Ella Cook

About

Here is the point I would most want understood: the second year is often harder than the first, and almost nobody warns you about it. The support thins out, the casseroles stop, and the absence becomes permanent rather than shocking. I work with people at every stage of that, including those who arrive years later wondering why it has resurfaced. A widow I might see could be six weeks out or six years out, and both are entirely legitimate reasons to be here. We look at what has changed, what has not, and what you are quietly carrying that nobody around you still thinks to ask about. Community mental health was my training ground, where I met people whose losses were tangled up with money, housing, and family obligations all at once. Very little about this is simple, and I have never found the simple version useful. If the second year has caught you off guard, that is exactly the kind of thing I work on.