How You Grieve Cannot Be Predicted, Nor How Long

Nobody can tell you ahead of time how you will grieve or how long it will take. What I do know is that you can't skip it. Push grief aside and it finds a way to do lasting harm. Losing a child, for instance, can pull a marriage apart, and it usually starts when the two people stop talking to each other. And grief isn't reserved for death. You can grieve a job that's gone, a child moving out of the house, any loss or even one you see coming.

My own longest stretch of grief lasted five years, and if I'm honest it hasn't fully closed even now. The deaths were sudden and brutal. A friend who was closer to me than most sisters was pregnant, and she and her toddler daughter died on the drive home. She and her husband had been heading out to tell both sets of grandparents about the baby. The word shock doesn't come close to what that did to me. They stayed in my thoughts for years, and for a long time I would mark her birthday.

People talk about the stages of grief as though you climb them in order, one rung at a time. Plenty of websites lay them out that way. But Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said something different at a workshop I went to: you don't move through them in any set sequence. You slide back and forth. You can be sure you've finished with one stage, then wake up inside it again.

The stages are denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Denial is the mind refusing to take in what happened or what's coming. "No, no, he can't be dead." A diagnosis of terminal illness that simply won't register. A spouse who has walked out for good, and the person left behind keeps telling themselves the absent one will snap out of it and come back. Bargaining is cutting a deal with God, or with whatever power you believe in: I'll do this one thing if only you'll spare them, if only the loss won't happen. Anger can point at whoever caused the loss, at the situation, even at the person who died for leaving. Depression settles in once it becomes clear the loss is permanent and you can't picture how you'll survive it. Acceptance is the slow understanding that life keeps moving after the loss, that nothing you could have done would have changed the outcome.

The real danger is how grieving people pull away. They shut themselves off and won't let anyone near enough to comfort them. Two people grieving the same loss can be in completely different places and end up wounding each other instead of leaning on each other. Grief turns outward sometimes as anger thrown at bystanders, and in some cases it hardens into a hunger for revenge. A lot of grieving people feel flattened, unable to manage the simplest things. You can't reason with them. And some deaths resist any reasoning at all: a stranger who decides to kill and doesn't care who, a car wreck that takes whoever happened to be standing in that spot at that moment, the way it took my friend.

Years after my father died, I finally saw his death certificate. He died of multiple bedsores, which almost certainly traces back to the nursing home's neglect. He had dementia and could be difficult, unreasonable, sometimes aggressive, and he stayed physically strong, more than my mother could manage alone. The rest of us had all moved away, so she depended on neighbors and relatives to step in when he got out of hand. For more than a year after he passed, there was no talking to her. She blamed herself for putting him in that home, over and over. All of us had thought she should have let go of caring for him on her own long before she did. Reading that certificate, I finally understood why she never would listen to us.

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