The closet you can't open yet.

There is a door in your house that you don't open. Behind it, everything is exactly as it was left — the shirts in their order, the shoes toe-out the way he lined them, maybe a robe on a hook that you cannot look at and cannot move. It has been four months, or eleven, or six years. And someone — a sister, a well-meaning friend, an article like this one — has suggested it's time.

I want to tell you what I tell everyone who finds their way to me with a closed door in their house: there is no timeline for this. Not a real one. The idea that grief has a schedule, and closets have a season, was invented by people who were uncomfortable watching other people grieve. The door is not a test you are failing. The closet doesn't need to be emptied because time has passed. Time passing is not a reason.

So before anything else: if you came here to find out whether it's too soon or too late, the answer is no. You are not behind. Nothing has to happen today, and nothing has to be decided today.

But maybe you didn't come for permission to wait. Maybe the door has started to change weight — from something you're protecting to something that's pressing on the house. You'd know the difference; it doesn't need explaining. If that's where you are, here is a way to begin that doesn't require courage, only twenty minutes.

Don't open the closet to empty it. Open it to visit. The first time, you move nothing. You stand there, you let it be what it is, and you close the door again. That is a full session. I mean it.

The second visit, you take out one thing — the thing you'd save from a fire. Not to decide anything about it. To hold it, and to tell its story out loud: where he got it, when he wore it, the day it stopped being funny that he still owned it. The story is the keepsake. The object was only ever carrying it.

After that, the work becomes almost ordinary, one armful at a time, because you'll have learned the secret that makes it survivable: you are not deciding about him. You are deciding about shirts. He is not in the closet. What's in the closet is cotton and wool, and some of it holds a story worth keeping, and some of it is just cotton and wool that no longer has a person. The stories, we keep — every one, told and written down if you want. The cotton and wool can go on to warm someone, which is all it ever wanted to do.

Practical things, briefly, because they help more than they should. Give yourself somewhere for things to go before you begin — one bag for family, one for giving, one for the pile of I-don't-know-yet. The I-don't-know pile is not cheating; it is the most honest container in the house, and it gets smaller on its own. If someone he loved would want a particular sweater, let them come and choose it themselves — don't decide for them, and don't mail it. Watching it be received is a kind of medicine that doesn't get talked about.

And keep something impractical. Not everything useful, one thing useless — the terrible hat, the concert shirt. Usefulness was never the point of keeping.

If you want company in any of this — someone who will not hurry you, and who will want to hear the stories — that is what I'm for. And if all you do this year is read this with the door still closed, that was a beginning too. The door isn't going anywhere. Neither am I.