The first year of widowhood and what it actually asks of you

Order ten certified copies of the death certificate. Not one, not three. Every bank, pension provider, insurer and share registrar wants to see an original, and several of them will keep it. Ordering more later means going back to the register office and paying again, at a point when you have even less patience than you do now.

Do that on the same trip as registering the death, because the registrar is also the person who can set up Tell Us Once for you. It's a government service that notifies HMRC, the DWP, the local council, the passport office and the DVLA in one go. You get a reference number and a short phone call or online form. It won't touch a single bank, private pension or utility, but it removes about a dozen letters you'd otherwise have to write while barely able to read.

That's the useful part. The rest of this is what the leaflets don't say.

The admin is a job, and it takes longer than anyone tells you

Estates take months. Nine to twelve is ordinary for anything with a house in it, and longer if there's a business, a foreign property, or a will that somebody wants to argue about. If the estate is small and everything was jointly held, you may not need probate at all. If it isn't, you will, and the wait for a grant sits outside your control entirely.

Get a solicitor or a probate specialist if there's property, a business, a second marriage, stepchildren, or anything that makes you hesitate when you try to explain the situation out loud. Ask for a fixed fee rather than an hourly rate, and ask what's excluded from it. If it's genuinely simple and you're the sole beneficiary, you can do it yourself, and plenty of people have.

Buy a lever arch file and a pack of dividers. One section per institution. Write the date, the name of the person you spoke to, and the reference number on the front of each section, because you will be told three different things by three different people and the only thing that ends that loop is a date and a name.

The other thing worth knowing: you'll be asked to prove you exist far more than you expect. Joint accounts usually pass to you straightforwardly. Anything in his sole name freezes. If the mortgage, the car finance and the household direct debits all sat on his account, you can find yourself asset-rich and unable to buy gas in the same week. Sort out a bank account in your own name with a few months of expenses in it as an early priority, if you don't have one already.

The decisions that can wait

Don't sell the house in the first year unless the money forces you to. Don't move cities. Don't give away his clothes because somebody told you it would help. Don't make large gifts to adult children, however much they need it, until the estate is settled and you know what you actually have.

Grief makes you decisive in a way that looks like clarity and isn't. You'll want to do something enormous because it feels like motion. Motion isn't the same as progress, and the house you sell in month four is the one you can't buy back in month fourteen.

But hold that loosely, because it isn't always true. If the mortgage was on his income and you can't cover it, you move, and you move early while you still have a choice about where. If the house has three flights of stairs and you're seventy-eight, you move. The rule is that you delay decisions grief is making for you. Decisions arithmetic is making for you don't wait.

Speak to a financial adviser who charges a fee rather than a commission before you do anything with a lump sum from a life policy or a death-in-service payout. Sitting in cash for six months costs you a little. Getting it wrong costs you a lot, and the people who cold-call the recently bereaved aren't there to help you.

What actually blindsides you

Not the funeral. You'll get through the funeral on adrenaline and other people's casseroles. It's week seven, when everyone has gone back to their own lives and the house has stopped being full.

It's the supermarket. You'll stand at the till having bought food for two, and it will hit you in the chest in front of a stranger scanning your shopping. Also his handwriting on a note stuck to the boiler. Also the car insurance renewal arriving addressed to him, eleven months on, because one company in the chain never got the message.

Grief doesn't go in stages. It goes in ambushes, and the gaps between them get longer. The first Christmas is hard in a way you can prepare for. A Tuesday in March is hard in a way you can't.

People will say things that land badly. "He's in a better place." "At least you had forty years." They mean well and they're frightened of your pain. You don't owe anyone a gracious response every single time, but you'll spend less energy if you decide in advance on one short line you can give and then change the subject.

Ask for specific help, because vague offers die

"Let me know if you need anything" is real kindness with no handle on it. People genuinely want to help and have no idea what to do. So tell them. Ask one friend to come and sit with you while you phone the pension provider. Ask another to take the car for its MOT. Ask your neighbor to knock on Sunday evenings, which are the worst hour of the week for most widows.

The friendships will re-sort themselves. A couple of people you counted on will vanish, and it will hurt, and it's usually cowardice rather than malice. Someone on the edge of your life will turn up every week for a year. Let that surprise you and then let it count.

Faith, honestly

If you pray, you may find you can't. That's normal and it isn't apostasy. The Psalms are full of people shouting at God, and the book kept them in on purpose. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution, and it's still in there.

Go to church even when you get nothing out of it. Sit at the back, leave early if the worship music undoes you, and let other people carry the belief for a while. That's part of what a congregation is for. If your church is the sort that hands widows a casserole for a fortnight and then forgets, find one that keeps showing up in month eight.

Starting again

You'll reach a point where you catch yourself laughing properly, and then feel guilty about it. Don't. Being unhappy forever isn't loyalty, and he didn't want it for you.

Take a class. Take a job, if you can and want to. Take a holiday on your own, somewhere with a walk in it. New competence is the fastest route back to feeling like a person, which is why so many widows learn to drive again, or use a drill, or finally deal with the thing in the loft.

If you want to date eventually, date. Some people will have opinions about the timing. Their opinions aren't a vote. And if you never want to again, that's a full answer too, not a stage you're stuck in.

Keep one of his shirts. Not all forty. One.