Grief Is Not
a Staircase

When someone we love dies, we reach instinctively for a framework. We want to know: What will happen to me? Is what I am feeling normal? When will this end? For decades, a tidy answer has circulated in hospitals, self-help books, and grief counselling handouts: you will pass through five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — and emerge, eventually, on the other side. It is a comforting map. It is also, for most people, a fiction.

That is not to say the model is worthless. Its originator, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, was doing something genuinely radical when she published On Death and Dying in 1969.¹ She insisted that dying patients deserved to be listened to — not sedated into silence — and her interviews with terminally ill individuals were an act of profound humanisation at a time when death was routinely hidden from patients themselves. The stages she described were observed in people facing their own deaths, not bereavement. The subsequent application to grief was, in a real sense, a misreading of her work.

Where the Stages Came From

Kübler-Ross identified five emotional states commonly reported by dying patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.¹ She never claimed these were universal, sequential, or complete. "They are not neat," she wrote. "People do not move through them in a linear fashion." Nevertheless, as the model spread into popular culture, those caveats were stripped away. By the 1980s and 90s, the "five stages of grief" had taken on an almost prescriptive quality — a checklist against which the bereaved measured, and frequently found fault with, their own mourning.

"The idea that grief follows a predictable sequence is not supported by the empirical literature. There is no evidence that people go through stages."

— George Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Columbia University²

Empirical research has repeatedly failed to validate a stage model. A landmark 2007 study by Maciejewski and colleagues at Yale, which is often cited as supporting the stages, actually found that acceptance was the most commonly reported response from the very beginning of bereavement — not the final destination — and that no discrete emotional stages could be reliably identified as universal.³ The authors themselves were careful to qualify their findings; subsequent media coverage was not.

↑ These states are real human experiences — but research shows they do not proceed in order, may not all appear, and are not the only responses to loss.

What the Research Actually Shows

George Bonanno's extensive research into bereavement at Columbia University has produced one of the most robust findings in the field: resilience is the most common response to loss, not prolonged suffering.² In multiple longitudinal studies, roughly 35–65% of bereaved individuals showed low levels of grief symptoms throughout — they were sad, but they functioned, and they did not enter a prolonged period of acute distress. This does not mean they loved the deceased less. It means human beings are, by and large, more resilient than the stage model implies.

Bonanno identified several distinct trajectories of grief — patterns of response that vary considerably across individuals:⁴

Crucially, none of these trajectories maps onto the five-stage sequence. People oscillate, plateau, regress, and surge unexpectedly. A bereaved person may feel genuine laughter on a Tuesday and complete devastation on the Wednesday that follows. Both are normal.

The Problem with Stage Thinking

The harm of the stage model is not merely academic. When grieving people believe they are supposed to follow a script, they can feel profound shame and confusion when they do not. Someone who feels little denial — who accepts immediately and sharply that the person is gone — may worry they are in shock, or that acceptance is "wrong." A person who does not pass through what looks like depression may wonder whether they loved the deceased enough. And those whose grief persists well beyond what feels like an allotted time may feel broken.

The model can also discourage help-seeking. If one believes grief is a natural process with five discrete steps at the end of which everything resolves, then persistent, disabling sorrow may be framed as "still being in a stage" rather than a condition — Prolonged Grief Disorder — that research has shown responds well to targeted treatment.⁵

"Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a human experience to be lived."

— Pauline Boss, family therapist and originator of ambiguous loss theory⁶

The Dual Process Model: A More Useful Framework

Among the models that have emerged from the research, the Dual Process Model developed by Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut in 1999 has proven particularly durable.⁷ It proposes that bereaved individuals oscillate between two orientations:

Loss-orientation

Focusing on the person who has died — grieving, yearning, processing the loss itself. This is what most people picture when they think of grief: crying, remembering, feeling the absence acutely.

Restoration-orientation

Attending to the secondary consequences of the loss — adapting to a new identity, managing practical matters (finances, household responsibilities), building a changed life. This is not "moving on" in a dismissive sense; it is the necessary work of continuing to exist in a world where a central person is absent.

Healthy grieving, Stroebe and Schut argued, involves oscillation between these two modes — moving back and forth as circumstances, energy, and need dictate. Neither orientation is superior. Neither is a stage to pass through and leave behind. The model has received substantial empirical support and has been integrated into grief counselling frameworks internationally.⁸

Common Experiences After Death and Loss

Below are experiences that research and clinical literature have identified as common — sometimes surprisingly so — in bereavement. They are not stages. They may appear in any order, recur unpectedly, or be absent entirely. Their presence does not indicate pathology; their absence does not indicate insufficient grief.

Searching and Yearning

John Bowlby, whose attachment theory forms a foundation for modern grief research, described a powerful urge to search for and recover the lost person.⁹ Bereaved individuals may find themselves looking for the person in crowds, picking up the phone to call them, or momentarily forgetting — and then remembering — that they are gone. This is not delusion; it is the attachment system doing what it evolved to do.

Grief Bursts

Intense waves of acute grief that arise without warning, often triggered by sensory cues — a smell, a song, a particular quality of light. These are sometimes called "grief attacks" or "grief waves," and they can persist for years or even decades after a loss, becoming less frequent but no less intense when they occur.¹⁰

Hallucinations and Sense of Presence

Studies have found that a significant proportion of bereaved widows and widowers — in some samples, more than half — report seeing, hearing, or sensing the presence of the deceased.¹¹ This experience tends to be comforting rather than distressing. It is considered a normal feature of bereavement and is not indicative of mental illness.

Relief

When a death follows a prolonged illness, or when a relationship was complicated or painful, relief is a common response — and one that many bereaved people feel intense guilt about. Research confirms that relief is not evidence of cruelty or absence of love; it is a natural human response to the end of suffering, one's own or another's.¹²

Physical Symptoms

Grief is profoundly physical. Fatigue, chest tightness, a sensation of emptiness in the stomach, shortness of breath, and appetite disruption are all well-documented somatic responses to bereavement.¹³ The language we use — "heartbroken," "devastated" — reflects how embodied grief actually is.

Cognitive Disruption

Concentration difficulties, forgetfulness, and a feeling of unreality ("derealization") are common in acute grief. Some bereaved people describe their minds as "foggy" for months. This appears to reflect the cognitive load of processing loss — attention resources that are being deployed internally are unavailable for external tasks.¹⁴

Post-Traumatic Growth

While grief literature has rightly become cautious about overstating positive outcomes, research by Tedeschi and Calhoun has documented that some bereaved individuals report meaningful personal growth following loss — shifts in values, deepened relationships, and a changed sense of what matters.¹⁵ This is not inevitable, nor should it be expected or pressured. But it is real, and it is worth knowing that loss does not only diminish.

Ambiguous Loss

Psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term "ambiguous loss" to describe losses without clear resolution — a family member with dementia who is physically present but psychologically absent, a missing person whose fate is unknown, an estrangement.⁶ Such losses can be particularly difficult to grieve precisely because their ambiguity resists the closure that conventional grief frameworks imply is possible and necessary.

What This Means in Practice

None of this is to say that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was wrong to put grief on the cultural map, or that the five emotions she identified are not real. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are genuine human experiences. The problem is the sequential, universal, prescriptive packaging — the implication that one must pass through each stage in turn, and that failure to do so is a deviation from healthy mourning.

The more useful view, supported by several decades of grief research, is this: grief is idiosyncratic, non-linear, and highly individual. It is shaped by the nature of the relationship, the circumstances of the death, the griever's personality and attachment style, the availability of social support, cultural context, and a dozen other factors that no five-step model can capture. There is no correct way to grieve. There is only the particular way that you grieve — which is likely to be messy, surprising, and entirely your own.

And that, it turns out, is completely normal.