Grief Doesn't Follow a Straight Line

I remember learning about the five stages of grief in nursing school. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Five stages that seemed to offer a way to understand something as complicated as grief.

The framework was introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, based on her work with seriously ill patients facing their own deaths. Over time, those five stages became one of the most widely recognized ways of explaining grief, applied not only to dying but to nearly every kind of loss.

And I can understand why. As human beings, I think we like to make sense of things. We organize information, create diagrams, and look for patterns that help us understand experiences that otherwise feel overwhelming. Kübler-Ross's work was groundbreaking in bringing greater attention to the experiences of people facing death, and her five stages gave us language for some very difficult emotions. There is real value in that. But somewhere along the way, I think we began treating a framework for understanding grief as a template for how we are supposed to experience it.

What's particularly interesting is that Kübler-Ross herself acknowledged the limitations of the framework. She recognized that people didn't necessarily experience all five stages, that emotions could overlap, and that there wasn't a predictable order in which they occurred. Yet somewhere along the way, the five stages became something many of us understood as a path through grief, almost as though we were supposed to move from one stage to the next until we finally arrived at acceptance.

But grief isn't nearly that tidy.

If you've ever grieved the death of someone you love, the loss of a beloved pet, the end of a relationship, a job, or a future you imagined, you probably know that grief rarely follows a straight line.

You might feel a sense of peace one day and find yourself overwhelmed with sadness the next. You might feel anger, gratitude, relief, loneliness, or even joy, sometimes within the same afternoon. A familiar song, an unexpected memory, or something as ordinary as walking into an empty house can bring feelings you thought had settled right back to the surface.

And none of that means you're doing grief wrong.

I think that's what concerns me about our desire to put grief into neat categories. When we begin to believe there's a particular way grief should unfold, we can unintentionally create expectations that make an already difficult experience even harder. We wonder whether we should be feeling better by now, whether we've reached acceptance, or why someone else seems to be grieving so differently. And sometimes those expectations come from the people around us, who may believe we should be further along than we are. Instead of allowing ourselves to experience grief as it comes, we can begin questioning whether we're doing it correctly.

But grief isn't something we need to perform correctly. It's an experience we each have to find our own way through.

Of course, there is value in understanding grief. There is comfort in recognizing that what we're feeling is part of a deeply human experience, and sometimes having language for those feelings helps us feel less alone. But I don't believe we need to fit our grief into a particular model for it to be valid.

And perhaps we can extend that same understanding to the people around us. We don't need to compare how someone else is grieving to how we think we would respond. We don't need to decide whether they've been sad for too long, moved forward too quickly, or expressed their loss in the way we expected.

We can simply recognize that their grief belongs to them, just as ours belongs to us.

I often think about how grief is connected to the things that make life so meaningful. We grieve because someone or something mattered. Because we loved, because we hoped, because we imagined a future, or because we experienced something we didn't want to lose.

And while grief can be extraordinarily painful, I think there is something worth honoring in that connection. It reminds us that we have participated in some of the most important and beautiful parts of being human.

So perhaps instead of asking ourselves where we are in the five stages, we can become a little more curious and compassionate about where we actually are.

There is no diagram we need to follow, no stage we need to reach by a certain date, and no single path that will work for everyone.

Our grief is our own. We can learn from it, make room for it, seek support when we need it, and allow it to change as we do.

And perhaps we can find a little peace in knowing that we don't have to get grief right. We simply have to find our own way through it.