Navigating Grief: There Is No One Way Through
I recently experienced the unexpected loss of a dear friend after a long illness. Though I’m not a stranger to grief, each loss still feels unfamiliar—as if I’m meeting it for the first time. As a mental health nurse practitioner, I have also walked beside many clients through their own seasons of loss. And one truth becomes clear again and again: the way we talk about grief—culturally and personally—often makes a hard experience even harder.
In our society, we don’t talk openly about grief. We don’t always know how to sit with someone else’s pain, and even those who love us most can struggle with what to say. This can lead to well-intentioned but painful missteps: questions about when you’ll feel “better,” pressure to “move on,” or assumptions that there’s a timeline to follow.
You may have heard of the stages of grief, first introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969. While originally meant to describe the emotional process of someone facing their own death, the model has since been applied more broadly to grief and loss. The stages are:
Denial – Feeling emotionally numb, or struggling to believe that the person is truly gone.
Anger – A natural reaction that can be directed at many things: the person who died, the situation, ourselves, or even a higher power.
Bargaining – A mental attempt to regain control, often through “what if” thoughts or making imagined deals with God or the universe.
Depression – Deep sadness and longing, which can feel overwhelming or come in waves.
Acceptance – Not about “getting over” the loss but learning to live with it. The grief softens, though it may still show up in unexpected moments.
It’s important to understand that these stages are not a checklist or a linear path. You may move back and forth between them, experience several at once, or find that some don’t resonate with your experience at all. Reaching acceptance doesn’t mean your grief is over—it means you’re finding ways to carry it alongside your life. And it doesn’t mean that you may not revisit other stages at different times.
There is no right way to grieve. Your journey is your own.
It may help to think about grief as a bookshelf. At first, after a loss, life can feel like a colorless, empty bookshelf—with only Grief sitting there, heavy and alone. Over time, the shelf begins to fill again. Little by little, life adds other books—memories, moments of joy, new routines, connections. But Grief remains. It doesn’t disappear.
As more time passes, the shelf becomes full. Color returns to life. Grief is still there, but it fits into the story now. It's just one of the many volumes. This is normal.
Grief isn’t something you necessarily “get over.” It becomes part of you—folded into your life. Sometimes you’ll take that book down and revisit it—on anniversaries, birthdays, or quiet moments of missing. Then you place it back on the shelf, alongside all the others.
This, too, is love. When someone we love is gone, the love doesn’t vanish. It lives on, held tenderly alongside our grief. Be gentle with yourself. Grief is love, living on.
If you are in the midst of loss, I hope you can offer yourself compassion. Grief is not a problem to solve or a wound to rush through. It is a reflection of love, and allowing yourself to feel it is part of the healing.
💙Marie Smith, PMHNP
If you are experiencing a medical or psychiatric emergency, or need immediate support, please do not wait for a response.
Instead, contact emergency services:
Call 911 for immediate assistance
National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Dial 988
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
