Grief that comes back after months of relative quiet is common enough that the bereavement organizations write about it plainly, and what they say about the second year is not what most people are led to expect.
Psalm 13 is six verses long, and the first two of them ask the same question four times over.
Psalm 13:1-2. It takes until verse five to turn.
How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
The short version
You are not going backwards
Cruse publishes that many people find the second year as hard as the first, or harder, and names why: everybody else has gone back to normal.
Nobody says grief takes a year
Marie Curie says plainly that nobody can answer it for you, and Cruse says some things can still set grief off years later. The year is a rule of thumb, not a finding.
The support left before the grief did
Cruse records support fading after the funeral, and a bereaved person saying that a month later people stopped asking.
There is a line, and it is drawn at six or twelve months
The two diagnostic manuals disagree about where. What they both describe is grief that impairs ordinary functioning, not grief that returns.
What the organizations say about the second year
The second year being harder is not folk wisdom.
Cruse Bereavement Support publishes it directly: “It’s common to find the second year after someone dies to be just as difficult or even harder than the first.” It gives a reason that has nothing to do with you. Everybody else has gone back to normal, so there is less space to talk about it. A second Cruse page says the same thing and adds that the fact somebody is never coming back can hit all over again.
That is an organization describing common experience rather than a study showing year two is worse for most people. It is a description of what is common, not a measurement of what is inevitable.
The other half of it is measurable in a different way. Cruse writes: “Many grieving people find that support from others starts to fade away after the funeral,” and prints what that is like from the inside: “I remember a month later people stopped asking how I was and I have never felt so alone.” Marie Curie draws the same line between the first days and weeks, when people are around, and the months or years after, when they are not.
So, the grief did not get worse on schedule. The company left.
Grief does not run to a year
The other common idea is that grief takes about a year. None of the bereavement organizations put a number on it.
Marie Curie: “no one can answer this for you because it is different for everyone and different each time we experience a bereavement,” and it describes feelings that come and go over months or years. Cruse says that after several years some things can still set grief off, and that it does not ever completely go away.
What surrounds Psalm 13
It is one of the shortest psalms and it is built as a complaint. “How long” four times in two verses, and no answer given to any of them. Then the middle asks God to look, and only at verse five does it turn: “But I trust in your loving kindness.”
Nothing is resolved between the question and the turn. The psalm does not say how much time passed between verse two and verse five, and the reason it is worth having months in is that it does not treat the asking as a failure of faith. Somebody put four unanswered questions in a book of prayers and left them there.
Psalm 42:9-11 does the same thing and adds the part people find hardest to admit: “Why have you forgotten me?” Then, to itself, twice: “Why are you in despair, my soul?” It is somebody arguing with their own head.
Lamentations 3:19-24 is where the most-quoted line lives, and the sentences before it are usually missing. “Remember my affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the bitterness. My soul still remembers them, and is bowed down within me.” The famous part comes next, that the loving kindnesses are new every morning. The bitterness is not withdrawn to make room for it.
Where the line is drawn, and who draws it
There is a point at which bereavement organizations say grief needs more than time, and both diagnostic manuals now name a condition for it. This is worth stating exactly, because the two disagree and the difference is six months.
The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 lists prolonged grief disorder as 6B42: a persistent and pervasive grief response, longing or preoccupation with intense emotional pain, that has lasted “more than 6 months at a minimum” and “clearly exceeds expected social, cultural or religious norms” for that person. It says in the same entry that grief lasting longer than that, where it is normal within somebody’s culture and religion, is normal bereavement and is not given a diagnosis.
The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR describes it as intense yearning or longing for the person, with preoccupation, and its 2024 update says more than twelve months.
Both descriptions turn on impairment: functioning that stays disrupted, not feeling that returns. A wave that knocks you over in month eight and passes is not what either of them is describing. If sleeping, eating or getting through a day have stayed broken, that is the thing worth taking to somebody, and it is a conversation with a doctor rather than a page.
How people describe it happening
From a thread called grief is hitting me months later, on Reddit's r/GriefSupport: “the visceral sadness and terror of the gap he’s left in my life is finally hitting me today, and it feels like Day Zero all over again.” From the same thread: “I was so convinced that the worst was over.” And: “a wave hit me super hard and swept me off my feet. I felt caught in a riptide.”
From another Reddit forum, r/grief, six months in: “this week just feels like a step backwards.”
What recurs in those threads is surprise. People expect the sadness. They do not expect to be ambushed by it in month eight.
Where to go next
Psalm 13:1-2 in its full context has both translations and the reflection.
The waiting page is the nearest hub for this, and the grief page covers the earlier ground.
Months on, what you are carrying is probably not what it was in week one. Bible Nudge takes a sentence about where you are now. Find a passage.
If any of this has turned into not wanting to be here, that is worth telling somebody tonight. In the United States the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is 988, by call or text. Outside the US, Find A Helpline lists services by country.
Words that come up here
Tap a term to see what it means.
Prolonged grief disorder. The condition named in ICD-11 as 6B42 and in DSM-5-TR. Both turn on impaired functioning rather than on grief lasting a long time, and they set the minimum at six months and twelve months respectively.