Grief Doesn’t Have Stages

I was nine when my dad died.

Twenty-eight years later, there are still days grief sneaks back in. Nothing special happens. No anniversary, no trigger I can point to. It just shows up, and for a minute I’m a nine year old boy who’s missing my dad.

Maybe you’ve experienced that too. For you, maybe it wasn’t a parent. Maybe it was a spouse, a child, a marriage, a version of your life you thought you’d already grieved and moved past. You think you’ve done the work and moved on. And then one random day it comes rushing back.

And in those moments it can feel like your going backwards. We treat grief like something we can move on from, so when we fall back into it it’s like we are failing.

I want to challenge that thought, because I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect. Where did we get the idea that grief is supposed to move in a straight line toward being done? Turns out, it’s not in the Bible.