Grief turns up in the supermarket. In the car. At a work thing you had to be normal for. In the middle of a perfectly good Tuesday, announced only by the sudden presence of the wrong brand of biscuits on the shelf.

Anyone who has lost someone knows that grief has no respect for appropriate timing or narrative shape. It’s just there, and then briefly not there, and then there again in a form you weren’t expecting.

The five stages were never a timetable

The 5 stage model Kübler-Ross wrote about was never intended as a checklist, but somewhere along the way it became one – a map that people feel obscurely guilty for not following correctly. The anger arrived too late. The acceptance hasn’t happened yet. It’s been eight months; shouldn’t you be further along?

There is no further along. There’s just the way grief actually moves, which is non-linearly and inconsiderately and entirely according to its own schedule. Some people find it gets lighter. Some people find it just gets different. The pressure to be over it by a certain point doesn’t help anybody.

The grief that doesn’t look like grief

Grief isn’t always tears and formal sadness. It can show up as irritability, or flatness, or difficulty concentrating, or a strange inability to care about things that used to matter. It can include relief – which is normal, and complicated, and doesn’t mean what people fear it means. It can involve, on difficult days, a kind of dark humour that would horrify anyone who hadn’t been there.

There’s no wrong way to grieve. There are just ways that are harder to carry alone.

What counselling is actually for here

Grief counselling isn’t about processing it faster, or arriving at acceptance on schedule. It’s about having someone to be in it with – someone who won’t need you to reassure them that you’re getting better, who can sit with the parts that are complicated or contradictory or just very sad.

Grief is love that has lost its person. It’s still there and always will be. 

If you’re in the middle of it and could do with some company, please feel free to get in touch.