Grief does not move in stages
The five stages were never meant to be a staircase. A truer picture of what mourning is actually like.
7 min read
Most people can recite the stages of grief, and most grieving people quietly worry that they are doing them wrong. They felt acceptance in week two and rage in month nine. They laughed at the funeral. They have not cried at all.
Where the stages came from
The model was first drawn from conversations with people who were themselves dying, not with the bereaved, and it was never intended as a sequence. It stuck because it offers something grief does not: a map with an end point.
A better picture
Many clinicians now describe grief as a movement back and forth. Some days you turn toward the loss: you look at photographs, you feel it fully. Other days you turn toward the rest of life, the laundry and the inbox and even pleasure. Both are part of mourning. The swinging between them is not avoidance. It is how people survive something unsurvivable.
What helps
Company helps more than advice. So does permission to grieve in your own order and for longer than the people around you expect. The loss does not shrink. Your life slowly grows around it, until there is room for it and for other things as well.
A note on this writing
The journal is general information, not medical advice. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or go to your nearest emergency room.
Keep reading
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New pieces every few weeks, written by the people you would meet in the room.
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Grief does not move in stages
The five stages were never meant to be a staircase. A truer picture of what mourning is actually like.
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