You already know grief does not follow a map.

It does not move in straight lines or offer signposts that tell you where you are or how long you have left to go. It arrives when it wants, stays longer than you expect, and changes shape just when you think you have learned how to carry it.

You have probably heard about the stages. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Five words that sound orderly, almost comforting. As if grief is something you progress through, something that eventually releases you once you have done it correctly.

What is often left out is this: those stages were first described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her work with people who were dying, not the ones left behind. They were never meant to be a roadmap for mourners. Somewhere along the way, they became a blueprint we quietly measure ourselves against. Am I angry enough yet? Why am I not accepting this? Should I be further along by now?

If you are grieving, you already know the truth. Some mornings you wake up and the loss feels distant, almost manageable, like something you can carry without thinking about it too much. Other days it shows up without warning, knocking the breath out of you in the grocery store, during a meeting, while you are brushing your teeth. There are moments when you feel almost okay, and moments when the weight of what is gone makes it hard to move. Sometimes both happen in the same hour.

For some people, grief cleaves life into two distinct parts: before and after. There is the life that existed when everything still made sense, and the life that began the moment it did not. The moment you received the call. The moment you knew something irreversible had happened. The moment your body understood what your mind could not yet hold.

People who have not lived this kind of grief often do not see the line. They move fluidly between past and present, while you are constantly aware of the fracture. They ask how long it has been, as if that should tell them something. As if time itself heals the rupture.

But grief does not erase the before. It simply forces you to live in the after, carrying both worlds inside you at once.

Grief comes in waves. Not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. As something your body understands long before your mind can make sense of it.

In the beginning, the waves do not give you space to breathe. They come one after another, relentless, overlapping, crashing before you have even had time to surface. You are in it all the time. Every room holds echoes. Every object feels charged. The absence is not abstract. It has weight. It presses against your chest, sits in your throat, follows you everywhere.

Eventually, the waves begin to spread out. Not because you are letting go. Not because it hurts less. But because the body cannot survive in constant devastation. The nervous system adapts out of necessity. It creates pauses. Small mercies.

But the waves never stop coming.

Sometimes you can see them forming on the horizon. A date circled on the calendar. A holiday. A song you know better than to play. Other times they come without warning. You are standing in line, driving home, folding laundry. You are fine. And then suddenly you are not.

Between the waves, there are windows. Small openings in the grief. Moments where the ache loosens its grip and the pain is no longer the loudest thing in the room.

At first, these windows are almost imperceptible. Seconds, sometimes less. A brief distraction. A flicker of forgetting. And then the remembering rushes back in, sharp and unforgiving.

Over time, the windows widen. Minutes. Hours. Occasionally, a whole afternoon slips by before you realize you have been breathing more freely. You catch yourself laughing, tasting your food, staying present in a conversation. Not because the grief is gone, but because it has made room for something else to exist alongside it.

This is often when guilt arrives.

How can you feel okay when they are gone? How can your body respond to joy when your heart still aches?

That guilt makes sense. But it does not need to stay. The windows are not a betrayal. They are not evidence that you loved less or that you are forgetting. They are your system's way of keeping you alive.