A sympathy gift for someone who has lost their husband

Where the memories come from when you can’t ask her

Nobody should hand a woman in her second month a list of questions about her husband. That is the obvious worry with this gift, and it has a straightforward answer.

You know more than you think. You sat at their table. You’ve heard how they met perhaps forty times, and you can probably do her version of it in her voice. You know what he was like when the two of them were arguing about the route, or the thermostat, or whose turn it was to call the plumber.

Her adult children are the other source, and they are usually glad to be asked. It gives them something to do with their hands. The eulogy is worth having as well, since somebody already sat down and wrote the man out in detail, and it’s full of usable material.

If you do want to ask her something, ask one question rather than twenty. What did he always call you. What was he like at six in the morning. Most widows will talk for an hour off a question like that and be glad somebody asked, because the alternative is a world where everybody has stopped saying his name.

The proof is your safety net. Nothing prints until you approve it, so if you’re unsure whether a line is right, send the proof to one of her children and let them read it first. People do that with us regularly, and it is never a problem.

Which photograph

The wedding portrait is the obvious choice and often the wrong one. She has been looking at that photograph for fifty years, and it shows a man she can barely connect to the one she just lost.

Use the one she keeps out. On the fridge, on the hall table, him laughing at something off camera in a kitchen that has since been remodeled twice. Pick the face she talks to.

When to send it

Not in the first fortnight. The house is full then. Children staying in their old rooms, neighbours at the door, more food than one person could eat in a season. Anything that arrives gets set down on a table with the cards.

The hard part starts when they all go home. Week three, week four, when the evenings arrive with nothing in them and the phone has gone back to normal. Six to eight weeks after the funeral is where this gift does the most good.

Her wedding anniversary is now the worst date on the calendar. For many widows it is harder than the anniversary of his death, because it belonged to the two of them and nothing has replaced it. If you’re aiming for it, have the piece arrive a few days beforehand rather than on the day, so she isn’t signing for a delivery and opening it while somebody watches her face.

Which is the other thing worth saying. Give her a private way to open it. Leave it at the house, or send it, rather than handing it across a table at lunch.

Allow roughly two weeks from the moment you approve the proof.

What to write on the note card

Take out “let me know if you need anything”. She won’t. Nobody does. Put a specific offer with a day attached instead. I’ll come Thursday around six with dinner. You don’t have to be dressed and we don’t have to talk.

Use his name. Ask a widow what she misses after him and a surprising number say it is hearing other people say his name out loud.

Then one thing you remember, ideally something she wasn’t there for. Ted talked me through a transmission over the phone at eleven at night and pretended he wasn’t in bed. She has his stories from inside the marriage. She doesn’t have yours.

If you’re a couple, sign both first names rather than a surname. Four lines is enough for the whole card.

Leave out the new chapter, and being strong, and what he would have wanted for her. She knows what he would have wanted. She is not able to do it this month, and being told about it is its own small weight.

When it is too personal

This one has a clearer line than most sympathy gifts, so we’ll say it plainly. A framed portrait of a woman’s late husband, given by somebody who only knows her from work, is a gift at the wrong distance. It asks her to hang something chosen by a person who never sat at their table, and it puts her in the position of having to be grateful about the most private thing in her life.

The people who give this well are her close friends, her sister, her children, the couple they went on holiday with for twenty years, the neighbour who has known him since the fence went in.

From an office, send a card with his name in it, or dinner, or cover something so she can take another week. If the workplace knew him properly and still wants to give one, keep it to the smallest size and let the colleague who is genuinely her friend be the one to bring it over.

Her children giving it to her is a different case entirely, and one of the few times the gift can arrive early. It comes from inside the loss rather than from outside it.