There is no date for this one. That is the entire point of it, and it is why it works.
A birthday card arrives because the calendar said so. A thinking of you card arrives because somebody chose to, on an ordinary Tuesday, for no reason except that you crossed their mind. People remember the second kind for years.
The difficulty is that with no occasion to hang it on, there is nothing to write except the actual thing, and the actual thing is harder.
The shortest ones are the best ones
Resist the urge to fill the card. Space on the page is not a problem to solve.
- "Thinking of you. No reply needed."
- "No news, no reason. Just thinking of you today."
- "You have been on my mind this week. That is all this is."
- "Just a card. Nothing required of you."
"No reply needed" is the most useful phrase in this entire post. Someone in a hard stretch is often carrying a backlog of unanswered messages and a low-level guilt about it. Explicitly removing the obligation turns a card from one more thing to answer into an actual gift.
If they are ill
Do not ask how they are. They have answered that question forty times this week and the answer has not improved.
- "No questions, no update needed. Just thinking of you."
- "I am not going to ask how you are. I am going to say I am thinking about you and that I will keep doing it."
- "Here whenever, for whatever, including nothing."
- "Thinking of you today, and tomorrow, and probably Thursday."
If you want to offer something practical, be specific and make it easy to accept. "Let me know if you need anything" puts the work on them. "I am doing a shop on Saturday, tell me what to add" does not.
If they are having a hard year and you do not know the details
Sometimes you can tell that someone is not all right and you do not know why, and asking would be intrusive.
- "I do not know what is going on and you do not have to tell me. Thinking of you."
- "Whatever this year is, I hope it eases off soon."
- "You seem to be carrying a lot. Just so you know somebody noticed."
That last one is powerful and should be used carefully. For most people it is a relief. For someone working very hard to appear fine, it can feel exposing. You know which they are.
After a bereavement, weeks later
The cards arrive in a fortnight and then stop, which is precisely when it gets harder. A card at six weeks or six months is worth more than the twenty that came at once.
- "Six weeks on and I am still thinking of you both."
- "I know the cards will have stopped. Mine has not."
- "Thinking of you today, which I think would have been his birthday."
Naming the person, and naming the date, is almost always right. The fear that mentioning them will remind someone of their loss gets it backwards. They have not forgotten. What they are frightened of is that everyone else has.
For the days immediately after, what to write in a sympathy card covers a different register.
For no reason at all
The best use of the format, and the rarest.
- "Saw a dog that looked exactly like Bramble. Had to tell someone."
- "This is a card about nothing. You are welcome."
- "Twenty years since we shared that flat. Felt like saying so."
- "You are one of my favourite people and I do not say it often enough. That is the whole card."
What to avoid
"Everything happens for a reason." It is offered as comfort and received as an explanation for something unbearable.
"Stay strong" and "keep smiling." Both quietly ask for a performance. Someone having a terrible time does not owe anyone cheerfulness.
Anything that needs a reply to make sense. "How are you doing?" turns your kindness into their admin.
Your own similar experience, at length. One line of "I have been somewhere near this" can help. A paragraph makes the card about you.
When to send it
Now, roughly. The reason thinking of you cards do not get sent is that there is no deadline to force it, so the impulse passes and the card never happens.
If the impulse has arrived, act on it in the next ten minutes or it will not survive the day. A digital card lands within the hour, which suits this format better than most, because the whole value is in the timing being unexpected rather than perfect.
You can put a photograph on the front, which for this kind of card does more work than any message will. A shared memory on the front and four words inside is usually the right proportion.
More across every occasion.
