Post 16: Am I Grieving Wrong?

Right away, when Rex passed, I knew that the only way I was going to make it through was to rely on my faith in Jesus Christ. Hours before he died, when I was alone with him in the hospital, and continuously that first week, I had marvelous experiences with the Spirit that testified to me that this was not a surprise to God nor a random act. I knew God was not leaving me alone to handle it. 

I decided I wasn’t going to be angry. I knew there were five stages of grief, and that anger was one of them. But I learned from my own experience that anger drives the spirit away, and I couldn’t afford to be left uncomforted and unsustained. When I felt frustrated, I prayed for a change of heart and a way to handle the immediate problem without becoming angry. 

I focused on the good things happening and the miracles I experienced. I filled my home with quiet music, scripture, conference talks, and other resources that helped me feel surrounded by the Spirit.

Yet I couldn’t help wondering if I was making a mistake.  I had heard that if you don’t go through all five stages, the grief will catch up with you later. There’s no getting away without grieving.

But was I doing it wrong?

A few months later, while teaching piano lessons for the first time since COVID started, I glanced at my watch and saw it was 5:15. Without conscious effort, I thought, Rex will be walking in the door any minute.

I couldn’t even finish that thought silently when the awful realization hit— he would not be walking in a few minutes. 

Then the devastating truth: He would never walk through that door again.

The false expectation collided with the awful truth and hit me like a sledgehammer. The emotional whiplash of those few seconds felt like a gut punch. 

Was I stuck in denial? That was one of the five stages too.

Every time I had a fleeting thought that I saw him in a parking lot, or expected to find a text message from him, I worried that I wasn’t doing grief correctly.

No anger, clearly in denial, and making no movement to acceptance.

Eventually I learned something I wish I'd known from the beginning: the five stages weren't developed by studying widows like me. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book, On Death and Dying, appeared in 1969. Her work came from interviews with roughly 200 terminally ill patients facing their own deaths. 

The surprising truth is that the famous five-stage model wasn’t developed from research on bereaved people at all. Kübler-Ross was describing patients facing their own deaths. Her work was a major influence on hospice care in the United States and helped bring attention, dignity, and honest conversation to people who were dying. That contribution matters. 

But somewhere along the way, the five stages took on a life of their own. They became something much more rigid in popular culture: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—as though healthy grieving meant passing through each one.

Later, when I discovered George Bonanno’s book, The Other Side of Sadness, I found research that looked much more like the grief I had actually lived. Bonanno’s longitudinal research found something very different: bereaved people do not follow one required path. Resilience was actually the most common pattern in his studies.

As I kept reading, I discovered that several things I had accepted as basic facts about grief had surprisingly little research behind them:

• The more you loved, the more you grieve.

• You must go through certain stages, and if you skip one, the grief will catch up with you later. 

• If you are doing well too soon, you may be in denial.

• Anger is a necessary part of grief.

That was startling to me. I had trusted the stages because I thought they were established facts. When my grief didn’t match them, I didn’t question the theory. I questioned myself.

That may be the part of this story that troubles me most. I was grieving. Deeply. I was missing Rex, learning how to live without him, relying on God, crying, laughing, functioning, falling apart, and getting back up again.

Yet because my experience didn’t match a familiar theory, I wondered whether I was doing grief incorrectly.

Later, learning more about the grieving brain gave me a much better explanation for those moments at 5:15. My mind knew Rex was dead. But after thirty-two years, my brain had learned thousands of patterns built around his presence. It expected him to come home. It still looked for him in familiar places. 

As I wrote earlier in this series, the brain has to learn, through repeated experience, a world that has changed.

That wasn’t denial. It was grief.

Better research gave me permission to ask a different question.

Not, what stage am I in? But what is actually happening to me?

The problem wasn’t that my grief failed to fit the theory.

The theory was never an accurate map of how bereavement actually works.