When a friend loses someone, keep checking in after the first couple of weeks. That’s when most people stop.

Support arrives in a crowd and leaves on a schedule. For a fortnight there are messages, food and company, and then everybody goes back to their own life at roughly the same time, which leaves your friend alone exactly when the quiet gets hardest. Nothing about losing somebody ends in two weeks. The attention just does.

If you can, put a reminder in your phone for a month out and another for three, and send something small on those days: a message that asks nothing, a photo, an offer to sit around with them. You do not need the right words. Still being there is the message.