Navigating Grief and Loss: There Is No Right Way to Grieve

The Myth of the Five Stages

Most people have heard of the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, the model has become so embedded in popular culture that many grieving people measure their experience against it, wondering why they're still angry when they should be bargaining, or why acceptance seems nowhere in sight.

Here's what's important to understand: Kübler-Ross developed her stages by observing people who had received terminal diagnoses. The stages were never intended as a universal map of grief. And Kübler-Ross herself later wrote that they should not be understood as a linear sequence most people move through predictably.

Grief is not a path with clear stages and a defined destination. It's more like weather — unpredictable, sometimes violent, capable of sudden sunshine in the middle of a storm.

What Grief Actually Looks Like

Grief can be physical. Heaviness in the body. Loss of appetite or inability to stop eating. Disrupted sleep. A generalised achiness that doesn't have a medical explanation. The body grieves alongside the mind.

Grief can be irrational. Laughing at a funeral. Forgetting, briefly, that the person is gone — and then the lurch of remembering. Feeling relief mixed with loss when someone who was suffering has died. None of this is wrong.

Grief can be intermittent. You don't grieve at a constant intensity. There are days and hours of relative normalcy, and then waves that come without warning — triggered by a song, a smell, an ordinary Tuesday.

Grief can take longer than anyone around you seems to expect. The informal social permission for grief in many cultures is measured in weeks. The actual lived experience frequently spans years.

Losses Beyond Death

We often think of grief in the context of bereavement. But grief is the response to any significant loss, and those losses are many:

The end of a relationship. The loss of a pregnancy. Losing a job that was part of your identity. A diagnosis that changes the life you imagined for yourself. Moving away from a home or community you loved. The gradual loss of a parent to dementia. Children leaving home.

These losses are real, and the grief they generate is real, even when the world doesn't always treat them as such. Disenfranchised grief — grief for losses that society doesn't fully recognise — is often silently carried and rarely talked about. If you're grieving something that doesn't fit neatly into a culturally legible category, your grief is still valid.

What Helps

There are no shortcuts through grief, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. But a few things are consistently reported as genuinely helpful:

Letting yourself feel it. This sounds trite, but the alternative — suppressing, avoiding, staying perpetually busy — doesn't process grief, it postpones it. Grief needs air.

Talking about the loss, and about the person or thing lost. Saying the name of someone who has died. Telling stories. Keeping them present in conversation. Many bereaved people are hungry for this and find that others avoid it for fear of upsetting them. Please: say their name.

Being in the company of people who don't need you to be okay yet. Grief requires permission to not be performing recovery. If you don't have people like this in your life, peer support communities — even anonymous ones — can provide that permission.

Giving yourself time. Actually giving it, not just hoping it passes. Grief has its own timeline, and the timeline is never as short as we'd like.

The Shape of Grief Changes

With time, grief rarely disappears — but it does change. The bereavement researcher William Worden describes grief work not as "getting over" loss but as learning to carry it differently. The loss becomes integrated into your life rather than overwhelming it. It doesn't hurt less because it matters less. The love doesn't go away. The grief just finds a shape that allows you to live alongside it.

Wherever you are in that process, you're in the right place. There is no right way to grieve. There is only your way.