Grief Does Not Move in a Line

Month three. A Tuesday that was fine until the afternoon. The thought arrives with a ruler: I should be further along by now. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a heaviness without words. The ruler comes from an old idea, that grief moves through stages in a line. Research has looked at that idea, and at what grief does instead. The studies read for this article did not test whether a thought comes first.

The line

The five stages of grief come from a 1969 book by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross about people who were dying. They spread into talk about every kind of loss. In 2007, Paul Maciejewski and colleagues tested the stage idea in a study of 233 bereaved people followed over two years, according to a summary of it. Emotions such as yearning and acceptance rose and fell, but the participants did not move through neat, ordered stages. Only summaries of that study were read for this article.

The swing

The thought has a second voice, and it swings. Some hours it says: I miss them. Other hours it says: there is paperwork, and a meal to make. In 1999, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut described this as oscillation. In their dual process model, coping with a death alternates between loss-oriented coping, which turns toward the loss, and restoration-oriented coping, which turns toward daily life and new roles. At times the bereaved person confronts the tasks of grieving, at other times avoids them, and both are part of the process. It is a model, with research behind it, not a measurement of one person’s grief.

The bond

A third thought says: they are still with me. For a long time, grief theory treated a continuing tie to the dead as something to be given up. In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman collected studies and clinical observations that challenged that view. They proposed continuing bonds: an ongoing inner relationship with the dead, open to positive and negative consequences. In Japan, ritual contact with ancestors is long established. A 1969 paper by Yamamoto and colleagues, “Mourning in Japan,” suggested that the near-universal custom of ancestor worship served an adaptive function in mourning. That was a psychiatric paper from its time, and it describes a custom, not an outcome that was measured.

What is not known

Whether the thought comes before the heaviness or after it is not known.

Whether a thought like “I should be further along” changes how grief goes is open. The studies read here describe patterns of emotion and coping, not that thought.

Whether the oscillation and the continuing bond help every bereaved person the same way is also open. Models describe tendencies. Grief that overwhelms daily life can call for professional care. This article describes thoughts, not treatment.