Grief does not run to a calendar

Almost everyone has heard of the five stages of grief. Two things are worth knowing about that model: it came from observing people who were dying, not people who were bereaved, and its author spent years explaining that they were not a compulsory sequence. Nobody goes through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in that order, and people who do not go through them at all are not doing it wrong.

How it actually goes

Grief comes in waves, and the waves do not shorten neatly. There are weeks of functioning well and then an ordinary Tuesday, in a supermarket, in front of a packet of biscuits he used to buy, and it all comes back at the intensity of the first day. That is not a step backwards. That is how it works.

The hardest moment is often not the funeral. It is the month afterwards, when the phone calls stop, everyone else has returned to their life, and you are left in a house with a voice missing.

When it gets stuck

Grief is not an illness and in the great majority of cases needs no professional help. But it can jam, and there are situations where that happens more often:

• When the relationship was conflicted and death made it unalterable.
• When the death was sudden, violent, or left no body to see.
• When the last conversation was an argument.
• When the loss is not socially recognised and nobody asks how you are.

The losses nobody calls grief

A separation. A miscarriage at ten weeks that perhaps nobody knew about. A diagnosis that cancels an imagined future. A job that was also an identity. These produce grief in full, and the people living them often apologise for suffering, because they have no right to a recognised mourning.

What helps

It is not getting over it, a phrase many people hear as an insult. It is making room. Being able to tell the person whole — including the part that was difficult, which usually cannot be said to anyone — and finding a space to live alongside what is missing, without having to file it away.