Ways families keep a loved one's memory alive

This page is for families grieving someone who died of cancer. It covers ways people keep a loved one's memory alive, including with children, and why doing so is a healthy part of grief.

Somewhere along the way, many grieving people pick up the idea that keeping a person present in daily life means failing to accept the loss. They come to believe that putting the photographs away is progress, and taking them out again is regression.

Nothing in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) account of grief supports that. NCI describes mourning as the way we show grief in public, shaped by beliefs, religious practice, and culture — an outward act, not a private stage to get through. And it describes the value of rituals directly in the context of children, noting that including them in memorial planning helps them cope.

Remembering is part of the process, not a detour from it.

The forms are endless and none of them are prescribed. Some patterns recur.

Things that happen once. A tree planted. A bench. A donation. A piece of jewelry made from something of theirs. A tattoo. A named prize or fund.

Things that repeat. A meal on their birthday. A walk on a particular route. A toast at every Christmas. An annual event with the same handful of people.

Things that are private. Keeping a voicemail on the phone. Wearing their sweater. A photograph that stays in a wallet rather than on a wall. Talking to them in the car.

Things that record. A box of objects. A written account of stories the family tells. Recording older relatives describing them before those memories go too. Scanning photographs so more than one person has them.

Keeping someone's name in ordinary conversation is one of the simplest forms of all, and one of the most missed.

Children who were very young when someone died end up with almost no first-hand memory. What they have is what the family gives them.

NCI's advice about including children in memorial planning, with a full explanation of what to expect, applies well beyond the funeral itself. A child can help choose what goes in a memory box, pick which photograph is framed, or write something for an anniversary.

This also creates a natural channel for the questions NCI says sit under children's grief: whether they caused the death, whether it will happen to them, and who will look after them. Those conversations happen more easily while doing something with your hands than when sitting down formally.

Clothes and possessions are where remembering gets hardest.

NCI names giving away items that belonged to the person as one of the reminders that can bring on a grief burst — a short, very intense period of 20 to 30 minutes. That is worth knowing before you open a closet, because it explains why an ordinary practical task can flatten you without warning.

There is no schedule. Practical pressure sometimes forces the issue, and where it does not, waiting is entirely allowed. A middle route many families take is to keep a small number of things deliberately, so that everything else can go without feeling like an erasure.

Do it with someone else in the house, and stop when you need to.

Within one family you will find someone who wants a public memorial, someone who cannot bear to look at photographs yet, and someone who wants to talk about the person constantly.

None of these is the correct approach. Grief is an individual response, and several ways of remembering can run in parallel. Problems come from insisting everyone participates in one version — not from the differences themselves.

Deliberate remembering usually softens into something less effortful. The date passes with a quiet acknowledgment instead of an event. A story gets told at a wedding and everyone laughs.

NCI says that for most bereaved people, symptoms lessen between 6 months and 2 years after the loss. Easing in that sense is not forgetting. It is the person taking up a different, more bearable position in your life — which is exactly what the rituals are for.