grief does not get easier after a year.
In fact, year two can be even harder.
You are still carrying the weight of everything
that you lost.
And now you're doing it in a world that assumes
because the first year has passed, you're fine.
For many people, year two is when grief gets even more painful.
And it's time we talk about why.
(gentle music)
- Any grief growers, I am so honored to be back here
with you today as always.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while,
welcome back.
And if you are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Farsithia.
I am a grief coach very soon to be three time author
and the founder of Life After Loss Academy,
which is an online course in community
that has helped dozens of grieving people
stop feeling lost, stuck, broken and alone,
and start building lives that they genuinely love
from the lives that lost force them to live.
This includes not only death-related losses,
but also divorce and breakup, major diagnosis,
a strangenment, and every other major life transition
that changes you.
Here on grief grower, we believe that grief
is not something we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside
and that when we stop treating grief like a problem
to be solved and start treating it like an invitation
to live more deeply, we can all create meaningful lives
that are rich with the memories that we carry,
the struggles that we faced, and the preciousness
of what it is to be alive right here and right now.
Before we get into today's topic, just a quick reminder
that release day for my new book, of course I'm here right now.
This is my third book is coming up on March 31st.
This little guidebook teaches you how to support
a grieving person in your life with the best free support tool
that any of us has at our disposal at any time
and that is words.
It teaches you what to say so that you never enter
another conversation with someone who's grieving,
wondering what on earth do I say to comfort them?
I've said this before, I'm gonna say it again,
but pre-orders are so incredibly helpful to me as an author
in terms of getting the book seen by bookstores
and the powers that be in terms of marketing land,
so you can find a link to pre-order,
of course I'm here right now in the show notes.
If you have already done the work of pre-ordering the book,
thank you so much.
You can submit your receipt number from Barnes and Noble
or Amazon or your local indie bookstore on my website
to access the free six week book club that begins in mid-April,
where we will read, of course I'm here right now
as a group and discuss it together.
This kicks off again in mid-April,
so make sure you have the book in your hands
or digitally before then.
And lastly, if you would like to celebrate
the launch of this book with me,
I am hosting two launch parties that I would love to see you at.
The first one is taking place here in Chicago on March 30th,
the eve before the book comes out,
so you will get this book in your hands
before the rest of the world.
The second launch party is the day the book comes out,
which is March 31st here on YouTube,
so no matter where in the world that you live,
you can tune in to hear more about the clients
and interactions that inspired this book.
You can also learn what to say to comfort someone grieving,
plus here we read some excerpts live.
And yes, I will be taking your questions.
And of course, the replay of that event will be made available
if you cannot attend the virtual event live.
Now we are so ready to get to today's topic.
And this is, watch me climb up on my soapbox,
grief does not get easier after a year.
In fact, year two can be even harder.
This is my locus.
This is the fount from which everything else will pour today.
Picture this, you are in year two of grieving a loss.
And you have probably discovered that it is not easier
like everybody promised.
In fact, it is probably harder for you than year one.
People around you, message boards online,
even books and sympathy cards may have said things to you like.
The first year is the worst, just get through the first.
As if grief comes with a built-in expiration date.
But now the calendar of your loss has flipped to year two.
The support has stopped coming.
And everyone around you seems to expect you to suddenly be okay.
But I know, and every other griver
who's ever walked the face of the earth knows
that you're not okay, not really.
You are still carrying the weight of everything that you lost.
And now you're doing it in a world that assumes
because the first year has passed, you're fine.
If this is you right now, grief girl,
we're listening to this episode.
I need you to know that you are not broken.
You are not doing grief wrong.
And you are definitely not failing at grief
because navigating loss after the first year
still fears hard.
Despite what society tries to tell us,
grief does not magically get easier after a year.
In fact, for many people year two is when grief
gets even more painful.
And it's time we talk about why.
So in today's episode, I want to share
a few different reasons why the second year of grief
is often harder than the first.
And I hope you will share it with someone in your life
who is navigating their second year of grief
or you'll share it with someone who said,
oh, just give it a year.
And you'll be fine after that.
Here's the first reason.
The world moves on, but you're still living with grief.
One of the most jarring things that happens
in hitting the one-year mark is how suddenly
it seems like everyone around you expects you to be fine.
In the early days of loss, especially if you had
a death-related loss, you probably received
some form of grief support.
For instance, people bringing meals, doing a meal train,
co-workers giving you grace on bigger, important projects,
or family checking in on you on a regular basis.
But around the six to 12 month mark, and even sooner
for other types of loss, I'm thinking, like, break up,
miscarriage, things that society doesn't take as seriously,
things like pet loss, things like estrangement, things like
major diagnosis that changes your life,
but not really the lives of other people around you,
support fades away.
People assume that you're back to normal.
Heavy air quotes here, back to normal.
Or they simply don't know what to say
or do to support you anymore.
And many of them, whether they say this out loud,
or whether they keep it to themselves,
they want the old you to return.
They think that because that your mark has passed,
you should be over it by now.
Again, heavy air quotes around the word over it.
But you are not the same person that you were before your loss,
and you are certainly not over it.
Whether you are grieving a death divorce breakup,
major diagnosis, any other life altering transition,
grief has changed you, loss has changed you,
and often the second year is when you feel the weight
of that truth most clearly.
You might begin to recognize, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
They're moving on, and I'm still grieving.
And that kind of realization that is a grief all its own.
The second reason that your two can often be harder
than your one is that the shock wears off,
and reality sinks in.
In your one of life after loss,
so many my grieving clients and students
inside life after loss academy describe being in a kind of fog
or haze.
One of my clients, I say this often,
she referred to it as being in frozen mode.
For you, this might look like moving through the motions
without being fully present, or prioritize it getting
through each hour or each day as it comes,
or doing the bare minimum of what you need to do to survive,
but it all feels sort of surreal and fuzzy
and not quite like your life.
In my first book, which is called Permission to Grieve,
it has a little band across it,
'cause this was my printer copy that I cut.
Before the book actually came out,
but I described the first year after my mom died like this.
It felt like I was living my life behind a thick pane of glass.
I was disengaged at all times,
one step removed from everything happening around me.
I've returned to campus, participated in classes
and graduated with honors,
but especially in those first months following my mom's death,
it was like I was living someone else's life,
or like I was living in a movie directed
by the world's cruelest movie director.
I was an actress showing up to play a part,
not the person who wrote the play.
Where I had once identified so much
with a world of learning all I could learn,
diligently working towards dreams and goals,
and actively showing up for club meetings,
parties and social events,
I now felt distant from all of it.
The suffocating wool blanket of my mom is dead,
covered everything I used to call my life,
so I disconnected from it.
It didn't belong to me anymore.
I kept showing up robotically moving through the motions.
On the outside, I looked like I was doing okay,
but on the inside, nothing I was surrounded by felt like mine.
I was checking tasks off the list,
but I wasn't the person who made the list.
I didn't even care about whether or not the list
got completed anymore.
I had switched from manual to automatic.
Life continued, but I was no longer driving.
I was just along for the ride.
And this is from page 34 and 35
of my first book permission degree.
That was my experience of the first year
after my mother's death.
And regardless, I have to say,
of whether your loss was expected,
you saw it coming, like the death of a loved one
after a terminal diagnosis or unexpected,
you didn't see it coming like a natural disaster.
You may be in some sort of grief haze of your own right now,
a sort of shock that shrunk your life down
into the bare bones minimum of just survive.
And shock is in many ways very, very protective.
It's our brain and our body trying to do the job
of keeping like the pokeyest and sharpest edges of grief,
slightly blurred or slightly farther away
until we're able to emotionally, mentally
and maybe even physically tolerate them.
But somewhere for a lot of grievers in year two,
that shock begins to wear off the buffer to the world dissolves.
And when it does, the reality of your loss becomes undeniable.
You may find yourself feeling emotions more deeply
or being caught off guard by delayed waves of sorrow
or rage, my favorite emotion, or even numbness.
The people around you may assume that you're better now
that the one your mark has passed,
heavy air quotes again there,
but in truth, you are just beginning to fully feel
what you have been simply surviving up until now.
Here's another reason that the second year
is often harder than the firsts.
You've lived through every grief related first,
now comes forever.
The first year after a loss is full of firsts without,
first birthday, for the anniversary,
for a holiday season, first time hearing
that one heartbreaking song in public,
and you have to figure out what to do about it,
first time needing to call someone
and remembering you can't, first time doing something
you've never had to do before the list of firsts
goes on and on and on and on.
When you're in your first year of loss,
it can seem like the firsts never stop coming
and do not get me wrong those firsts
and living through them is brutal.
But they also carry a sort of strange momentum.
You brace for them, you see them coming on the calendar,
you start to rack up, I survived points
for everyone that you live through
and people often acknowledge them
by sending a text or a card or bouquet flowers
or outreach on social media.
And then year two comes,
and the calendar doesn't feel as urgent anymore.
But the pain of the grief and the milestones still stick around.
And that's what starts to settle in,
this deeper quieter grief of, oh my God,
I have to do this forever.
You realize that this is not just an ache
that sticks around for a year,
this isn't something you'll get through once
and never have to deal with again.
This is your life now with grief in it, always forever.
Suddenly, you are no longer bracing for short term impact.
You are staring down the looming threat
of every upcoming grief date between now and the day you die.
That is a huge perspective shift that comes in year two
and not enough people are talking about it.
Here's a fourth reason that the second year
is harder than the first.
More loss comes to the forefront, not less.
And here's what I mean by that.
Another struggle that often appears in year two
is the arrival,
so often suddenly, of secondary losses
or more loss on top of loss.
And if you're not familiar with the concept of secondary losses,
I'll do like a little crash course.
Your primary loss is like the big overarching loss
that you can name.
For example, my dad died, my fiance broke things off.
I lost my job, my sister got diagnosed with cancer,
my cat died, and so on.
Anything that you can name of like,
I have lost something, something died.
There's some part of my life that can no longer be.
That's the primary loss.
I usually see it as like a big umbrella
that all the other losses live under.
Your secondary losses are the underground
just as heavy losses that happen underneath that umbrella.
They are happening as a result of
or as a byproduct of or a consequence of
or a cascading order of events of the primary loss.
You might not recognize them in year one
because you are so focused on grieving the primary loss,
but they tend to make an appearance once year two begins.
Here's some examples for you.
Secondary losses, a friendship that you now have to grieve
because it could not hold space for your grief.
And identity, I see this so often in life after loss
academy such as artist, husband, teacher,
productive worker that no longer fits who you see
and know yourself to be now.
A dream that now feels impossible to achieve
or that loss has rendered no longer true for you.
Things like, especially in our society,
access to money, resources, power or community,
these things often metaphorically die or literally die
when we experience a devastating loss.
A future life that you can no longer live
hopes dreams, expectations for the future.
A sense of stability, family or home.
In one of the first blogs I ever wrote about grief,
I talked about a feeling of homelessness
that came along with grief after my mom died.
Even though I had a place to live,
I felt homeless in the world.
And then a version of you grieving yourself
or the parts of yourself that died
along with your primary loss.
And sometimes in year two, in addition to this list
of secondary losses, you may also uncover unexpected truths,
things like family secrets or relational betrayals
or financial issues or medical realities
that you hadn't known the full extent of
when the loss first happened.
And of course, sometimes also devastatingly,
more primary losses can literally happen.
Perhaps your dad dies and then you get laid off.
Or somebody else in your life gets diagnosed with something
or your health changes or a global or political crisis
forces you back into another cycle
of some sort of primary grief that comes with its own suitcase
of secondary losses.
Inside my course in Community Life after Loss Academy,
my students describe year two,
not as I've never heard them say this, a season of relief,
but a season of navigating even more loss
than they thought they would ever contend with
because of all these secondary losses,
because of sort of the creaking open of Pandora's Box
that comes on day 366 when you cross into another year,
a second year.
Maybe the same sense that, oh my God,
there's more to grieve underneath all of this grief
is true for you as well.
Here's yet another reason that the second year
is harder than the first.
You are on what I call the swinging rope bridge of identity loss.
And this is something that nobody really talks about
or like a lot of grief professionals make space for,
but like the larger world doesn't make space for.
It is that in the second year of grief,
you are still figuring out who the hell you are.
In one of my most popular video lessons
inside the release module,
the second module of Life after Loss Academy,
I refer to this phenomenon
as the swinging rope bridge season of your life
and you can visualize it like this.
You have your life before Loss on one side.
You have your life after Loss or your new normal
as some people call it.
That's not my favorite phrase,
but your new normal on the other side.
And connecting those things is a swinging rope bridge.
You have been forced to leave behind the solid ground
of who you used to be, who you knew yourself to be,
before the death, before the divorce,
the diagnosis, the identity shift,
but you have not yet arrived at solid ground
or sort of an identity settling on the other side.
You are metaphorically suspended in uncertainty.
You are moving through the mist of the in between,
sometimes forward, sometimes backward,
sometimes side to side, sometimes who knows.
You are trying to build a meaningful future
while still sorting through the pain of the past
and you are carrying all of it with you all of the time.
This season of your life, this rope bridge season
is enormously disorienting and super duper tender.
It is so hard to make decisions or to set goals
because you don't necessarily know where you're going
or where life and grief will cause you to end up.
It is also hard to know exactly
who you are and what you want
because loss is the incredible power
to sort of rearrange what we value
and who we get support from and how we ask for help.
This specific flavor of lostness,
the swinging rope bridge season,
is a hallmark of year two and beyond of grief.
And I'm gonna reiterate what I said at the beginning
of this episode, you are not lost or stuck
because something is wrong with you
because you're failing at grief.
You are not bad at figuring out how to move forward.
What this season of your life is,
what year two often becomes is the slow and sticky
and confusing and painstaking nitty gritty work
of putting your life back together in a way
that you can live with, not in the way that it was before
because you cannot go back to what that solid ground used to be.
Lost has rendered that life inaccessible to you.
But in a way that feels honoring of everything
and everyone you lost and are carrying
and who you are becoming.
Suffice it to say that I strongly believe
that the first year of grief is the worst is a lie and a myth.
Eurocentric Western culture has done a stunning job
of creating timelines and tidy boxes
for a normal human experience.
Lost, that is not normal or tidy at all.
Our society has created this deeply embedded belief
that you get a year to grieve, you find closure
and then you go back to who you were before.
That's really simple as an in-I love a three step process.
But grief does not give two shits
about what our culture thinks of it,
much less any sort of arbitrary timeline.
What's more true about grief is grief has no finish line.
It just keeps going.
Year two is not the end of your loss.
It is often the beginning of deeper healing
and you do not go back.
You move and you grow forward by force with grief in tow.
I often in Lifehector Lost Academy talk about building a life
you love from the one that lost forced you to live.
There is no way to go back to what you knew before,
the beginning or where you started
before you got pushed onto that rope bridge,
the only way to figure out who you are now,
what you want, what your goals are,
what has meaning anymore,
how to carry your grief forward is by walking forward
and you are doing that right now.
And if you have suspected, the people around you
aren't telling the whole truth when they say things
like the first year is the worst or it'll be better
after the first year.
You are absolutely right.
Your intuition, your feelers are ringing correctly.
But beyond being right, it is important to know
that despite or maybe inclusive of your losses,
you are also incredibly smart.
You know the real story that year two marks
the continuation of the grief that began the day
your loss happened or sometimes for the case
of anticipatory losses where you knew
a loss was coming even before that.
Just because there are no more firsts
does not mean that there is no more grief to contend with.
Grief will always work its way into the tiniest crevices
and also the largest milestones of your life.
It will be present forever, non-negotiably again,
not because you are incapable of moving on,
but because that is simply the nature of grief.
Before we go today, I need you to know
that if you are struggling in year two or beyond
of grief, here's what I want you to take with you.
You are not behind.
Grief is not a race and there is no magical timeline
for when you should be done grieving.
You are where you are and that is more than okay,
especially all things considered in this year
of our Lord 2026.
There is nothing wrong with you.
And if year two feels heavier than you expected
or than others told you it would be,
it is not because you're doing something wrong.
It is because now you are doing the real and raw work
of learning how to live with your grief.
You still deserve support.
Just because the card to text of stopcoming
does not mean your need for care has ended,
I hope you will seek out spaces where you do not
have to hide your grief.
Life after a loss academy is one place you can do that,
but there are literally thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands of others.
And you are allowed to grieve forever.
Grief doesn't ever really go away.
It just transforms.
You can find personal and even compassionate ways
to carry it with you as you build a beautiful
and meaningful and joy-filled life.
I think a lot of people hear the word grief
and they think bad, sad, suffering, agony, despair.
But there is another part of grief too
that is related to remembering that is related to resilience
that is related to growth that is related to having
ancestral ties or figuring out your own values
and things that you want in the world.
Grief does not mean bad all the time.
I think that's another thing our Eurocentric
Westernized Society does really well
is creates like anti-grief propaganda, basically.
But real grievers know, and you know,
as you're listening to this show called grief rower,
that grief doesn't disappear just because time has passed.
It changes shape.
Grief doesn't get easier, necessarily.
It just gets different.
And sometimes that difference,
especially in year two, feels heavier
before it feels lighter.
If you're in the second year of life after loss,
wondering why everything feels like a struggle.
Know this. You are not failing.
You are not slow.
You are not weak or deficient or broken.
You are not incapable of coping.
You are in the in between.
You are recognizing grief's permanence
as a fixture in your life.
You are noticing additional losses
that need you are tending both new and old.
You are on the metaphorical rope bridge of identity loss
and who am I now and what do I need
and how is my support system changed
and how have I changed and where am I going from here?
And even though this rope bridge is swinging over
a vast pit of God knows what,
you are still doing the work of crossing it.
There is life ahead.
There's meaning to build.
And there are people.
There are grieving people like you who get it
and who are already walking with you.
Inside life after loss, Academy,
and a few of my books I talk about how everyone is alone
on their grief planet.
But when we look around and see from our grief planet
that there are other grief planets
and other constellations of grievers in the world,
it can make us feel a little bit less alone.
We can be reminded that there are others
on their own swinging rope bridges on their own grief planets
with their own losses and their own stories
and their own things that they're carrying.
And it sort of reinforces that it's okay to have ours
because it is a normal natural thing
to continue to have grief long after the first year.
If you are struggling in year two of grief or beyond
or before, if you are negotiating a loss right now,
I hope that you will consider joining us
inside my online course in community life
after loss Academy.
This is a virtual place that offers short
and on-demand video lessons for me.
Weekly live grief coaching with me
also with replays available if you can't come live
and a resource library that is chock full
of my favorite podcasts and books and articles
and just like tools to companion you
as you figure out year two of grief and beyond
or before wherever you are in your grief.
It is designed for all types of losses,
death, divorce, diagnosis and more.
And it is for all timelines.
No matter how long it's been, we have students join
who are three months out from a loss.
We have students join 20 years after the fact
to say I've never really grieved this part of my loss
or this element of my grief or something
in the world where fresh losses brought up something old
and they want to process that in community.
That is the work we do inside of life
after loss Academy.
This is my signature roadmap of tools and support
that has guided grievers through devastating loss
since 2020.
So if you would like to join us inside life
after loss Academy, the doors are always open
because grief happens 365 days a year.
(laughs)
And you can find a link to do that in the show notes.
I am sending you so much love and so much grace
and so much like if you can feel like reinforcements
as you navigate whatever year you are in after loss.
But this episode, especially this one,
goes out to all the folks who are living in year two
and wondering why the heck is this so hard?
I hope this provided you some validation
and some reassurance and some answers.
I'll see you next time.
(gentle music)
That's all for this episode of Grief Grower.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're looking for Grief Support Beyond this show,
you can find free workshops, blog articles, and my new,
what's your grief supporter's strength quiz
at shellbeefersitthia.com/links.
And if you'd like to get support from me
for your unique loss experience,
you can join us in life after loss Academy.
As a student, I will walk you through my five step
Grief Framework, G-R-I-E-F, for rebuilding life after loss
and you can get live coaching from me every single week
to answer your questions and help you through your struggles.
Replays are always available if you can't attend live.
It is just $33 a month to join or $22 a month
if you're marginalized or financially stressed griever
and you can cancel at any time.
If this podcast felt validating, comforting, educational
or otherwise helpful to you,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts
or Spotify.
And be sure to share this episode with a friend
because you never know what someone you love
is going through.
Grief Grower is hosted by me, Shelby for Cytheia,
and the theme music is composed by our own Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, I see you, I am so proud of you
and the work that you're doing in the world.
And I love you because even through Grief, we are crawling.
(gentle music)
[Music]