AFTER THE CASSEROLES STOP

The casseroles stop. The cards stop. Everyone goes back to their lives - and that is when it actually gets hard.

Almost every book about grief is written about the first two weeks. This one starts on the ordinary Tuesday afterwards: month three, month seven, the second Christmas. The stretch nobody photographs, nobody sends flowers for, and nobody warns you about.

AFTER THE CASSEROLES STOP is a plain-spoken companion for the long middle of grief - written for the person who is upright, dressed, answering emails, and quietly convinced they are doing this wrong.

Inside, 23 short chapters on the parts no one prepares you for:

- The second wave - why month four is often worse than week two, and why that is not a relapse

- Being ambushed in a supermarket by a jar of mustard, and what to do in the first ninety seconds

- Being furious with someone who died, and where to put it when they cannot answer back

- Relief after a long illness - the most common feeling in grief and the least confessed

- The friends who vanish, why most of them are frightened rather than cold, and how to get them back

- The paperwork: a script for the fortieth phone call, and how to stop admin bleeding into every hour

- The evening - six until eleven, the hardest five hours of the day, and six specific ways through them

- Going back to work with a brain that will not hold anything

- What to say when someone tells you everything happens for a reason

- The first time you laugh properly, and why it feels like a betrayal when it is not

No stages. No timeline. No closure. No promises about healing.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT: it is not therapy, and the author is not a clinician and does not pretend to be. It cites no studies and quotes no statistics - deliberately, and it says so on page one. What it offers instead is specificity: the actual, unlovely, useful detail of the months after the support ends, written in the register of a friend at a kitchen table rather than a professional behind a desk. There is a page at the back on when a book stops being the right kind of help and who to call instead.

There are no blank journalling pages padding this out. Every page has text on it.