Grief 101 and the Grief Loop
Grief is the price of love. It is not a problem to fix or a checklist to complete. It is a process your heart and body move through — often messily, often non-linearly — as you learn to carry a loss while still living a life.
By Jamie Ruth, LPCC · Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (Minnesota)
Forget the tidy stages
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — Kübler-Ross described what dying patients experience, not a roadmap for the bereaved. Grief does not move in order. You can feel acceptance Monday and rage Tuesday. That is normal, not regression.
The grief loop
Grief tends to come in waves. A trigger — a song, a smell, a date, a stranger who walks like them — drops you back into the loss. Your body responds (tears, tightness, heat, exhaustion). You ride it out. Eventually the wave passes and you surface. Over time the waves come less often and feel less drowning — but they don't fully stop, and they aren't supposed to.
Both/and, not either/or
Healthy grief is not 'moving on' from the person. It is learning to hold both: the love that remains and the life that continues. You can laugh at dinner and ache at bedtime in the same day. Neither cancels the other.
Grief lives in the body
Exhaustion, brain fog, appetite changes, a heaviness in the chest, immune dips — these are not weakness. Lower the bar. Sleep more. Drink water. Walk. Your body is doing real work even when nothing visible is happening.
Let people in — even imperfectly
Most people don't know what to say and end up saying something that lands wrong. Try to receive the intent behind the awkwardness. And name what you actually need: 'You don't have to fix it — just sit with me.' 'Text me on the 14th, that's the hard day.'
Grief that hasn't been named
Not all grief is from death. Divorce, estrangement, miscarriage, lost health, lost dreams, the parent you needed and didn't have — all of it counts. Disenfranchised grief (the kind no one threw a casserole for) often hits hardest because no one helped you carry it.