“It feels like everybody else has stopped talking about them, but I haven’t stopped missing them.”
After someone dies, there can be a period where people ask how you are quite regularly. Friends might check in, people remember important dates and there is some space for you to talk about what has happened.
As time passes, other people’s lives naturally carry on, but your relationship with the person who died doesn’t just disappear. You might still think about them every day, remember something they would have found funny, or want to tell somebody a story about them without it suddenly becoming a very serious conversation about grief.
Sometimes people start holding those things back because they worry about making other people uncomfortable. Maybe somebody changes the subject quickly, or you get the feeling that you’ve talked about your loss enough now, and after a while it can become easier not to mention them at all.
There isn’t a point where you have to stop talking about someone because a certain amount of time has passed. You might want to talk about how much you miss them, but you might also want to talk about who they were, what annoyed you about them, or something completely ordinary you used to do together.
Counselling can be one place where you don’t need to work out whether it’s the right moment to bring them up.
You’re allowed to keep talking about someone who was important to you.