If you have read books that promised denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and you have quietly believed you were doing grief wrong because the stages did not match what you were feeling, please hear this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You are not doing it wrong. You were given the wrong map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This piece is for the bereaved person who has cycled through the stages out of order. Who has reached \u201cacceptance\u201d only to be back in raw anger an hour later. Who has wondered, in the quiet of 3am, whether something is broken in them because their grief refuses to behave the way the model promised it would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nothing is broken in you. The model is broken for you. Let me explain, and then offer something that might actually fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where the five stages of grief actually came from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Elisabeth K\u00fcbler-Ross<\/a> was a Swiss-American psychiatrist who, in 1969, published a book called On Death and Dying<\/a><\/em>. It was a landmark work for its time, she was one of the first clinicians to take seriously the inner experience of people facing the end of their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The five stages<\/a> \u2014 denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance<\/strong> \u2014 came from her observations of terminally ill patients<\/strong>. People who knew they themselves were dying, and were processing the approach of their own death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did not develop the five stages of grief for the bereaved. She did not develop them for grieving parents, surviving spouses, siblings left behind, or children who lost a mother. She developed them for the dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This matters because the inner experience of facing your own death is structurally different from the inner experience of carrying someone else\u2019s death across the rest of your life.<\/strong> A terminally ill patient is moving toward something. A bereaved person is carrying something, and the carrying does not end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n K\u00fcbler-Ross herself, late in her career, acknowledged that the stages were never meant to be a checklist or a sequence. They were meant as a description of emotional terrain that could occur in any order, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not at all. But by then, pop culture had already flattened her model into a staircase. We ended up with a generation of grieving people quietly believing they were failing because they did not pass through the stages in order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You did not fail. The simplification did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I sit with grieving parents … months 3 to 24 out from their loss, the season I write for and walk with<\/a> … I hear the same complaints over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI keep cycling back.\u201d<\/strong> Someone reaches what they thought was acceptance. Then a song plays in a grocery store. Then it is the first birthday their child is not here for. Then it is a stranger asking how many children they have. And the floor opens again, and they are back in raw shock, as though no time has passed. The staircase model says this is regression. It is not. It is the actual shape of grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI never went through some of them.\u201d<\/strong> Many bereaved parents I have walked with do not experience bargaining. Many do not experience denial in any conventional sense. Some live in a kind of permanent quiet acceptance from day one, and a slow-burning anger that comes years later. The staircase model says you should have passed through all five. The reality is you don\u2019t have to. They are not boxes to be checked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m stuck in one of them.\u201d<\/strong> Some people stay in depression-shaped grief for years. Others stay in anger. The model implies they are failing to \u201cprogress.\u201d But progression is the wrong word, because grief is not a destination, and there is nothing to get to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI never reach acceptance.\u201d<\/strong> This is the most painful one. The framework promised a stage in which the grief would be integrated, accepted, made peace with. For many bereaved parents, that stage never arrives … and the longer it does not arrive, the more they feel themselves failing at grief. But the truth is that for catastrophic loss, there is no final stage of acceptance.<\/strong> There is only the work of carrying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The five stages of grief were a generous beginning, a way to break the silence around dying. But as a roadmap for the bereaved, they have caused real harm. They have made grieving people feel broken for grieving the way grief actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grief, in my experience and in the experience of every bereaved parent I have ever sat with, is cyclical, not linear.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You walk through a season. You think you have reached some kind of settling. Then something … a smell, a date on the calendar, a child the same age your child would have been … pulls you back to the beginning. You start the walking again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not a staircase. It is not a series of rooms you pass through and close behind you. It is more like a path through landscape<\/a> that you walk again and again, and each time the landscape looks slightly different because you are slightly different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why \u201cAre you getting better?\u201d is the wrong question to ask a grieving person. Better is the staircase question. The right question is: Are you still walking?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are still walking, at any pace, including walking back, you are doing the work<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the framework<\/a> I built out of my own survival, and out of the work I now do with other grieving parents. It is the framework that sits underneath everything I write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has five landmarks, like the five stages of grief. But the landmarks are not a staircase. They are a circle.<\/strong> You walk them more than once. The shape changes as you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first landmark. Waking up to the reality of grief. Not the night of the loss itself, most people are in shock that night and the days after. The Call is the moment, days or weeks in, when the body realizes the loss is permanent. It is when you stand in front of an open refrigerator for ten minutes and cannot remember what wanting feels like. It is when the future tense quietly disappears from your interior life. The Call is not loud. It is the smallest yes the body can still say to being alive at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What you actually do in the bad seasons. Not \u201cfeel your feelings\u201d \u2014 which is not a tool, it is a sentence. Real, small, physical practices for getting through 3am. Cold water on the wrists. One sentence on paper. Something warm in your hands. A brief message to a person who can hold it. (I wrote a full guide for this \u2014 download it here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The slow, repeating work of carrying loss through time. The work that does not have a finish line. The work that demands you keep moving forward at any pace, including walking, and refuse to make permanent decisions in the worst minute. This landmark is where most of the years of grief actually live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Functioning in a world that does not know what you are carrying. Holding down the job. Raising the surviving children. Going to the meeting. Quietly drowning in the off-hours. The Double Life is the particular loneliness of being a high-functioning griever, and the practices that make it survivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Letting love take a new shape. Legacy work does not begin with a noble idea. It begins with an unbearable absence.<\/strong> You build a thing … a foundation, a fundraiser, a book, a podcast, a small practice of helping someone else, even a single annual act on their birthday … and the thing becomes the way you keep being their parent. It is not closure. It is not \u201cmoving on.\u201d It is a way of carrying that takes the shape of giving forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the staircase model has been hurting you, here is how to begin using a different shape:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Stop asking \u201cAm I getting better?\u201d<\/strong> Start asking \u201cAm I still walking?\u201d The first question implies an endpoint. The second one is true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Recognize where you are today, knowing you may be somewhere else tomorrow.<\/strong> You might be in The Walk for three weeks, get pulled back to The Call for an afternoon when a song plays, and end the day in The Legacy because you wrote a small letter. All of this is normal. None of it is regression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. Use The Tools when 3am comes.<\/strong> The bad nights happen. The framework does not eliminate them \u2014 nothing does. It gives you something to put your hands on when they arrive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Do not force Legacy.<\/strong> Some bereaved people never feel the pull to build something. That is a complete life. Survival is the work for years. Legacy is not a measure of how much you loved them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 5. Walk the path with someone who has walked it.<\/strong> The single most useful thing in the work I do is being a person who has walked it and is still walking it. Find that person<\/a> \u2014 me, or a grief therapist<\/a>, or a bereaved parents support group, or one trusted friend who lost someone. Do not walk it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This framework is a path. It is not a substitute for clinical care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are in active suicidal crisis, please call or text 988<\/strong> (in the US, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or your local emergency number. If your grief has tipped into clinical depression … if you have lost the ability to eat, sleep, work, or care for the people you are responsible for … please talk to a clinician<\/a>. There are grief therapists who do excellent work, and grief is a recognized clinical specialty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A framework is a way to make meaning out of an experience. A clinician is a person who is trained to help when the experience becomes more than meaning can hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both exist for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No. Her work was groundbreaking and compassionate, and she helped open the broader cultural conversation about dying and grief. The harm came from the simplification of her model into a sequential checklist. She herself, late in her career, said the stages were never meant to be linear. The cultural distortion of her work is what has hurt grieving people \u2014 not the original work itself.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For many bereaved people \u2014 especially bereaved parents \u2014 no. There is no final stage where the grief is fully integrated and put down. There is only the continual work of carrying it. This is not failure. This is the actual shape of carrying love when the person you loved is not here to receive it.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The honest answer: the rest of your life, in some form. It changes shape. The acute, suffocating phase usually softens after the first 12-24 months, but waves return \u2014 sometimes years later \u2014 around anniversaries, milestones, holidays, and unexpected triggers. Time does not heal it. We learn to carry it. Some wounds become a permanent part of the architecture.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n First \u2014 you are likely not stuck. You are walking a cyclical path that returns. Second \u2014 if you have lost the ability to function (eating, sleeping, working, caring for others), please talk to a grief therapist or your doctor. A framework is not a substitute for clinical care if the bad seasons become most of your seasons.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The free guide \u2014 5 Gentle Steps for Carrying Grief Without Moving On<\/em> \u2014 walks through all five landmarks in detail, with practices and reflection prompts for each. You can download it here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n If the five stages of grief have ever made you feel like you were failing at grief, please hear this one more time: you are not.<\/strong> You were given the wrong map. The path you are walking is the actual path. The fact that you are still walking it, in any direction, at any pace, is the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am still walking it too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Justin<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy the five stages don\u2019t work for the bereaved<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What grief actually is<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nA different framework: the Living Legacy Path<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Call<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Tools<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Walk<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Double Life<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Legacy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to actually use this framework<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nA note on professional help<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n
Was Elisabeth K\u00fcbler-Ross wrong?<\/h3>\n
Is there ever a final stage of acceptance for catastrophic loss?<\/h3>\n
How long does grief last?<\/h3>\n
What should I do if I am stuck in one stage?<\/h3>\n
Where can I learn more about the Living Legacy Path?<\/h3>\n
Walking with you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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