Last month, I wrote about grief. I wrote about how we can help our friends who are grieving.
You can read that post here.
One of the most common responses I received after my last post on grief surprised me.
It was an observation from the people who were grieving about the people who were trying to help them.
It was from the people around them.
Again and again, people told me the same thing: “So many people expected me to grieve in a straight line.”
That sentence has been rattling around in my head ever since.
I think most of us know grief is painful. What we often forget is that it’s also unpredictable. Somewhere along the way, we’ve picked up the idea that healing should look like steady progress. Every week should be a little easier than the last. Every month should hurt a little less. Eventually, we should arrive at acceptance and stay there.
That isn’t how grief usually works.
Many of us are familiar with the five stages of grief: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced these stages while studying people facing terminal illness. Over time, they’ve become a helpful way to describe many of the emotions people experience after a significant loss.
The problem isn’t the stages themselves.
The problem is how we’ve come to imagine them.
We often picture grief as some sort of mile markers on the highway. First comes shock and denial. Then anger. Then bargaining. Then depression. Finally, acceptance. As if we struggle to each way station, arriving at the next stage, we never have to look back.
Real grief rarely follows that pattern. In therapy with my clients, I will often draw the five stages in a circle and then I will draw them as five mountain tops behind the circle. I point out that they may go through all five stages in a morning while simultaneously being in any of the five stages of the mountain.
You may feel acceptance for days or weeks, only to find yourself overwhelmed with sadness because you heard a song your spouse loved. You may laugh with your family on Saturday morning at 9am and feel angry at the world at 10am while doing a regular household chore. You may think you’ve made peace with what happened until a birthday, anniversary, or random Tuesday proves you wrong.
One of the hardest things about grief is that it refuses to follow our schedules. It doesn’t care how much time has passed. It doesn’t check the calendar before showing up. It is often like the ocean. Calm one moment, crashing the next.
The tranquil sunrise of acceptance followed by the stormy crashing of an afternoon squall.
There is very little rhyme or reason to it.
Unfortunately, I find that many people expect it to come with those rhythms and if we’re honest, so does the world around us.
Even the people wanting to help us.
They mean well. They want to be there for you.
They also need life to go back to normal because if your grief keeps reminding them that life isn’t normal, they have to face the uncomfortable truth that loss eventually comes for all of us.
After a few weeks, the meals stop coming. The phone gets quieter. People assume you’re doing better because they need life to return to normal—they need to feel normal again.
Sometimes they become uncomfortable when your grief lingers longer than they expected. They need the sorrow and sadness to go away. We don’t do a very good job in society of sitting in the uncomfortable. You can read listen to a podcast episode where I talk about our confusing discomfort with a lack of safety here.
Of course, grief doesn’t disappear simply because everyone else has moved on. One of the hardest aspects of grief is the truth that the person grieving has this giant hole in their heart that can take their breath away and wrench their entire soul in an instant for any or no reason while the rest of the world continues.
The sun still rises and falls.
Holidays happen.
Sports events and Concert Venues sell out.
The mundane and the spectacular things of life keep going.
And every time they do, the hole that now inhabits your heart both tears and heals a little bit.
If you’re trying to walk alongside someone who is grieving, please just accept where they are at that day in that moment.
Accept the fact that there won’t be a lot of logic to the process and that’s OK.
Accept the fact that you will be uncomfortable because you won’t know what to do and you will simultaneously know that their grief will someday be your grief—a truth we often try to pretend doesn’t happen.
You don’t have to solve your friend’s grief. You can’t solve it, you can only journey with them.
Faithfully and imperfectly.
Don’t take it personally, when they cancel at the last minute. Understand that they rarely understand what is going inside of them, and they truly don’t expect you to understand.
They might tell you they don’t want or need you to come around but often that is because they don’t want to feel like a burden to someone.
Keep asking them how them questions. Keep listening to their answers.
Sometimes the greatest gift you can offer someone is reminding them they don’t have to walk through their grief alone.
If you’re grieving, please know that you are not doing it wrong because your emotions came back. The fact that you feel like you often can’t control your emotions means you are human, not broken.
You are not weak because something caught you off guard because indeed while you are not broken, parts of you are.
You have not gone backward because today hurts more than yesterday.
Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line.
Acceptance isn’t graduation. It isn’t a place you arrive and permanently stay. It’s simply one of the many places you’ll visit as you learn to live with a loss you never wanted.
When we heal, we don’t somehow stop missing what we lost. The love. The Person. The Relationship. Healing is somehow learning to live with the loss. Somehow, learning to appreciate the sunrise or sunset again.
In a way that I don’t have words to explain, we endure and survive to come a new place in life where the sorrow is ever with us but becomes somehow a bit more distant. It is a part of life that moves us and moves with us.
There is no timeline. No straightforward steps.
It’s a messy, soul bloody process that gashes at our comfort.
And yet.
And yet, somehow it shapes who we become. How we process it (both our own and others) reveals our own growth.
I don’t believe sorrow was ever supposed to be part of the story but that’s a theological argument not a psychological one.
When it comes, we will have to choose wisely how we interact. Especially, with those vulnerable souls around us who are walking their darkest days and deepest fears.
If this article encouraged or challenged you, consider sharing it with someone who might need it today. Every week I write about relationships, emotional health, faith, and the choices that shape who we become. If you’d like new posts delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe here.
