~by Haley Lynn Gray~
When the going gets very tough, sometimes the only thing available is to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.
My father died on a Saturday, while I was out of the country. I could have curled up and pulled my head back into my shell. Instead there was a job to do — a very large one — and doing it was, in its way, the thing that got me through the week.
What nobody tells you about the week after
Grief arrives with administration. An astonishing amount of it.
There is a funeral to arrange, people to notify, a house or a room to clear, accounts to close, paperwork that must be found, and a hundred small decisions that all want answering immediately while you are least equipped to answer them.
It feels obscene that this is how it works. It is, nonetheless, how it works.
What actually helped
I made a spreadsheet. Everything that needed doing, in one place, visible.
It sounds cold. It wasn’t — it was the opposite. Holding that list in my head would have meant carrying it alone, waking at three to remember whether anyone had called the bank. On paper, it was a set of tasks rather than a weight.
Then I split it. Between my father’s caregivers, my husband and others who offered. Because a list is also the answer to “let me know if you need anything” — instead of an impossible question, people got a line item they could own.
And I kept moving. Not because stopping is wrong, but because for me, at that moment, forward motion was more bearable than stillness.
A caution about that last part
Being the person who functions is genuinely useful in a crisis. It’s also a way of postponing something that doesn’t get cancelled by being postponed.
The grief arrives regardless — often weeks later, when the administration is finished and there’s nothing left to organise. I’ve written about that year, and what it cost.
So do both. Make the list and get through the week, then give yourself considerably more time afterwards than seems reasonable.
If you’re doing this now
Write it all down. Everything, however small. Out of your head and onto a list.
Give tasks away by name. “Could you handle the caterers?” is easy to say yes to. “Let me know if you need anything” is easy to leave unanswered.
Do the time-critical things first — the notifications with deadlines — and let everything else wait. Most of it can.
Tell your clients something. Not the details. Enough that nobody is guessing, and enough that you’re not performing normality in a meeting on Tuesday.
Eat, sleep, and go outside once a day. When everything else is chaos, those three are what keep you upright.
And then put one foot in front of the other. That’s not a platitude — some weeks, it’s the entire plan, and it’s enough.
