The First Weeks After You Lose Someone Suddenly

If you just lost someone and are somewhere in those first unbearable days or weeks, I want to share some helpful tips.

What has helped me in the first weeks

If you are in those first raw weeks, when the mind is apart from the body, when solid sleep seems impossible, when the crying headaches hurt and the whole world has gone quiet and slow… here are the things I have learned. Not to fix it. Only to help you through.

1. Drink water, and add electrolytes. Your appetite may be gone completely, and food may hold no interest at all. That is okay. Just stay hydrated. Let that be the one small thing you do for your body.

2. Reach for gentle relief when the crying and the headaches come. A dab of lavender at the temples can soften things, and it is okay to take an ibuprofen. You do not have to white knuckle the pain on top of everything else. (I make a heart oil for exactly these moments.)

3. Find a moment to touch the earth. It can be as simple as standing in the shower and letting the water run over you, or taking your shoes off and putting your bare feet on the ground, or pressing your hands down into the dirt of your garden. Let something solid and alive hold you for a minute.

4. Let yourself step out of the grief for a little while. It is not a betrayal. Put on a funny movie and let your mind rest on some other story than your own for a while. That break can be some of the best medicine there is.

5. Move slowly, and let the coordinating go. You do not have to text everyone back or return every call. That is genuinely not your job right now. Ask a friend or a family member to be the one who handles the logistics and the messages. Your only job is to move slowly through a world that just changed in an instant.

6. Take breaks from holding the heaviness, and let yourself cry. Step away for ten or thirty minutes and be somewhere private, where you can fall apart with no one to hold together for. Cry if you need to. Be angry if you need to. Let it move. And when the wave passes, come back to your breath. I made a quick guided somatic practice to walk you through it, to cry, to breathe, and to find your way back into your body. It is right here whenever you need it.

7. If you cannot even name what you need, that is normal. You may not know what you want to eat in the next hour, let alone anything larger. The people who love you genuinely want to help, so let them, and be gentle and slow with yourself for not having the answers.

8. Let your body be held. Schedule a massage or some bodywork if you can. Safe, kind touch matters more than you realize when your nervous system has been this shaken. Being held can be deeply nourishing.

9. Take a bath. Pour in big scoops of magnesium salts and let your nerves settle enough to take a few real breaths. Let it be your time, where you are not holding anyone else, only soaking and letting the day move through you.

10. Do whatever it takes to sleep. This one is not optional. Sleep is often the hardest thing in these weeks, and it is also the thing that makes all the rest possible. Play soft music all night, or drift off to the sleep playlist I made for exactly these nights, just below. Drink a herbal tea made for deep rest. Find whatever gentle combination works for you. Without sleep there is no energy for the next day, for your family, or for the planning ahead. Protect your sleep like the lifeline it is.

If you want to know how I learned these things, my own story is here. It touches losing people I have loved, and it touches suicide. Come to it only when you feel ready, and be gentle with yourself as you go.

I heard the words start to come out of my loved one’s mouth, that something had happened to my best friend’s child, and my whole body knew before my mind would let it in.

My head began to spin. I found myself asking which one, which of the children it could be, already knowing in some deeper place that it was the one who had been having the hardest time. My mind kept circling, making just enough dissonance to keep the words at arm’s length, because they were words I did not want to have to hear. Not now. Not when it had not even been two years since I lost my own Liv, who was like a second daughter to me, the same way.

Then it landed. A fifty pound basketball thrown straight into my stomach. My breath went shallow and high, my thoughts went dizzy, and somewhere underneath all the spinning we were already making a plan to go and be with them.

After we visited, I was still in that shocky place, the one where your head is spinning off in some other land and your body is somewhere behind it, trying to catch up. So I did the thing I always do. I took my shoes off, put my bare feet on the earth, and pushed my hands down into my garden.

That garden has held a lot. It is the place where I watched my mother grieve the loss of her father. It is where I went when I lost my dear friend to suicide. Now the garden was holding me again, for my best friend’s child, lost the same way.

In the first weeks after you lose someone to a sudden death, it is as if the mind splits off from the body, sleep breaks apart, the headaches come, time slows all the way down, and the ordinary noise of the world cannot reach you. This is shock. It is your nervous system protecting you, not you losing your mind.

What shock feels like in the body

If your mind has started to race, if you feel like you are coming apart, if the sequences of what I can only call PTSD loop have begun to run through you, please know you are not alone. This is what sudden loss does to a body.

For me it came as that fifty pound weight in the stomach, the shallow breath, the dizziness, the strange floating haze where time slows down and nothing will hold still long enough to make sense. Yours may live somewhere else, in the chest, the throat, the low back. Wherever it lives, it is real, and it is your body doing exactly what bodies do when the world breaks open.

The 2 a.m. loop: is everyone else I love safe?

That first evening, and for many nights after, I cycled through the same loops, over and over.

One of them was fear. My mind would start to comb through every other person I love and every other way I could lose them. The car accident. The heart attack. A long grand mal seizure. Every piece of bad news I had ever received, every unexpected death, filtering through me in an endless loop. Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay?

Then I would stop. I would take one slow, deep breath, and I would tell my mind and my body the only true thing I had. “For this moment, everyone is okay.”

If this is happening to you, I want you to know it has a name and a reason. When you lose someone suddenly, your nervous system can start to read the whole world as dangerous, bracing for the next loss around every corner. It is not you going crazy. It is a frightened body trying to keep the ones you love safe. The breath, and those few words, are how you gently tell it the truth of your life, in this present moment.

The other loop: what could I have done?

The other loop is the one so many of us know. What could I have done? Did I do enough? What did this beloved human need, and was there a way we could have shown up more?

I want to say this to you as gently as I can, because I have to keep saying it to myself. That loop is love with nowhere to go. It is not the truth. You did not have the whole picture, none of us ever do. We will never fully understand the darkness someone else may be wrestling, and their wrestle may have been there for a long time.

There were other loops too. The one that pulled me back into the moment I lost my own beloved one, replaying it as if my mind were a broken record that could not stop. The one that started listing everything that needs to be done… who needs help right now? Are they going to be alright? Am I going to be alright? Is my family going to be alright? Then the existential thoughts come, even later at night, alone in your own mind. “What really happens in the moment a person takes their last breath? Was it gentle? Did they struggle? How long did they suffer?”

Then the next loop comes. What do we need to do? Does everyone know? How much will all of this cost? When all of these thought loops come rushing in, one after the other, please know that the best thing you can do is think of ways to get yourself to sleep. Right now, the only thing being asked of you is to sleep, because without sleep you will not be able to think clearly, or take care of yourself, or anyone else. Come back to the breath one more time and say, “For this moment, I will be okay.”

If you lost them to suicide

If the person you love died by suicide, I want to speak to you directly for a moment, because I know this grief from the inside.

There is a particular loop that comes with this kind of loss. The guilt. The endless why. The turning over of every conversation, looking for the thing you missed. Please hear me. The weight they carry was woven into them long before you loved them, deeper than you could see, and their leaving is not the measure of your love. What you are feeling, the shock, the guilt, the anger, even moments of relief that their suffering is over, all of it is normal, and none of it makes you a bad person.

You do not have to carry this alone, and there are people who understand this exact terrain. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, at afsp.org, offers real support for those of us left behind, and the Alliance of Hope holds a warm online community of people who have walked this same road. Reaching for them is not weakness. It is how we hold each other.

One breath, and a few words

When the loops come, and they will, here is the smallest practice I know, the one I used again and again through those nights.

Put one hand on your heart, or one hand on your belly where the weight sits. Take one slow breath in, and let the breath out even slower than it came in. Then say, out loud if you can, gently, the way you would speak to a frightened child:

For this moment, everyone is okay. For this moment, I am okay.

Say it as many times as you need to. You are not lying to yourself, and you are not promising the future. You are telling your body the one true thing about right now, this breath, this moment, that in it you are still here. The long, slow exhale is what tells your nervous system it is safe to soften. Then take one more breath, and let that be enough.

You are not broken. You are in shock, and you are surviving.

If your mind is spinning off into another land, if you cannot sleep or eat, if the fear is running wild and time has slowed to a crawl, please hear me. You are not losing your mind. You are a body in shock, doing exactly what it was built to do to carry you through the unthinkable. Move slowly. Drink the water. Touch the earth. Sleep however you can. And breathe, for this one moment, which is the only one you have to survive right now.

A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy healing practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This is lived experience and gentle practice, offered from one grieving heart to another, not medical or psychological care, and it does not replace a doctor, a therapist, or a crisis line. If you are carrying thoughts of not wanting to be here, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. You are not meant to hold this alone.

If, when the shock begins to ease, you long for a gentle and grounded place to bring your grief, that is the work I hold, and there is always a free discovery call if you would like to feel whether it is yours. But mostly, I just wanted you to have these tonight.

You are not broken. You are in the first weeks. And grief, in the end, is only love with nowhere left to go.