of a medical emergency, and they need help faster than an appointment can give. If you have health conditions of your own, keep your regular checkups even when you’d rather skip them, since a lot of people let their own care slide while they’re handling a death.
If you’re thinking about dying, feel that the people around you would be better off without you, or worry that you might hurt yourself, call or text 988 now. Your grief doesn’t have to look a certain way before you’re allowed to call.
Your medicine while you grieve
If you take an antidepressant or any other prescribed medicine, keep taking it as prescribed. A death isn’t a reason to stop, skip, or change a dose. Crying a lot doesn’t prove the medicine has failed, and you don’t need to come off it to grieve properly. People who take antidepressants still feel grief after a death, and that’s expected.
Grief can make it easy to lose track of pills. The days run together, a routine you used to share with the person may be gone, and you may be up at odd hours. A weekly pill box from the pharmacy, a sticky note on the coffee maker, or an alarm on your phone can help. If you miss a dose, call your pharmacist or your doctor’s office and ask what to do, rather than guessing or doubling up.
Some people are offered sleeping pills or a medicine for anxiety in the weeks after a death, and some reach for a nightcap that turns into two. Alcohol can deepen a low mood and break up sleep, and it can mix badly with many medicines. Your pharmacist can tell you what’s safe with what you already take, and it’s a question they hear every day. Write any other questions down and take them to the doctor who prescribed the medicine. The page on questioning the medicine goes through how to raise doubts with your doctor without changing anything on your own.
Small ways to get through the day
A few small habits can give a hard day some handholds while you and your doctor look after the bigger picture. Try one or two, and keep the ones that help.
Start the morning the same way each day: a glass of water, then something small to eat at the table, even if it’s one piece of toast. Grief makes it easy to skip meals without noticing until the headache arrives in the afternoon. Eating at the table, instead of standing at the counter, also gives the day one fixed point you chose.
Say the person’s name out loud at least once a day, to a friend or to the empty kitchen. Many grieving people notice that others stop using the name, afraid of causing pain, and the silence around it can hurt more than the name would. If you’d like your friends to keep talking about them, tell them so: “Please don’t be afraid to mention Dad. I like hearing his name.”
Give the people who offer help a real job. “Let me know if you need anything” is kind, and it also leaves all the work of asking to you. Keep a short list by the phone of tasks other people could take on: picking up a prescription, mowing the lawn, helping sort the mail, coming over for coffee on Thursday morning. When someone offers, read them one item from the list. Most people are relieved to be told how to help.
Spend 10 minutes with a notebook in the evening. Set a kitchen timer, write to the person or about them, and stop when it rings. You might start with “What I wish I’d told you is,” “Today I noticed,” or “This week you’d have laughed at.” Then close the notebook and do one small chore, like rinsing a cup or laying out tomorrow’s clothes, so the writing has an end. If the writing leaves you feeling much worse night after night, skip it and mention that to your doctor.
Break the paperwork into small pieces. Pick one task a day, such as one phone call to the bank or one form, and give it about 30 minutes before you put it away. Keep everything in one folder or box so nothing has to be hunted down twice. If the estate or the accounts feel like too much, ask a trusted relative, a lawyer, or the bank for help with the parts you don’t understand.
Get outside in daylight if your body allows it, even for a walk to the mailbox and back. Morning light and a little movement can help sleep at night, and the fresh air gives the mind something to notice besides the loss. Then, once a day, tell one person the truth about how you are: “Today is hard, and I’d like some company more than advice.” If you need more company than you have right now, the loneliness room has ideas for finding it.
When everyone else has gone back to normal
Somewhere around the second or third month, the cards stop coming and people stop asking. Your friends return to their own weeks, and you may feel the loss more sharply right when the support thins out. That timing is common, and it’s a good moment to reach out on purpose instead of waiting for others to remember. A phone call you make on a Tuesday afternoon counts just as much as one you receive.
The first year brings a run of firsts: the first birthday without them, the first Thanksgiving, the first time their favorite team makes the playoffs. It helps to look at the calendar a few weeks ahead and decide on a small plan for each one, even if the plan is only who you’ll call that morning. The page on the anniversary of a loss has more on getting through dates like these.
Many hospices run grief support groups, and some open them to anyone in the community, often at no cost, even if the person who died was never in hospice care. Churches, synagogues, senior centers, and libraries sometimes host groups too. A phone call to a local hospice is an easy first step: “My sister died this spring. Do you have a grief group I could join?” If the evenings are the hardest part, the page on long evenings at home may help, and if it’s the first hour of the day, read heavy mornings. For a few minutes of stillness that makes room for the loss, there’s grief and the chair in the meditation room.
A better week, months after a death, usually still has sadness in it. It might be a week when you ate most of your meals, slept through a few nights, laughed once at a story about them, and found the waves came a little less often. A bad day after a good one is common, and it doesn’t mean you’ve slid back to the start. If you’ve tried the small habits for a few weeks and nothing has eased, that’s useful information to take to your doctor, and it says nothing bad about how hard you’ve tried.
No one can tell you how long grief should last or which feelings are the right ones. When a voice in your head says you should be further along by now, you can answer it gently. Try “I’m grieving someone I loved, and this is what it looks like for me,” and then carry on with your day.
If the one you lost was a pet, read After your pet is gone.
Learn more from trusted sources
These public health agencies explain grief and depression in more detail, including the medical side, and they’re good pages to share with family who want to understand.
- Coping with grief and loss from the National Institute on Aging walks through what grief can feel like and where to find support.
- Depression and older adults from the National Institute on Aging describes what depression can look like after 50 and how it is treated.
- Depression from the National Institute of Mental Health covers the signs, the causes, and the treatments that help.
If you need care
If you’re in crisis in the United States, call or text 988 now, before you read any further. You don’t need a good reason or the right words, and you don’t have to decide whether your grief counts. If you’re outside the United States, call your local emergency number or a local crisis line. A real person can stay on the line with you.
This page is for education and can’t diagnose you or treat you. If you’re not in crisis but the heaviness keeps hanging on, tell your doctor what the days since the death have been like. Keep taking any prescribed medicine as prescribed, and talk over any change with your doctor before you make it. There’s more in the depression room and its depression FAQ, short definitions in the glossary (including depression and adjunct to care), and short answers in the FAQ. This page is not yet medically reviewed.