The Year Two Nobody Warns You About

Everyone shows up for year one.

The first year after Joel died, my kitchen counter looked like a potluck. Casseroles in dishes I’d have to remember to return. An influx of cards in the mailbox. People I barely knew were messaging me on social media, telling me they were praying. The phone rang. The doorbell rang. For a whole year, the world circled close, like it knew I couldn’t stand up on my own yet.

What no one told me is that year one isn’t the hard part.

Year one, you’re numb. Shock is a kind of mercy — it wraps you in cotton and walks you through the funeral and the paperwork and the first round of holidays before you’ve fully understood what happened. You’re running on something that isn’t quite strength, but it holds you up. And everyone’s watching, so you hold steady.

Then year two arrives, and the cotton wears off.

By the second year, the casseroles had long stopped. The cards trickled to nothing. The world had quietly decided I was doing better — and the cruel joke of it was that I felt worse than I had at the funeral. The numbness had burned off and left me standing in the full heat of it, finally understanding, in my body and not just my head, that he was not coming back. Not next week. Not ever.

And by then, nobody was asking about us anymore. “How are you?” had gone back to meaning the polite version. To say “Actually, I’m drowning…” in month eighteen felt like breaking a rule no one had written down, but everyone seemed to know that unwritten rule — the one that says grief has a shelf life, and yours expired a while ago.

So, I most often responded with something along the lines of “I’m fine” and proceeded to drive the kids to their appointments. Later, I came apart quietly in places where no one could see.

That was the year I learned grief doesn’t run on anyone’s calendar but its own. The kids needed me no less just because the world had moved on. Our four adopted children were still at home, as they were significantly younger (ages 2, 6, 7, and 8) than any of our biological children. The four of them had a list of diagnoses as long as my arm, and I was the only grown-up left to meet their growing needs. I couldn’t fall apart on a schedule. I fell apart in pieces — in the laundry room, in the ten quiet minutes after the last one finally went to sleep — and then I put myself back together enough to do it again the next day.

Here’s the part I hold onto.

When the people couldn’t stay — and that’s not a complaint, people have their own lives and their own limits — God did. The casseroles stopped. His presence didn’t. On the worst nights of that second year, when the house was dark, and the loneliness sat on my chest like something with weight, the one thing that refused to pack up and go home was the sense that I was not alone in it. Not rescued out of it. Just not alone in it. That turned out to be the thing I actually needed.

I’m writing this for whoever’s in their own year two right now. Maybe it isn’t a death — maybe it’s a divorce, a diagnosis, a marriage that ended, a life that quietly fell apart while everyone assumed you’d bounced back. If the hardest part came after everyone stopped checking on you, I want you to hear this plainly:

You are not doing it wrong. You are not weak, or stuck, or behind. Grief is just honest, and it tells the truth on its own timeline — long after the cards stop coming.

The casseroles will stop. Let them. Someone steadier is holding you up, and He doesn’t have a shelf life.

There’s still a spark here, even in year two. Maybe especially in year two.