There Is No Right Way to Grieve

People often arrive in my office already in a box of their own making.

They have decided they are behind, or that they are cold because they have not cried, or that they are excessive because they cry every day, or that something is wrong with them because what they mostly feel is anger, or relief, or nothing at all. Before we have talked about the person who died, we frequently have to spend a session opening the box.

Most boxes trace back to five words that got loose about fifty years ago.

Where the stages came from

In 1969, a Swiss American psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying. She had been sitting with terminally ill patients at a time when hospitals largely did not tell people they were dying, and the book was in many ways a moral intervention. It insisted that dying people had interior lives worth listening to.

In it she described five patterns she observed: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

Two things about that list are almost always lost.

The first is that she was describing people facing their own deaths, not people who had been bereaved. The stages were about anticipating your own end.

The second is that she did not present them as a fixed sequence everyone completes. That reading came later, from summarizers, textbooks, and eventually greeting cards and television.

Decades later, Kübler-Ross wrote On Grief and Grieving with David Kessler, published in 2005 after her death, which did apply the five stages to bereavement. Even there, the authors were explicit that the stages are not linear, not universal, and not a discrete set of steps towards healing. Kessler has spent much of his career since repeating that point, and he has added a sixth stage, meaning, which I wrote about here.

None of that caught up with the popular version. So people still measure themselves against a staircase that its own authors said was not a staircase.

What grief actually seems to do

If not stages, then what?

The model that best matches what I see is the dual process model, described by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999. It says grieving people oscillate between two orientations. One is loss-oriented: feeling the pain, missing them, going through the photographs, crying. The other is restoration-oriented: dealing with the practical fallout, learning the tasks they used to do, building a new routine, going back to work, having a normal afternoon.

Healthy grieving is not staying in the first one until it is finished. It is moving back and forth, and the oscillation itself is what does the work. This is why you can sob in the car and then laugh at lunch and feel like a fraud at both. You are not a fraud. You are doing the thing.

It also explains a common fight between grieving people. One person copes by talking and remembering. The other copes by reorganizing the garage. Each thinks the other is doing it wrong. Both are oscillating, just at different frequencies.

The other thing to say is that grief does not respect the calendar. It comes when it comes: at the DMV, at a wedding, from a smell in a stairwell, on an ordinary Thursday in year four. Kessler’s line is that everyone’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint, and I would extend it to say that your own grief is unique week to week. What worked in March may do nothing in June.

The grief nobody lets you have

Some losses come with a funeral, casseroles, and time off work. Others come with nothing.

Kenneth Doka named this in 1989: disenfranchised grief, grief that your community does not recognize as legitimate, and therefore does not support. The list is long and most people find themselves somewhere on it.

Miscarriage and stillbirth. Infertility. The death of an ex-spouse, or of someone you were involved with but not publicly. Pet loss. Estranged parents, where you are grieving both the death and the relationship you never got. Death by overdose or suicide, where the sympathy comes wrapped in judgment. Losing someone to dementia, where the person is alive and the relationship is not. The death of a coworker, a former patient, a friend from twenty years ago you had lost touch with.

Then there are the losses with no death in them at all: a marriage ending, a body that stopped working the way it did, a career, a country you left, a faith you can no longer hold. Those are real bereavements and they behave like bereavements.

Disenfranchised grief tends to be harder, and the reason is the subject of the piece I wrote on witnessing. It is not that the loss is objectively worse. It is that there is nowhere to put it. There is no one to see it with you.

The feelings people apologize for

A short list of things clients have told me while bracing for judgment, and what I actually think about each.

Relief. After a long illness, after caregiving that hollowed you out, after a relationship that hurt. Relief and love sit together all the time. Unspoken relief becomes guilt, and guilt is far more corrosive.

Anger at the person who died. For not going to the doctor. For the debt. For the things they said and never took back. For leaving. This is one of the most common and least confessed feelings in grief.

Nothing. Numbness is a normal early response, and for some people it lasts a while. Not crying at the funeral is not evidence about how much you loved someone.

Laughing. Sometimes hysterically, sometimes at the wake. The body has a limited number of exits for that much pressure.

Wanting it to be over. Being tired of your own grief, of other people’s sympathy, of being the person this happened to.

Grieving one person more than another. You are not obligated to grieve in proportion to how you were supposed to feel about someone.

Almost every one of these becomes lighter the moment it is said out loud to somebody who does not react badly. That is most of what I do.

So when should you get help?

There is no threshold you must cross to deserve support. If it would help to talk to someone, that is enough of a reason.

That said, there are patterns I would not want you to sit with alone.

Months in and still unable to work, sleep, eat, or care for the people who depend on you. Structuring your life around avoiding every reminder. Drinking or using more to get through evenings. Grief that has become mostly guilt or mostly rage with no movement in it. Having nobody at all who can hear it. And any thoughts of ending your life, which is the one that should not wait.

Prolonged grief disorder is worth knowing about, not to give you something new to worry about, but because it is treatable. It entered the DSM-5-TR in 2022. To briefly describe it, for adults, it is an intense yearning, and preoccupation persisting at least a year after the death, with significant impairment. It affects a minority of bereaved people. If it is what is happening, that is something with a name that responds to treatment, not a personal failing.

The permission part

Here is what I would want you to take out of all of this.

There is no correct grief. There is no schedule you are behind on, no stage you skipped, no amount of crying that is right. Your grief has the shape it has because of who that person was to you, how they died, what your life looked like when it happened, and everything you carried into it beforehand.

What you do get to decide is what you make of it. Not why it happened, which is usually unavailable. What you build afterward, out of what is left, in whatever time you have. That part is genuinely yours, and it is the only part of this that anyone gets to choose.

If you want company while you work that out, I see adults for grief and bereavement at our Carlsbad office and online across California, and I lead a small grief group on Thursday evenings. Start with a free 15-minute call. Fees, insurance, and superbill details are on our Cost and Insurance page.

If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, free.