There is a thing people say in the first year of grief that sounds like comfort but is actually a postponement. They say: give it time. And the problem is not that it’s wrong. It’s that it implies a timeline — that time is moving the grief somewhere, that there is a destination — when what the neuroscience actually describes is something considerably less tidy than that.
Cambridge neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow has been researching what happens to the brain during and after significant loss. I came across her work through an episode of Sarah Ann Macklin’s podcast, and there was a section on grief that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since — specifically the part about when the hard part actually arrives.
What Critchlow describes is a pattern that some grief researchers have documented and that almost no one seems to communicate clearly to people who are actually going through it: for many people, the first year is not where it gets hard. The first year is where you survive. The second year is where you notice what surviving cost you.
What the first year actually is
The brain in acute grief is a brain in crisis mode. It is flooded with stress hormones, running on disrupted sleep, and processing an informational load that has no precedent in ordinary life. Research on the neuroscience of grief consistently shows that early bereavement activates the same neural pathways as physical pain — the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, the regions the brain uses to register and process bodily harm. Grief is not metaphorically painful. It is, at the neurological level, painful in essentially the same way.
The survival function kicks in because it has to. The brain does what it always does under sustained threat: it prioritizes the immediate over the long-term, narrows attention to what is most urgent, and suppresses everything that is not strictly necessary. You get through the year. You handle the firsts — the first birthday, the first Christmas, the first ordinary Tuesday that hits differently than any ordinary Tuesday should. You move through it because the brain is doing its job, which in this case is keeping you functional enough to continue.
This is not healing. It is closer to triage.
Why the second year is different
The second year arrives and something has shifted. The acute neurological crisis has eased. The stress hormones are less constant. Sleep has, often, improved somewhat. The brain is no longer in full emergency mode — which means it now has the capacity to feel what it couldn’t fully feel while it was only trying to survive.
And what it feels, frequently, is that things are not better yet. That the absence is still there, still the same size, still arriving on the same ordinary Tuesdays. That the year of getting through it did not produce the thing that the phrase “getting through it” implies — that there is something on the other side. There isn’t. There is just the grief, now encountered in something closer to normal consciousness rather than crisis mode.
Critchlow’s account of this maps onto something that grief counselors and clinicians have described from a practical direction: the second year can feel harder not because the grief is worse, but because the expectation has shifted. In the first year, people give you the grief. In the second year, there is an ambient assumption — mostly unspoken, sometimes not — that you should be further along.
The grief hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that you’re meeting it without the anaesthetic of shock, and everyone around you has already moved on.
What this means for families
I think about this particularly in the context of children who have lost a parent, or parents who have lost a child, or families navigating the particular complexity of a loss that has reorganized everything. Because in those situations, the second-year problem compounds.
Children process grief differently at different developmental stages — grief in children is not linear and often resurfaces at developmental milestones years after the loss. A child who seemed fine at seven may hit the loss again at twelve, when the capacity to understand what was actually taken from them has deepened. A family that has functioned, has managed, has gotten through the first year, may find the second year surfacing grief they thought was processed, in people who were supposed to be past it.
None of this means something has gone wrong. It means grief is working the way grief works — which is, in Critchlow’s framing, the way the brain works. The loss of a person is also the loss of a shared cognitive system: the distributed memory, the division of emotional and practical labour, the particular way that family’s world was organised around that person’s presence. The brain rebuilds that system slowly and without announcing that it is doing so. The work is invisible. The timeline is genuinely long. And the second year is when the length of that timeline becomes undeniable.
The thing nobody says out loud
What I keep returning to is how little this gets said in the spaces where people are actually living through it. The first year of grief is culturally legible — we have language for it, rituals for it, the social infrastructure of condolence and support. The second year is quieter. The support has receded. The acknowledgment has moved on. And the person still in it is left to interpret their own continued difficulty without much help, in a cultural environment that has mostly finished accounting for their loss.
What Critchlow’s neuroscience does is offer a frame that is not about weakness or failure to heal. The brain does not move on because it has been given enough time. It moves on because it has done the work of rebuilding what was lost — and that work takes as long as it takes, regardless of what year it is.
Knowing that doesn’t shorten the process. But it might change what you do with the second year when it arrives and is harder than you expected. You might be slightly less inclined to treat the difficulty as evidence that you are doing grief wrong. And in my experience, that particular piece of information — that you are not doing it wrong — is the one that matters more than almost anything else when you are inside something this slow and this large.`
This article discusses grief and bereavement. If you are struggling with loss and would like to speak with someone, the GriefShare directory can help you find local support groups and counsellors. If you are in crisis, please contact a mental health professional or your local emergency services.
