Grief Doesn’t Get Easier After a Year—In Fact, Year Two Can Be Even Harder
Grief can make reading hard. Want to listen to this article instead? Find its corresponding podcast episode here.
Picture this: You’re in year two of grieving your loss, and you’ve probably discovered that it’s not “easier” like everybody promised. In fact, it might even be harder than year one.
People offered you garbage reassurances like, “the first year is the worst,” and “just get through the firsts”—as if grief comes with a built-in expiration date.
But now the calendar has flipped, the support has stopped coming, and everyone around you seems to expect you to be okay.
But I know—and every other griever who’s ever lived knows—you’re not. Not really.
You’re still carrying the weight of everything you lost. And now, you’re doing it in a world that assumes you’re fine.
If this is you right now, I need you to know that you're not broken, you're not doing grief wrong, and you're definitely not “failing at grief” because navigating loss still feels hard.
Despite what society tries to tell us, grief doesn’t 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.
The World Moves On—But You're Still Living With Grief
One of the most jarring parts of hitting the one-year mark is how suddenly it seems everyone around you expects you to be okay.
In the early days, you may have had some form of grief support. For instance, friends bringing meals, coworkers giving you grace on important projects, or family checking in. But around the 6–12 month mark—and even sooner than that for many grievers—that support fades.
People assume you're “back to normal,” or they simply don’t know what to say or do to support you anymore. Many of them, whether spoken or unspoken, want the “old you” to return. They think that because the year mark has passed, you should be “over it” by now.
But you’re not the same person you were before your loss. And you’re certainly not “over it.”
Whether you’re mourning a death, divorce, breakup, major diagnosis, or other life-altering transition, grief has changed you—and often, the second year is when you feel the weight of that truth most clearly.
You may begin to recognize: they’re moving on... and I’m still grieving.
And that kind of realization? That’s a grief all its own.
The Shock of the Loss Wears Off, and Reality Sinks In
In year one of life after loss, many of my grieving students inside my online course + community Life Life After Loss Academy describe being in a kind of fog.
For you this might look like moving through the motions without being fully present, prioritizing getting through each hour and day as it comes, or doing the bare minimum of what you need to do to survive—but it all feels surreal and not quite like your life.
In my first book, Permission to Grieve, I describe the first year after my mom died like this:
“I 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 returned to campus, participated in classes, and graduated with honors, but especially in those first months after 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…
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 the list got completed any more.
I had switched from manual to automatic. Life continued, but I was no longer driving. I was just along for the ride.”
Regardless of whether your loss was expected—like a death after a loved one’s terminal diagnosis—or unexpected—like a natural disaster—you may be in a sort of grief haze of your own: a sort of shock that shrunk your life down into the bare bones minimum—asking only that you did what it took to survive.
Shock is, in many ways, protective. It keeps the sharpest edges of grief slightly blurred until you’re emotionally, mentally, and even physically able to handle them.
But somewhere in year two, that shock begins to wear off. And when it does, the raw reality of your loss becomes undeniable. You may find yourself feeling emotions more deeply or being caught off guard by delayed waves of sorrow, rage, or even numbness.
The people around you may assume you're "better now that the one year mark has passed"—but in truth, you're just beginning to fully feel what you've been just surviving up til now.
You've Lived Through Every Grief-Related "First"—Now Come the Forevers
The first year after a loss is full of firsts without: first birthday, first anniversary, first holiday season, first time hearing that one heartbreaking song in public, first time needing to call them and remembering you can’t, first time doing something you’ve never had to do before. The list goes on and on.
When you’re in year one of loss, it can seem like the firsts never stop coming. And don’t get me wrong: those firsts are brutal. But they also carry a strange momentum. You brace for them. You rack up “I survived” points one for each one you live through. People acknowledge them by sending a text or a card or a bouquet of flowers.
Then year two arrives. The calendar doesn’t feel as urgent anymore—but the pain lingers.
And what starts to settle in is the deeper, quieter grief of forever.
You realize this isn’t just a one-year ache. 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.
Suddenly you’re no longer bracing for short-term impact; you’re starting down the looming threat of every upcoming grief date between now and the day you die. That’s a HUGE perspective-shift!
More Losses Emerge—Not Less
Another struggle that often appears in year two is the arrival of secondary losses—or more loss on top of loss.
While your “primary loss” is the big, overarching loss you can name—for example, “My dad died,” “My fiancé broke things off,” “I lost my job,” “My sister got diagnosed with cancer,” and so on—your secondary losses are the underground, just-as-heavy losses that happen as a result of your primary loss.
You may not recognize them in year one of your grief, but they tend to make an appearance once year two begins.
Examples of secondary losses include:
A friendship that couldn’t hold your grief
An identity—such as artist, husband, teacher, or productive worker—that no longer fits
A dream that now feels impossible to achieve
Access to money, resources, power or community
A future life you can no longer live
A sense of stability, family, or home
A version of you that died along with your primary loss
Sometimes in year two, in addition to secondary losses, you also uncover unexpected truths—family secrets, relational betrayals, financial issues, or medical realities you hadn’t known the full extent of.
And of course, sometimes, devastatingly, more primary losses literally happen: you get laid off, another of your loved ones dies, your health changes, or a global crisis forces you back into another cycle of grief.
Inside my course + community Life After Loss Academy, my students describe year two not as a season of relief, but as a season of navigating even more loss than they thought they would ever contend with. Maybe the same is true for you too.
You’re on the “Swinging Rope Bridge of Identity Loss”
Here’s the truth nobody talks about: in the second year of grief, you're still figuring out who you are now.
In one of my most popular video lessons inside the Release module of Life After Loss Academy, I refer to this as the swinging rope bridge season of your life.
You can visualize it like this: You’ve been forced to leave behind the solid ground of who you used to be—before the death, the divorce, the diagnosis, the identity shift—but you haven’t yet arrived at solid ground on the other side.
You're suspended in uncertainty.
You’re moving through the mist of the in-between—sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes side-to-side.
You’re trying to build a meaningful future while still sorting through the pain of the past.
This season of your life is enormously disorienting and super tender. It’s hard to make decisions or set goals because you don’t necessarily know where you’re going—or where life and grief will cause you to end up. It’s also hard to know exactly who you are and what you want because loss has the incredible power to rearrange what we value, who we get support from, and how we ask for help.
This specific flavor of lostness is a hallmark of year two of grief.
And I’ll reiterate: You are not lost because something is wrong with you or because you’re “failing” at grief. You’re not “bad” at figuring out how to move forward.
You are doing the slow, sticky, confusing, painstaking work of putting your life together in a way that you can live with. Not in the way that it was before, because loss has rendered that life inaccessible to you, but in a way that feels honoring of everything and everyone you lost and who you are becoming.
The Myth of “The First Year of Grief Is the Worst” Is a Lie. Here’s What’s More True.
Eurocentric, “Western” culture has done a stunning job of creating timelines and tidy boxes for a normal human experience—loss—that is not tidy at all.
It created a deeply embedded belief that:
You get a year to grieve,
Then you “find closure,”
Then you get back to who you were before
But grief doesn’t care about what our culture thinks of it—much less its arbitrary timelines.
What’s more true is this:
Grief has no “finish line”; it keeps going
Year two isn’t the end—it’s often just the beginning of deeper healing
You don’t go back; you move—and grow—forward with grief in tow
If you've suspected people aren’t telling the whole truth when they say, “The first year is the worst,” you’re absolutely right. But beyond being right it’s important to know that despite—or maybe inclusive of—your losses you are also incredibly intuitive and smart. You know the real story: that year two marks the continuation of the grief that began the day your loss happened.
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 smallest crevices and largest milestones of your life. It will be present forever. Again, not because you’re incapable of “moving on,” but because that is simply the nature of grief!
If You’re Struggling in Year Two of Grief, Here’s What You Need to Know
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.
There is nothing wrong with you.
If year two feels heavier than you expected (or than others told you it would be), it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. It’s because now, you’re doing the real, raw work of living with your loss.
You still deserve support.
Just because the cards or texts have stopped coming doesn’t mean your need for care has ended. Seek spaces where you don’t have to hide your grief. Consider Life After Loss Academy, my online course + community, designed for all types of loss, no matter how long it’s been.
You’re 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, meaningful, joy-filled life.
Closing Thoughts: Grief Doesn’t Get Easier In Year Two; It Just Gets Different
Grief doesn’t get easier after a year. It just gets different.
And sometimes, that difference feels heavier before it feels lighter.
If you're in that second year wondering why everything feels harder—know this: You’re not failing. You’re not slow. You’re not weak or deficient or broken. You’re not incapable of coping.
You’re in the in-between. You’re recognizing grief’s permanence as a fixture in your life. You’re noticing additional losses that need your tending, both new and old.
You’re on the rope bridge. And even though it’s swinging over a vast pit of god-knows-what, you are still crossing.
There is life ahead. There is meaning to build. And there are people—grievers like you—who get it and are ready to walk with you.
Want practical tools and supportive community for life after loss?
Consider joining my online course + community, Life After Loss Academy, which offers short, on-demand video lessons, weekly live grief coaching with me, and a resource library of podcasts, books, articles, and more to companion you as you navigate year two and beyond.
Designed for all types of losses, including death, divorce, and diagnosis, it’s my signature roadmap of tools and support that has guided grievers through devastating loss since 2020.
