Grief Doesn't Follow a Schedule (And Other Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me)

There's a moment that happens in almost every session I have with someone who's grieving. It usually comes about twenty minutes in, after the small talk has worn off and the real thing finally surfaces. They lean forward a little and say something like, "I thought I'd be further along by now."

I hear some version of that sentence more than almost anything else. And every time, I want to gently take it out of their hands, because it's not true, and it's not fair to them.

We've been sold this idea that grief has a natural projectory. First, you're sad, then you're angry, then you bargain a bit, then acceptance, and that's that. You�re done, you've "healed," you can go back to being who you were before.

I understand why that idea is appealing. It gives people something to hold onto in a situation that otherwise feels unsupported and alone. But in this work, I have never seen grief actually behave that way.

Grief is not a staircase. It's more like weather. Some days it's light rain you barely notice. Other days, out of nowhere, it's a storm that knocks the wind out of you, often triggered by something small and unremarkable. A song. A smell. You're not regressing. You're not failing at grief. You're just having a very human response to having loved someone, or something, deeply.

Grief doesn't only show up after a death, even though that's when we tend to give ourselves permission to feel it. I've sat with people grieving a marriage that ended, a career that was taken from them, a body that no longer works the way it used to, a pet who was quietly there for every hard year. I've sat with people grieving a future they had planned out. All of it is real. All of it deserves space.

One of the harder truths I try to offer people, gently, is that grief isn't something you get over. It's something you learn to carry differently. In the beginning, the loss is all you can see, and it colors everything else. Over time, as you let yourself actually feel it instead of pushing it down, the loss doesn't shrink but has changed your life.

If you're in the thick of it right now, here's what I'd actually say to you, sitting across from each other rather than through a screen: �You don't have to act as if you are okay for the people around you. You're allowed to still be sad about something that happened, even if other people seem to think you should be "over it." And you don't have to go through this without support, even if the people who love you don't fully know how to help, sometimes the people closest to us are too close to it, or too afraid of saying the wrong thing, to truly be there for you.�

Grief and loss support is, in practice, not fixing anything, because there's nothing broken that needs fixing.

Just having someone alongside you while you find your footing, someone who isn't going to flinch when it gets hard and isn't in a hurry for you to feel better.

If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to talk. You don't have to carry this by yourself.