What to Write in a Thinking of You Card When There's Nothing to Celebrate and Nothing to Fix

The two questions every line has to answer

Every other card you write comes with instructions built in. A birthday card wishes, a wedding card congratulates, a sympathy card condoles, and if you do those things plainly the card has done its job. A thinking of you card has no verb to hide behind, so before you write a line of it, two questions need honest answers. What do I actually know about what they are carrying? And what is this card asking them to do? Most weak cards fail the second question without noticing: they ask the reader to reply, to be cheered up, to confirm the card arrived and was found comforting. A person in a bad month experiences that as one more task. The Greeting Card Association has run a Thinking of You Week every September since 2014, which tells you the appetite for these cards is real. The cards people keep are rarely the ones a calendar told them to send.

Here is the difference the two questions make, on the same news. A colleague's job has gone in a restructure, and the first draft hovers:

Just wanted to say we are all thinking of you at this difficult time. You are such a strong person, you will bounce back in no time. Let us know if there is anything at all we can do.

Nothing in it is unkind. Nothing in it is about him either, and the offer at the end hands him the job of inventing a way for you to help. The same card with both questions answered:

I heard on Monday that the restructure took your job with it, and I have been angry about it on your behalf all week. Eight years is not nothing, whatever the letter called it. No fixing in this card. Soup on Sunday if you want it, silence if you would rather.

When you know what is wrong, say its name

If you know the word, use the word. Divorce. Diagnosis. Redundancy. The name does two jobs at once: it tells them you actually know, rather than having heard a rumour and embroidered it, and it tells them you are not frightened of the subject, so they do not have to protect you from it. Hovering language, the thoughts-and-prayers fog of 'this difficult time', usually means one of those two things failed.

I learned this by getting it wrong in both directions with the same person. My friend Odile lives in Galashiels, in the Borders, and her marriage ended in the spring of 2023. My first card, in April, said I was thinking of her at this difficult time and managed never to use the word divorce anywhere, because I was scared of saying it wrong. She answered with a thumbs-up emoji, which in Odile's economy is a receipt, not a conversation. In June I wrote again and said the word in the first line, and put in the memory that had actually been running through my head: the two of us eating petrol-station sandwiches off the bonnet of her dead car outside Peebles, waiting for her brother to arrive with jump leads. She wrote back a four-line letter, the first letter she had written to anyone that year, and most of it was about the sandwiches.

• I was sorry to hear the redundancy was confirmed. Six years is not a small thing to be handed back in a cardboard box, and I wanted you to hear from someone who thought you were good at that job.
• You do not have to perform brave for this card. The diagnosis is frightening and it is allowed to be frightening. I am in the corner of the waiting room for as many Thursdays as it takes.
• I know Thursday is the court date. I will be thinking of you at ten, specifically, and there is a sandwich and a long walk in this card whenever you want them.
• The house sale fell through, and I know that was the third time. No silver lining in here. Just: I saw, I remember what this one cost you, and tea is on me until further notice.
• He would have been seventy this week. I did not want the day to go past with nobody saying his name to you, so: Edward. I think of the porch wave every time I drive down your street.
• The baby would have been due this month. I have not forgotten, and I did not want you to carry the date on your own.
• It is a year since the accident on Friday. I still think about that phone call. This card does not have to become a conversation. I just was not going to let the date pass quietly.

When you know something is wrong but not what

Sometimes all you have is a tone change, a cancelled plan, a sister who said 'she's having a time of it' and changed the subject. Write to that. A card that admits the limits of what it knows is honest in a way a guessing card never is, and it does not fish. Fishing is the failure to avoid here: 'Hope everything's okay??' is an interrogation wearing a card's clothes, and the person having the worst month of their year can tell.

• I do not know the details and this card is not asking for them. I know the last few weeks have been heavy, and I wanted one thing on your doormat that is not a bill or a form.
• Whatever is going on, you do not have to catch me up for me to be in it with you. Consider me informed enough.
• You have gone quiet, and quiet from you usually means carrying something. No questions in here. Just a marker: I noticed, and I am not going anywhere.
• I heard there has been news, and nobody passed it on properly, which usually means it isn't good. I am sorry. This card knows no more than that, and needs to know no more.
• If it's nothing, bin this with the pizza leaflets and I will never know. If it's something, the kettle is on at mine and the good biscuits are in the tin.
• You don't owe anyone the story, including me. But if the story ever needs telling at 11 p.m., I am awake and I take no notes.
• You crossed my mind at the shops, again at the bus stop, and I decided a card was a better use of the thought than a third one.

Write a card that asks for nothing back

The reply is a debt, and people in trouble keep books on it even when nobody asks them to. Every card they cannot answer sits on the counter accruing guilt, and the pile is one reason well-meant cards sometimes go unacknowledged for months. So cancel the debt in writing, once, plainly. Then go further and build a card that asks for nothing structurally: no question mark anywhere in it, nothing to respond to, no news requested. A card with no questions in it cannot be left unanswered.

• No reply is owed on this. It isn't that kind of card. I just wanted you to know that on an ordinary Tuesday, somebody is in your corner.
• Please don't thank me for this, and please don't write back out of politeness. Spend the afternoon on a nap. That is the whole transaction.
• There is not one question mark in this whole card, and that is by design. Nothing here needs answering. The kettle, the walk and the spare room all stand, and none of them needs arranging today.
• If this lands on a day when even reading is too much, put it behind the clock and forget it. It will still be true in a fortnight.
• I am not checking whether this arrived, and I won't follow it up with a text asking if you got it. It's yours now, and so is the silence after it.
• You are loved at a distance that asks for nothing. That is the entire contents of this envelope, apart from the stamp.
• File this under things you never have to deal with. I'm thinking of you, I'll keep thinking of you, and the ball is in nobody's court.

When it has been months since you last spoke

Often the gap since you last spoke is longer than the news is fresh, and the card stalls on the gap instead of the news. The fix is to carry the silence in one clause and then start the actual card: 'it's been since the wedding', six words, done. What sinks these cards is the apology essay, three sentences about your own busyness that make the bereaved or the divorcing do the forgiving before they reach the point.

• It's been since your mum's funeral that we spoke properly, which is my loss and not a debt you owe. I heard about the operation, and I wasn't going to let 'we never talk now' be the reason this card didn't get written.
• Two Christmases of meaning to write. Here is the card, late and meant. How the allotment went this year is genuinely all I want to know, and even that can wait.
• I don't know if this is still your address. If it is: I think about the flat in third year more often than I think about most of my degree, and I hope the hard spring is behind you by now.
• We used to manage whole conversations in the margins of each other's notebooks. This is a margin note, twenty years on: I heard, I'm sorry, I'm here.
• No excuse in this paragraph, because you'd see through all of them anyway. I should have written in March. It's October and I'm writing now, because the alternative was another March.
• Old friends are allowed to reappear without paperwork. Reappearing: I was so sorry to hear about your dad, and the offer of the spare room is as good as it was in 2011.

One memory is worth five warm adjectives

The fastest way to rescue a line from the fog is to give the card an engine: one thing you actually remember. A song in a supermarket, a soup, a lay-by, a photograph taken on a ferry. The memory does not have to be profound and should not be about their tragedy; it is evidence that your thinking of them has content, that they exist in your head as a person and not as a situation. If you cannot find a memory, write down the thing that made you think of them today. That is a memory in the present tense.

• They were playing our song in the supermarket, the terrible one from the holiday playlist, and I stood in the cereal aisle grinning like an idiot. You are thought of in worse places than this card.
• I made your lentil soup on Sunday and put too much lemon in, same as always, and it occurred to me I have never once told you that recipe holds up my whole winter. Thinking of you, via soup.
• Drove past the lay-by where we ate chips out of the paper the night the fan belt went. I still can't pass it without checking the verge for us. Hope the new house treats you better than that car did.
• You taught me to gut a fish on that harbour wall, and I have thought of you at every fish counter since, which is a strange legacy and entirely your fault.
• Every time the committee meeting runs past nine I think of you leaning over and whispering the minutes in limericks. Nobody has made that room bearable since you left. We miss you in the specific, not the general.
• Found the photograph from the ferry, the one where the wind has taken both our faces apart. You are mid-laugh. It lives on my fridge now, which is where you live in this house.
• The hydrangea you planted by my gate flowered this year for the first time, enormous and blue and slightly showing off. You'd have had something to say about it. I miss having you say it.

The second card, the one nobody sends

Everyone sends the first card. It arrives in the crowd, with the flowers and the casseroles and the colleagues being kind in corridors, and it does its work. Then the corridor empties. Somewhere around week five or six, the person is back at work or back at the school gate and the world has quietly filed them under 'dealing with it', which is exactly when a second card lands like a rope. It should be shorter than the first, it should mention the first without auditing it, and it should ask for no news, because there may be no news they can stand to give.

• Card two. Nothing has changed at this end: still thinking of you, still not requiring anything. The first card wasn't a loan.
• It's been six weeks since I wrote and I have no news-shaped reason for this one. I just know the cards slow down about now, and I didn't want mine to be one of the ones that stopped.
• You don't have to update me. Whatever stage it's at, this card is written for that stage. I'll write again when the leaves turn, whether or not I hear anything.
• Shorter than the last one because there's less to say and more of it to mean: still here.
• The flowers from March are long gone and the hospital car park is full of people visiting somebody else by now. This is the still-thinking-of-you that arrives in June, on purpose.

Signing a group card when nobody knows the details

Group cards have a division of labour, and it helps to say it out loud before the card goes round. The organiser's line carries the facts, or the decent minimum of them, and every other signature carries presence: a name, one true small thing, no commentary. What a signer must not do is speculate in ink ('hope it's nothing serious!!') on a card the person will keep, or write the warmest paragraph on the page about their own feelings. If you are organising, tell the signers the two things they need: how the name is spelled, and that this is not good news. Then let twenty short lines do what one long one can't.

• From all of us on the third floor: we're thinking of you, and the kettle rota has your name on it in pencil until you're back to argue about it.
• Signed by eleven people who know almost nothing except that you're missed in the kitchen at eleven. Get through it at your own speed.
• We took a vote and it was unanimous: take the time, all of it. We'll be here, mildly chaotic, keeping your mug washed.
• From everyone in the Thursday group: no news needed, no rush back. Your chair is being sat in by a coat, in your honour.

For the little card that comes with the flowers

The florist's enclosure card holds about three lines, and the writing has to fit the space or it arrives in handwriting squeezed up the margin. So plan for three moves: their name, one true sentence, your name. Don't spend the first line on 'thinking of you' when the printed card already says it in foil. And write the sentence the flowers can't: the flowers say somebody spent money; the line has to say somebody knows something.

• For you. Nothing flowery, just true: I'm sorry, I'm near, I love you.
• These are instead of a visit because you'd tell me not to fuss. Fussing anyway, in daffodils.
• No card could hold it, so here's the headline: you are thought of, today and most days.
• For the one who brings everyone else flowers. Sit down. These ones are yours.

Turn it into a group card

A thinking of you card is the natural group card, because its whole message is plural already: more than one person has noticed, and you are held in more than one head. One card signed by the whole street or the whole team asks nothing of the person, not even the work of opening twenty envelopes, and it lands as a wall of names on a week when names are what they have least of. A group card with room for everyone to sign lets each person add their own line in their own words, and you can create the card online and send the link round in a morning.

When the news is a death, the register changes and the condolence wording matters more than the thinking-of-you kind: what to say when someone dies covers the lines that hold up. For a colleague on leave or in a rough month, building a positive work culture is the workplace version of the same argument, and virtual events and celebrations is about getting a scattered group onto one card. For grief specifically, a shared online sympathy card keeps the signatures together in one place.

Odile sends me one photograph every October: the last tomato on the vine in her greenhouse in Galashiels, no caption, nothing before or after it. I have never once replied with a sentence, because somewhere along the way the protocol got set and a sentence would break it. This year's hasn't arrived yet. It's nearly November, the glass will be going opaque with cold up there, and I find I'm checking my phone like a person waiting for news, which I suppose I am.