Rachel Nelson

About

People generally contact me either immediately or about a year later, and the second group almost always apologizes for the delay. There is nothing to apologize for. The first year is often spent simply getting through the practical requirements, and the rest of it waits until there is space. Both timings are normal. Grief does not obey the calendar that the people around you are quietly using, and arriving late is a lot more common than arriving right away. We start from wherever you actually are rather than from where you feel you ought to have been by now. Nobody here is keeping score of how long you took to come. Research came first for me, and then the room, because the questions I cared about could not be answered from behind a desk. This is one of them. If you have been putting it off for a year, that is an ordinary length of time to have waited.