I remember being an undergraduate student, diligently memorizing the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. I was taught that grief was a linear process — a step-by-step emotional journey that would eventually land in acceptance. It’s an idea that’s become so familiar that many people have come to see it as a kind of roadmap for loss.

Much to my surprise, when I experienced grief myself, my emotions didn’t follow that neat path. They were all over the place. Am I not grieving the right way? I wondered. What’s wrong with me?

Here’s the truth: grief doesn’t actually follow a predictable sequence of stages. The “five stages of grief” were never meant to describe how everyone grieves. In fact, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who introduced the model in 1969, was studying the emotional experiences of people who were dying — not those mourning a loss. Over time, her model was applied more broadly, but even Kübler-Ross herself later clarified that grief is not a linear process.

Grief isn’t a checklist to complete or a ladder to climb. It’s more like the tide — ebbing and flowing, sometimes gently, sometimes with overwhelming force. One day you may feel peaceful acceptance; the next, anger or sadness might resurface. That doesn’t mean you’re moving backward — it means you’re human.

Some people feel numbness before sadness. Others find moments of laughter or relief alongside tears. You might skip certain “stages” entirely or experience several emotions in the same hour. Every person’s grief is unique, shaped by their relationship to the loss, their history, and their ways of coping.

Instead of stages, it can be more helpful to think of grief as a series of ongoing processes or “tasks” of mourning:

• Accepting the reality of the loss — coming to terms with what’s happened.
• Processing the pain — allowing yourself to feel it in your own time and way.
• Adjusting to a new world — learning to live without the person or thing you’ve lost.
• Finding ways to stay connected — remembering while continuing to live your life.

These aren’t steps to finish, but evolving processes that can shift over months or years. If you, like me, have ever thought, “I should be over this by now,” or “Why am I feeling angry again?” — please know there’s no timeline for grief. You are not doing it wrong.

Healing isn’t about getting back to who you were before; it’s about learning to carry your loss as part of your story. Grief is love with nowhere to go — and learning to hold that love differently takes time, compassion, and patience.

There’s a wonderful clip of Andrew Garfield speaking with Stephen Colbert about his mother’s passing. He says his tears are “[…] all of the unexpressed love [I still have for my mom],” and adds, “The grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other… I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all of the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her — and I told her every day.”

The stages of grief, while outdated, gave us a way to begin talking about loss — but they don’t define it. Your grief doesn’t have to fit into stages to be valid. What matters most is allowing yourself to feel what comes, when it comes, and remembering that healing looks different for everyone.

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