gods, monsters, and dreams you don’t have to believe in

1. There are only 5 stages of grief, and they’re linear.

Nope. Actually, the original describer of those stages, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, came up with them after working with terminally ill patients. That is, she was observing the general stages people go through when they’re dying—not the stages people go through when they’re grieving. And even if the stages often apply to the grieving, they don’t describe the specific order in which everyone experiences them. Some people won’t experience all five—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and most will experience whatever they experience in whatever order they happen to occur.

Also, I’m not particularly happy with the word “depression” in this list. Depression is a whole other condition from grief, often long-term or recurring, rarely brought on by a specific event, a mental health condition for which people seek treatment (therapy, medication, TMS, etc.). Grief is the human condition, a consequence of living as a full person who loves and hopes and tries and fails and cannot control the fact that loss is part of life.

2. Normal people stop grieving after a year.

Like I said, grief is part of life. When was the last time life paid any attention to timelines? You’re alive, which means by nature you’re a chaotic being. Your thoughts ping around faster than a laser at a laser tag game, more randomly than a June bug you’re trying to get away from on a summer evening. You’re full of contradictions and ideas and memories, plans for the future and scenes from movies. Heck, physicists argue that linear time is an illusion in any case (and no, I don’t understand that science, so I can’t explain it to you). Of course your grief isn’t going to confine itself to a particular period of time. And remember, really, there is no “normal” here.

3. If you talk to those you’ve lost, you’re crazy or getting there.

I suppose the cultural exception to this concept is the television scene where someone places flowers on the grave of their lost loved one and talks to them, maybe once a year. But some don’t have a cemetery to go to, or the grave is far from them, or they just think of their loved one during normal, everyday tasks. If you want to talk to them, do it! Talk out loud or in your head. Imagine what they’d say in response. These conversations keep you connected to a person whose presence still reverberates through your life. They are with you because they taught you, influenced your taste and your conversations, helped create the person you are now. Just like a mother will always have some of her baby’s DNA, you’ll always have this person as part of you. And whether or not you believe in an afterlife, engaging in these conversations is an act of creation—and applying creativity to our experiences is how we make meaning of them.

4. You need to move on.

I’m not sure what this even means. Move on, move past. Have you ever driven past a car wreck? Does your memory of it disappear just because you’re no longer looking at it? Does the wreck itself disappear? Like I said, there’s no normal. We’re all just navigating the marshes of life. Some folks will take a leap and land on solid ground—like a widow going on a dating site and finding real, sustainable love. But others are going to proceed more slowly, putting a foot out to test the ground before relying on it. And still others will take a different direction entirely. Feelings will come up when they will, and as Rilke wrote, “no feeling is final.” So the feelings connected with your grief will rise and fall, come to the forefront and recede to the background. Your job is to notice them, be compassionate with yourself as you have them, and not try to stuff them down inside.

One final thought: please remember that you can grieve so many things other than a loved one dying. Whatever we can lose, we can grieve: pets, relationships, health, homes, careers, and more. We’re human. We’re allowed to have reactions to loss.