The grief myth: it doesn’t come in stages or follow a checklist – like love, it endures

Shutterstock/arvitalyaart I thought when someone was bereaved it was the first couple of months and then everything was okay again. I was so naive. It is so different. When I met Ella, it had been ten years since her father had died by suicide. She was 17 at the time, repeating important school exams. Although her parents had separated when she was young and contact with her father had been limited, they had started rebuilding their relationship. She described that period as a happy one: her father was making more effort, both parents had new partners, and things felt “in a good place”. Then he died. The aftermath was not contained to the weeks after the funeral. Ella missed half a school year as she struggled with the shock and strain of bereavement. A decade later, she spoke to me about her grief in metaphors, as something ongoing rather than completed, a process that had shifted shape over time but had not ended. Ella’s experience is not unusual. Emily was 12 when her father died suddenly. She was present when it happened. Growing up in the Republic of Ireland in a family of five, she returned to school carrying not only the shock of his death but a growing sense that her grief was somehow too much. “I just started hiding it because I thought that that was the right thing to do,” she told me, 42 years later. What stayed with Emily was not only the grief itself, but the feeling that her sadness had been somehow inappropriate. The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges. Ella and Emily’s stories were part of a research project which involved in-depth, in-person interviews with 13 adults in Ireland who had lost a parent or sibling while in primary or secondary school. I heard versions of their stories again and again. Years, and in some cases decades, after the deaths participants were still grappling not only with grief, but with the fear that they had not grieved “properly”. Ella even told me: I thought I was doing it wrong. Like I’d skipped a stage or something. Everyone else seemed to be moving on, and I just felt stuck. I kept thinking, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ The people I spoke to were worried they were falling behind an invisible emotional timetable. That they had missed a “stage”. That they had failed to arrive at the elusive destination of “acceptance”. Beneath these anxieties lies a powerful cultural story: that grief follows a recognisable path and, in time, comes to an end. Yet for many of the people I spoke with, no matter how many years had passed, grief did not end. It certainly changed, it sometimes resurfaced or intensified, particularly at unexpected moments (exams, milestones, becoming a parent themselves). But it did not disappear. The problem for many people I spoke with was not the enduring grief – it was the expectation that it should have finished. Silence from fear I have been thinking about grief in both a personal and professional capacity for the last 20 years. It began in 2006, after an experience early in my teaching career that, in hindsight, changed the direction of my thinking entirely. I realised then that many children come to school carrying far more than the bags on their backs. It was a bright May morning in 2006 when I began a substitute teaching position in a primary school in Ireland, teaching a class of eight-year-olds. That morning, the principal took me aside to let me know that one pupil would be returning after the death of her mother by suicide. I remember the principal saying: “Good luck, I know you will be great.” How could she know I would be great at handling this situation? I certainly didn’t feel like I would be great. I stood in the classroom, lesson plans in hand, heart in my throat, with no training, no manual, and no idea what to do. I saw the child immediately, her small shoulders hunched, her eyes averted. I never said anything to her about the death that day. I honestly did not know what to say and I was afraid that I would make things worse. Instead, I tried to be extra kind. I smiled more at her. I offered extra academic help. I also overlooked behaviour I would normally address in the classroom. I now know that this can make things worse (if peers see a student getting preferential or special treatment). My silence, though well-intentioned, came from fear. And in hindsight, it came at a cost because I look back now and feel like I did not do all that I could have to support this young girl. As the author C.S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Faced with someone else’s grief, our uncertainty can often turn into silence. We wait and we avoid. We hope grief will run its course and that the person will eventually be “over it”. This experience stayed with me long after I had left that school. It prompted questions that would become the foundation of my academic journey: why are we not taught how to support grieving children? Why is death, one of the most significant human experiences, absent from so many parts of our lives? Research shows that grief is different for everyone and doesn’t follow a simple path. Shutterstock/Madiwaso

Two years later, when given the opportunity to complete an undergraduate dissertation, I chose to explore childhood bereavement and the role of the teacher. That early project led to several years of classroom teaching and, eventually, to my research exploring childhood bereavement in Irish primary and secondary schools. I kept returning to the same unanswered questions about grief that I was encountering in everyday school life. What I began to realise is that grief is everywhere in our schools and in our lives – and yet it is largely invisible. Why we expect grief to end If we want to understand why we expect grief to end, we need to look beyond psychology textbooks and towards history, culture, and the stories we keep telling ourselves. Our ideas about “normal” grief are deeply shaped by the world we have inherited. When psychology was emerging as a discipline in the late 19th century, it promised order and understanding in a world that had become profoundly unstable. It is no coincidence then that many of our dominant grief models took shape in this moment. If we look back to Victorian Britain and Ireland, we can see that death was very much visible and part of everyday life. Mourning was public, it was prolonged, and it was socially recognised. Black clothing signalled to everyone that you had experienced a death. Memorial jewellery held hair or photographs of the dead. It was not uncommon to pose the dead and take photographs of them. Grief had a shared language, but most importantly, it had a permitted place in public life. People were not expected to hide their sorrow or to rush through it to the finish line. But that visibility did not survive the 20th century. When two world wars arrived, they brought death and grief with them on an unprecedented scale. A sea of poppies: Art installation, entitled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at Tower of London in 2014 which features 888,246 ceramic poppies, each represents a British WW1 military war dead. Shutterstock/BBA Photography

It was not surprising then, that the response to this experience was that the pain of grief had to be contained. In some cases, public mourning was often replaced by stoicism, and silence. In this context, grief came to be managed rather than expressed, echoing stoic traditions that view excessive sorrow as disruptive to one’s responsibilities. Such restraint has been defended in philosophical and religious ethics as promoting gratitude and has been known to provide comfort to some experiencing grief. But it does not provide a universal model for responding to grief. Cross-cultural bereavement research shows significant variations in how emotions are displayed and supported publicly, suggesting that stoic containment of grief reflects a cultural model, rather than an inevitable response to grief. So, it was not surprising to me that some people I spoke to mentioned wanting to hide their grief. Caoimhe, for example, grew up in the Republic of Ireland in a family of five which included her parents and two brothers. Caoimhe’s father died when she was nine after being ill for four years. Caoimhe was in primary school at the time of the death. When I met her, it had been 41 years since her father’s death. She said she felt that, even now, she has not dealt with her grief because her family did not acknowledge her father’s death and spoke about him in a way that made her feel that he was still alive and this made her feel like she had to suppress it: I was very much aware that I did not want to cause grief for my mother so I think I did withdraw a little bit. I did pull away from friends and spend a lot of time in my room just thinking and wanting to be on my own. Emily too talked about how when she returned to boarding school, she felt like she had to hide her grief: It wasn’t something that I was encouraged to talk about, I learnt very quickly when I came back that none of the nuns and none of the adults were going to engage with me at any level, so even as a child I realised this is how everyone deals with this and just get on with it. Grief framed as ‘work’ and ‘stages’ In his seminal 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud suggested that healthy grieving required detachment from the deceased. The bereaved, he argued, must gradually withdraw emotional energy from the person who has died so that life could continue. Grief was framed as work: something difficult, but purposeful, with a clear endpoint. Later, Erich Lindemann’s research with survivors of mass tragedy reinforced the idea that grief followed recognisable patterns and could be managed through “grief work”. These ideas found their most enduring cultural expression in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Although originally developed in her work with people facing a terminal diagnosis, the model was quickly adopted as a universal roadmap for bereavement. It was comforting because it reassured us that grief would unfold in order and it would, eventually, end. It became prominent in popular culture: we see in an episode of The Simpsons (Season 4, Episode 16), as Homer’s enforced abstinence from beer results in behaviour that mirrors the stages of grief – a pattern Lisa recognises and explicitly identifies as the five-stage model. Even Bridget Jones is not immune. In Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s friends gather around a wine bar table and gently inform her that she is nearing the “final stage”: acceptance. The moment is played lightly, but the message is clear – grief is something you progress through and there is an end-stage. The five so-called ‘stages’ of grief: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Shutterstock/Madua

It is easy to roll your eyes at scenes like this, but their appeal runs deep. In moments of profound powerlessness, stage models give us a sense of control. They offer a map when we feel lost, and the promise of an ending when the pain of grief feels endless. Wouldn’t it be comforting if grief really did come with a calendar? A final checkpoint. Roll the credits. Life resumes. The problem is not that these models were created, but that they became expectations. When grief returns, lingers, or refuses to soften, people often turn the discomfort inward. Let’s go back to Ella who thought, “when someone was bereaved it was the first couple of months and then everything was okay again.” The harm lies not in grieving deeply, but in believing that continuing to feel a connection or a bond with the deceased is in itself, a failure. It is against this backdrop of silence, stoicism, and stage-based thinking that more contemporary grief theories began to emerge post-1990. It is important to remember that they did not emerge in order to deny the pain of death, but to offer language for many people who described their grief in different ways – such as holding on. Why ‘letting go’ isn’t the point By the 1990s, grief researchers had begun to ask themselves a different question. What if the problem was not that people were failing to “let go”, but that our theories had actually misunderstood what grieving really feels like? Out of this shift came the idea of “continuing bonds”, developed by psychology researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and psychiatrist Steven Nickman. Their work named something many bereaved people already knew intuitively: relationships do not simply end when someone dies. Instead, they change. People carry the dead forward through memory, ritual, internal conversation, and the quiet ways they shape their lives around the death. For others, the bond continues in more private ways, kept hidden not because it is unhealthy, but because grief itself can feel like something you are meant to hide away. Mia grew up in the Republic of Ireland in a family of five which included her parents and two older brothers. When Mia was 14, her 22-year-old brother died in an accident. Mia’s other brother was 26 at the time and was suffering from mental health problems. Mia felt as if, in some ways, she was suffering a double bereavement for both her brothers.
The overarching emotion that emerged from Mia’s interview was that of anger: anger towards her parents and school for their lack of support during this difficult period. Mia felt that as a result of trying to cope at home, she began to struggle with her mental health: “I became quite depressed … I suppose I hid it very well.” This oscillation between appearing “okay” and feeling overwhelmed is captured in the dual process model of grief, developed by bereavement researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. Rather than progressing neatly from loss to recovery, the model suggests that people move back and forth between confronting their grief and setting it aside in order to function. Grief can come and go in waves. Shutterstock/WorldView Gallery

This is a mode which chimes with another of my interviewees. Sophie grew up in southern Ireland in a family of five which included her parents, and her older brother and sister. She experienced four bereavements between the age of eight and 14. When Sophie was eight her grandmother died, when she was nine her cousin, whom she was very close to, died suddenly. Following this, Sophie’s grandfather died when she was 13 and the following year, when Sophie was 14, her brother died in an accident when he was only 22. Sophie was in secondary school when the death occurred. She felt that the death of her brother had the most impact on her and recognised that her three previous experiences of death may have prepared her for it in some way. It had been 14 years since the death of her brother when I met her. Sophie discussed her experience without getting emotional. She felt that her family coped well with the death as she received a lot of familial support, particularly from her father who was instrumental in seeking support from Barretstown, a bereavement support service in Ireland. She recognised that her grief is still there, but comes in waves during different stages of her life: The first six months I had insomnia … I couldn’t sleep and that kind of improved after the first six months and I got back into a routine but I remember being triggered off at certain points … I went through a period where I was getting very upset that he wasn’t around. It subsided and then it was triggered off you know birthdays and stuff or transitions … I think then going to college was particularly a big one because transitioning into adult … being in the place and stage that he was when he died. The story we tell ourselves So grief does not disappear. It ebbs and flows, often resurfacing unexpectedly, long after others assume it should have settled. Psychologist Robert Neimeyer argues that bereavement does not just remove a person from our lives; it shatters our assumptions about how the world works because the future we imagined for ourselves is suddenly gone. This idea was mentioned by many women who took part in my research who had lost a father. They mentioned, unprompted, that they wondered who would walk them down the aisle when they got married. The future story they had told themselves about how their life would unfold was ripped out and needed to be rewritten. The sense that life is predictable or fair is disrupted. Earlier, theorist Colin Murray Parkes described this as the loss of an “assumptive world” and for many people, grief becomes the slow, uneven work of trying to rebuild a narrative that can hold what has happened. Ella, in my study captured that feeling of rupture when she said: A person full of insecurities, full of sadness; I know that the world isn’t this silly dreamy place that it might have been before … you have to look after yourself a lot more. This is why grief so often returns at moments of transition: birthdays, exams, weddings, or becoming a parent. It is not that we have not moved on; it is that the story keeps changing. This helps explain what the singer Bob Geldof described in his reflections on death that grief does not simply fade, but can “erupt” without warning, even years later. In this sense, grief is not a single emotional state to be resolved, but a recurring human experience that surfaces as life continues. These theories help explain why grief lingers and returns, but they also point us back to something more fundamental: most of us encounter grief not through theory, but through formative loss that shapes how we come to understand death at all. The first death I was 11 when I experienced my first bereavement: the death of my grandfather, my father’s father. My memories of him are bathed in warmth, he was a gentle, soft-spoken man, kind to his core. The eldest of nine children himself, he went on to raise nine of his own, my father being the first. He always made time for his grandchildren (of which he had many) with small, meaningful gestures. When we visited, he would often reach into his pocket and produce a square of chocolate or a shiny pound coin (what would be the equivalent of a €1 coin today). Those simple gifts felt like treasures. Though rooted in traditional rural life, he was ahead of his time in many ways. Family lore tells us that he insisted on pushing the pram when his children were small, an act that scandalised my grandmother, who maintained that such things simply were not done by men of his generation. But he did it anyway. That was the kind of man he was: grounded, thoughtful, and quietly progressive. His death was my first real encounter with grief, and though I did not have the words for it then, I now recognise that it left an imprint on how I understand grief. I remember being allowed to visit my grandfather in the two weeks before he died. He had developed pneumonia and was struggling to breathe, a consequence of years spent smoking at a time when the true dangers were not known. It was difficult to see him that way, frail and gasping, and I remember finding it upsetting. But looking back now, I see the quiet wisdom in what my parents did. They gave us the choice to visit, gently involving us in what I now recognise as the process of anticipatory grief. It was their way of helping us prepare, not by shielding us from death, but by offering us a way to begin understanding it. What stands out most clearly from that time is the gentle support and encouragement of my father. He has never been afraid to talk about death. His calm presence and quiet faith offered us a kind of anchor, not through denial or platitudes, but through openness, steadiness, and trust in something greater. His belief did not erase the pain, but it gave it a shape, a space to be held. In a moment that could have felt frightening or isolating, his comfort gave me strength. When my grandfather died, I remember his body being brought home and laid out in a large front room, as was tradition in rural Ireland. Through my adult eyes now, I can see the beauty in that ritual, a final gesture of love and inclusion. But as a child, I was afraid. It took time to summon the courage to go into that room and see him laid out. I remember the stillness of the room, the unfamiliar scent in the air, the cold stiffness of his fingers. Time felt suspended. I cried a lot, as the truth settled in: the people we love can die. My parents could die. My siblings. Even me. That was the moment when the permanence of death first imprinted itself on my young mind. The individuality of grief What continues to strike me in both my personal reflections and research is how profoundly individual the experience of grief can be, even when shared within the same household. In writing about the death of my grandfather, I decided to speak with my siblings to understand how they remembered that time. One of my siblings, who is characteristically less openly emotional, began to cry as we spoke. This was an unexpected reaction that neither of us had anticipated. They recalled how, even though their belief in God and religion had disappeared, they had spent weeks praying that our grandfather would recover. “I used to pray every night,” they said. “And when he died, I just stopped. What was the point?” Later in the conversation, they added quietly: “Our parents just didn’t talk about him afterwards. They just didn’t talk about him.” I was struck by how different their experience was from mine. I remembered that period as one of openness and inclusion, marked by quiet support, meaningful rituals, and humorous stories. For my sibling, however, it was defined by silence and confirmation of their disillusionment about religion. The contrast was sharp, but it was an important reminder of the individual reality of grief. We had lived through the same bereavement, in the same house, with the same emotional support from our parents, and yet we had constructed completely different narratives around it. It was the same in my research. Over and over again, participants described the vastly different ways that grief manifested within their families. What this teaches us is that grief is not experienced equally and it is not synchronised. Each person carries a different understanding of the person who has died, a different level of emotional maturity, and a different internal process. We must resist the urge to generalise. We cannot assume that because one person in a family appears to be “doing okay,” their sibling must be too. Nor can we assume that a lack of visible distress equates to emotional resilience. Grief is deeply personal, shaped by both internal and external factors, and influenced by what is spoken, what is avoided, and what is felt alone in silence. What happens if there is no end point? So what happens when we stop expecting grief to end? The five stages endure because they promise an endpoint when grief makes time feel suspended. It is not surprising that for many of us in moments of profound grief, that promise can feel like a lifeline. What is striking is that those who write most honestly about grief, those who speak from inside it rather than about it from a distance, rarely describe an ending at all. Freud himself, so often associated with detachment, wrote something very different later in life. In a 1929 letter to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, written after the death of Freud’s daughter Sophie, he acknowledged that grief does not resolve: We know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside … but we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. The pain may soften, Freud suggested, but the loss is never replaced. The love endures, and so does the absence. Grief does not neatly resolve, and great thinkers have recognised this. Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor wrote in his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, about his own experience of suffering, and observed that “if there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering,” and that “in some way suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning”. Grief is not a detour from life to be exited as quickly as possible; it is a form of suffering that can become part of the fabric of a meaningful life. Frankl also reminded us that everything can be taken from us but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. This is a reminder that how we carry grief matters even when the pain remains. This aligns with what many people who have lived with grief tell us: the pain may become less intense over time, but the love endures. Nearly a century after Freud, the songwriter Nick Cave wrote publicly about grief following the death of his son, describing it not as something to be mastered or completed, but as a state of profound powerlessness. Grief, he wrote, “is not something you pass through, as there is no other side.” What remains is not closure, but humility. A recognition that love does not disappear when someone dies, and that the ache left behind is not evidence of failure, but of attachment. Cave speaks of grief as something that changes shape over time, becoming less raw perhaps, but no less real. Geldof echoed this in his reflections on the death of his daughter Peaches, saying that “time accommodates” the grief, but it “is ever present.” The distinction matters. Getting on with life does not require leaving the dead behind. It means learning to carry grief alongside love, and absence alongside presence. Ongoing bonds with the dead are not signs of denial or pathology, but very often the way people survive. When grief is allowed to be ongoing, when the dead can be spoken about, something shifts. People stop measuring themselves against an imagined timeline and they stop waiting to “graduate” from grief. Perhaps the discomfort we feel around enduring grief says less about the bereaved and more about the rest of us. Grief unsettles us because it reminds us of life’s fragility and our own mortality. But if we allow ourselves to move away from the idea that grief is a problem to be solved, we make room for a more honest understanding of grief. It is likely that grief does not end because love does not end. What changes is not the bond, but how we learn to live with it. For you: more from our Insights series: Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack

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Aoife Lynam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.