Grief Doesn’t Have a Timeline: Letting Go of Society’s Expectations
By Nora Biette-Timmons
It’s almost a rite of passage, googling “stages of grief” when you’re grieving, supporting a loved one who’s grieving, or preparing to enter a period of grieving. The idea that there are stages—that we will move through certain emotional states in a particular order—is comforting; it suggests that this pain will someday not only be lessened but over. That’s not the way grief works.
Some models say there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Others have sought to inject a bit more nuance into it, with stages that include “the upward turn” and “acceptance and hope,” but these are also inadequate for portraying the journey of grieving, which is neither linear nor the same for each person, nor does it end after a person has experienced a certain set of emotions.
For some, of course, the concept of “stages of grief” may be comforting: to have a heads up about what emotions you may soon feel can help you feel less alone in grief. The “stages” also suggest some communal solidarity in grief; they imply that nearly every other human being has experienced the same turmoil.
But whether you are grieving yourself or supporting a loved one going through grief, it’s important to remember that, despite social—and even medical—expectations, grief is not linear. Especially after losing a loved one, grief is a life-long process, something that ebbs and flows through different stages of life, just like every other emotion.
Where does the idea of linear grief come from?
The “five stages of grief” framework was first put forth by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying, which came out in 1969. At the time, this was a groundbreaking work: Kübler-Ross wrote it based on her experiences working with terminally ill patients, who often told stories of how they were mistreated, ignored, dismissed, or treated inhumanely by medical professionals, which echoes what many bereaved people feel today. The idea that dying carried emotional repercussions and that those emotions ought to be honored and cared for was truly important—but it should be thought of as the starting point for conceiving grief, rather than the be-all-end-all.
However, because grief is messy and throws our regular lives off-kilter, the “stages of grief” idea has developed quite a strong foothold in contemporary Western society because- it treats grief as neater and tidier than it really is, giving people the idea that at some point, things will return to “normal.”
This has, unfortunately, become fairly widespread. When she shared her story with WPSU Penn State’s Speaking Grief documentary, Joyal Mulheron, Evermore’s founder and executive director, said that, after losing her daughter, she found that “everyone [else] has … some sort of internal timestamp where they feel like at this point, you should be doing better.”
And what that actually means for a grieving person can be harmful. “In some cases, I have found that doing better means that you are less inconvenient for someone else or you make them feel less uncomfortable about the loss or the death that you’ve experienced.”
Besides the “stages of grief,” many of us first encounter grief in popular culture—in movies, TV, or books, where there is a definitive beginning, middle, and end. Art and music can be crucial tools in helping grieving people process their loved one’s death and their own feelings, but especially in narrative art and culture, it is difficult to accurately portray the grieving process. For example, we often see grieving people on TV acting out, being destructive, engaging in self-harm, hitting so-called rock bottom—for example, on The OA or Grey’s Anatomy—but then they emerge, recognize their pain, heal, and ta-da, they’re fixed. But that’s not the way grief works in real life; there is no “end,” the way there is in a movie.
On top of that, our contemporary work culture and economy have no room built in for grace, which is one of the many things grieving people need. Many companies offer only a few days off to mourn a loved one; then, a bereaved person must return to work, and be able to still perform at their job as they did before. For the lucky among us, a kind manager and a flexible sick leave policy lessen the whiplash of returning to a “normal” work life—but overall, those are exceptions, not norms.
“Our contemporary society doesn’t respect the need for time. We’re getting more and more rushed, more and more focused on consuming and less and less tolerance for listening,” Ted Rynearson, a psychiatrist whose research focuses on violent death and the unique bereavement experience it conjures, told Speaking Grief. “And so, we hope for and anticipate easy answers, and I think that’s what stages and a lot of the popular books that are written on grief can be very comforting. But they often don’t respect the fact that things are forever changed, and we can’t go through steps to recover.”
Grieving, facing pressure to be “normal,” and needing to perform “being OK,” as Megan Devine so clearly articulated in her bestselling grief book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK.
What happens when we rush grief?
“There are really only two stages of grief; there’s who you were before and who you are after,” Rynearson said.
When we try to rush grief, to move through it too quickly—or to pretend that it’s not happening—we are not acknowledging the true, painful fact that the life of the bereaved person has been irrevocably changed. Ignoring that reality can cause people to feel even more alone and like they do not have the support system they need.
Allowing everyone (including yourself!) to cope with grief at their own pace allows their brain and their body to process grief in the individualized way that is best for that person. Bereavement is associated with poor declines in mental and physical health. Just last week, Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor released her second book, The Grieving Body, detailing the physiological impact of grief on the body. Many experts, including O’Connor, research prolonged grief disorder (PGD), which affects as many as 7 percent of bereaved people, where a grieving person may “get stuck” in their grief.
So, “what constitutes ‘normal’ grief?” psychiatric researchers Sidney Zisook and Katherine Shear asked in a 2009 paper. “There is no simple answer. Grief is different for every person and every loss, and it can be damaging to judge or label a person’s grief, especially during early bereavement.” (You can read their full paper here.)
Letting go of timelines
Speaking from her personal experience, Mulheron said, “Grief is like a volume switch. In the very beginning, it’s very loud. It’s almost so loud that you can’t remember if you’ve eaten, you can’t remember if you’ve showered.”
After a while, the volume dies down: “You work on ways to lower it, and you try to keep it at a manageable volume,” she added, even though, “in the first few years, it remains very high, although it lowers enough that you remember to eat, you remember when you need to shower.”
Imagine a soundwave graph: There are spikes, deep valleys, and levels so consistent they almost look straight. That’s what grief can look like, and there is no guarantee that one reaction will come after another.
For some, obvious manifestations of grief don’t begin until months after losing a loved one, further disproving that there is a single grief timeline for everyone. People can appear and act fine the day or a week after a loss—and suddenly be paralyzed by it in six months’ time. Acute feelings of grief may also reemerge years after loss.
Supporting bereaved people
Ignoring any sense of a timeline, order of emotions, or “appropriate” responses is the best way to start supporting a grieving loved one. Nix social expectations: Focus only on the individual you are caring for. Recognize that their lives are occurring through the filter of grief, whether or not that grief appears obvious to you.
Those you encounter may be grieving in some way that you do not know about—and they may not want to talk about it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t support them.
“Understand that at any time, someone is dealing with something that is creating a barrier, a challenge to their hundred-percent self showing up,” Alesia K. Alexander, an advocate who works with youth who’ve experienced loss, told Speaking Grief. “We can respond to that honestly and openly, then we are really creating that safe environment for sharing.”
On our website, Evermore lists 10 ways you can support a grieving person. The most important thing is to speak up; ignore the awkwardness you feel in addressing someone’s loss or pain. Give people the grace to respond when they are able—which might not be for months or years. But don’t act as if everything is back to normal when you see or talk with them; it never will be because they’ve lost a loved one, and just like Devine says, “that’s OK.”