Grief is a painful, inevitable part of being alive. When we are in the throes of a loss, it can feel like we’re drowning, like our world has been upended with no end in sight.

How does grief work? How long does it last? Why do we grieve? Let’s explore this complex experience and how we might just start making sense of it.

Most people’s understanding of grief comes from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ landmark work, On Death and Dying. From this, we received the often referenced “five stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Popular psychology espouses that when we experience a loss, we will work through these five stages one at a time until we are no longer grieving. This outlook implies there is a correct way to grieve, an endpoint to grief, and that we should work through these stages within one year (or risk a diagnosis of Prolonged Grief Disorder in the DSM-V!).

What is often lost from pithy paraphrasing of Ross’ work is that this research was never meant for grieving people who have lost someone – it was meant for people receiving a terminal diagnosis. Additionally, there were not just five stages, but actually more than ten! Ross also never meant for these stages to be a linear process, but rather to lay out the different aspects of grief that we will bounce between in a messy pursuit for stability and balance.

A more humane way of viewing grief, and one that is hard to hear for many, is that you may never, ever stop grieving for your loved one. You may never “get over it” or “move on”.

Grief is the nature of living in relationship, the risk of loving others, and a part of what comes with being human. If we are lucky enough to age, we will become more and more acquainted with this aspect of life.

Instead of avoiding or denying grief, it may be more supportive to build a relationship with your grief, to think of it as a roommate you may always have. This roommate has bad days and might need extra care, especially in the beginning. Learning how to communicate with it, allow it space, tend to its needs, and know where grief’s boundaries are can help you co-habitate easier.

Another metaphor often used is the idea of “growing around grief” – that our grief always stays the same size, but that through new experiences and building a compassionate relationship with our grief we continue to grow as humans, better able to hold the grief in the total breadth of our complexity.

What once took up all our vision because it was so close and tender, in time recedes to be just one more star in a sky full of stars – a part of us and our story, something we look at from time to time and feel crushed by, but one of many parts that make up the whole of our experience. It’s a slow process – incremental changes, meandering paths, but with time, space and empathetic support we can see a fuller constellation above us.

Grief is woven within the tapestry of life. If the loss is a death, you often feel its echoes at every big life event. Funerals remind you of other funerals. Births and weddings and holidays are bittersweet remembering who isn’t there. Anniversaries of your loved one’s birth are sometimes remembered by others, but often their deaths won’t be. Death days are sacred, painful days held alone by survivors. Fifteen years can pass, and you may be well into your grief journey, but a song might play on the radio that brings on a full hearted sob at the traffic light on your way to work.

Grief also exists beyond death, though death can affect us in a very particular way. Grief is a normal response to any kind of loss or transition: relationship fallouts, job loss, new diagnoses, changing or aging body, watching our children grow up, moving to a new city – and bigger things like intergenerational and historical trauma, systemic failures of justice, the collapse of our globalized economic systems, and climate change.

Grief happens any time there is a change that is too big for us to process without dedicated attention, and life is constantly changing.

Accepting that there is no pathology to grief, but rather a deeply human experience will help you move through these experiences with more self-compassion. Noticing and allowing these feelings to exist without shame or “should”ing will support them to no longer be dysregulating but potentially nourishing reminders of the impact of a person or experience on your life.

In contrast to the five stages model, the Dual Process Model (DPM) offers a different way of thinking about grief. The core component of DPM is oscillation, or the back and forth, between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Loss-oriented would include things like mourning, preoccupation with the loved one, emotional dysregulation, avoiding any changes such as going through the loved one’s belongings, and focusing on memories and interest that help you feel closer to the lost loved one. Restoration-oriented by contrast would include things like allowing pleasure and positive mood in activities, nourishing relationships and meeting new people, relational systems adjusting, donating or selling your person’s belongings, distractions from grief, and moving towards things you enjoy.

The goal is not to move completely into Restoration, as society tries to pressure us to do. In fact, “continued bonds” with our dead loved ones, is linked to better mental health outcomes. Examples of continued bonds include observing their birthdays or deathdays, talking to them in troubled times through speech, prayer, or letters, ritually connecting to them in meaningful ways, keeping their photos present in the home, listening to music they liked, etc.

Loss is remembering, Restoration is forgetting. The dance between the two is what helps us learn to carry the grief more comfortably. We all will start on one side of the spectrum or the other due to our temperament, family or cultural norms, and gender socialization. Most of us will slowly move towards the middle through oscillation, like a pendulum swinging until it finds its center.

This oscillation is also a merciful cognitive protection for our brains at an extremely taxing time. Grief re-writes our whole script and blueprint for life, and this takes a significant amount of energy to process in our brains. It is impossible for us to stay purely in loss-oriented grieving for long periods of time, and taking breaks or finding methods of containment is recommended for folks in active grief. Allowing time to numb out, to forget, to allow themselves a respite from the pain will help them find a way to carry it more comfortably.

Something is rarely acknowledged at a cultural level that we see every day at Tend and Cultivate Counselling is the heartbreak and pain in grieving a changed body. Whether through weight changes, chronic illness, aging, menopause, accidents, or disability, our bodies inevitably change.

But we also live in a patriarchal, ableist culture that prizes very specific kinds of bodies. Instead of a changing body being seen as natural, normal, and even honored, we see advertisements for wrinkle creams, celebrities being touted for their agelessness thanks to countless micro surgeries and whole teams of professionals dedicated to one person’s aesthetic, and the invisibilizing of elders. We see before and after pictures that only ever celebrate the move towards smallness or able-bodiedness or youth.

Bodies change as long as they’re alive. Yet, when it happens to us, it can force us to reckon with lost opportunities, lost identities, lost resources, increased pain, and changing narratives about ourselves. As mentioned above, there are so many secondary losses that accompany a changing body. Of course grief will be a part of that journey.

Finding ways to honor that grief can move you towards greater self-compassion and kindness for your body.

Why is our culture so phobic of grief? Perhaps a subject for a longer blog, but a short answer is that grief is not productive. Grief is not a good, compliant worker. Grief doesn’t follow the rules, it is not predictable, and it is never satiated. It is wild, unruly, and often felt as if it were driven by something outside of ourselves that we cannot deny or forsake. As humans we love having neat containers to understand this life of ours. A checklist, or succession of stages, a handbook that promises to help you finally move on, once and for all. It is all illusory though.

Grief is the ultimate price of experiencing life. As Martin Prechtel says, grief is also praise. Praise for our loved ones, our unique stories, our dreams and imaginations, and for the sheer impossibility of life in the first place. If we’re willing to open ourselves up to grief, to nourish and tend to it without hurry or chiding, we can maintain deep, vulnerable connections to ourselves and others.