Grief doesn’t go in stages

Months have passed. People have stopped asking. And you are wondering whether you are doing this wrong.

Grief doesn’t go in stages: it oscillates. For a while you turn toward the loss, for a while toward living — and both halves are grief.

And it doesn’t take a death. Health, a country, a job, a relationship, the future you had already planned: those are losses too, and nobody sends condolences for those.

Months later a wave arrives without warning, in the supermarket. What you decide that wave means changes what you will demand of yourself afterwards.

Almost nobody needs treatment for this: what is needed is time and people. And for the minority whose grief stays stuck, there is treatment aimed at exactly that.

There is no correct way and no deadline. For most people, with time, the waves space out — and if yours don’t, that is not your failure: there is help for that.