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Grief is a deeply human response to loss rather than a problem to fix, and it looks different for each of us.

Expectations about how grief should look or last can leave us feeling as though we are mourning the wrong way.

Letting go of expectations about grief can change how we make sense of our losses and support one another.

Most of us have been told, in one way or another, that grief is something to get over. We hear it in well-intended phrases about moving on or finding closure, which suggest that mourning follows a predictable pattern and ends in due time, though grief rarely cooperates with that schedule. Bereavement scholars describe grief, however painful, as a natural, deeply human response to loss rather than a problem to be fixed, and one that looks different for each of us. Understanding why there is no single right way to grieve can change how we make sense of our own losses and how we show up for one another.

Grief Rarely Moves in Stages

Grief is often pictured as a staircase, with denial on the bottom step and acceptance at the top. This notion is largely credited to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose 1969 book, On Death and Dying, outlined five stages observed in terminally ill patients as they came to terms with their own deaths, rather than people mourning a loss. While this work gave us a helpful starting point, the stages have been widely misread as a sequence everyone who grieves "should" move through—a belief experts now caution against. As noted in On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross's final book with coauthor David Kessler, the stages “were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat........

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