Are We Not Grieving Wrong

One of the essays on interior life—grief, loneliness, relationship confusion, family silence, burnout, and knowing when to ask for help. Written for the reader who cannot afford a therapist, and for the one who can but hasn’t found the courage yet.- Dr Sonia Sharma

  The first thing people do when someone they love dies is look for a map. They search the internet at two in the morning, and they find the same five words everywhere: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They read them like a prescription. They wait for the stages to arrive in order, like buses. And then, when their grief does not behave the way it is supposed to — when they laugh at the funeral, or feel nothing for a week, or experience a wave of rage six months later at a supermarket — they begin to worry that something is wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with them. Something is wrong with the map.

I want to talk about grief the way I have witnessed it — as a daughter who has witnessed the loss of a parent and as a writer who has spent years trying to put the experience of loss into language precise enough to be useful. Both the experiences have taught me the same thing: grief is not a process. It is a weather. You do not move through it in an orderly line. You live inside it, and some days it rains and some days there is sun, and neither means you are done.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying in 1969. Her research was based on interviews with terminally ill patients — people facing their own deaths, not people mourning someone else’s. The five stages she described — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were never meant to be a universal prescription for bereavement. She said this herself, late in her life, when she and David Kessler wrote that the stages are “not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.”

By then it was too late. The model had become cultural mythology. Therapists quoted it. Hallmark cards implied it. Well-meaning relatives said things like “You will get over it with time” or “it’s the universal truth, and we have to accept it as it’s delivered to us”. None of that is wrong, but expecting life to be as usual just because you are past the 11 or 13 days of mourning is far-fetched, as though grief were a journey with a destination and a reasonable ETA.

Research since 2004 shows emotional wellbeing oscillates back and forth following loss rather than progressing through stages. Grief is non-linear, fluid, and deeply individual. — Bisconti et al., 2004; Frontiers in Psychology systematic review, 2021

The research that followed Kübler-Ross has consistently confirmed what anyone who has grieved already knows: there is no universal sequence. Wortman and Silver, in their 1989 landmark paper, challenged the entire premise of stage-based grief models, pointing out that many people recover without passing through all the stages, and that the absence of intense distress does not indicate pathology. In other words: not everyone falls apart, and that is not denial. It is simply how some people grieve.

“The trouble with giving grief a timetable is that it makes people feel they are failing at the most human thing they will ever do.”

  In my personal and acquired experience and in the research I trust most, grief looks like this: it comes in waves. 

It returns unexpectedly — triggered by a song, a smell, the particular quality of light on a winter afternoon. It does not always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like anger that has nowhere to land. Sometimes it looks like an eerie calm that frightens the person experiencing it. Sometimes it looks like going to work and laughing at a colleague’s joke and then sitting in a bathroom stall and crying because you laughed.

In Indian families, grief often looks like silence. We are a culture that moves the body forward through ritual — the antyesti, the terahvin, the thirteenth-day prayers, the annual shradh — while rarely creating space for the interior experience to be named or shared. The rituals are not wrong. They serve a real function: they structure the days, they bring community around the bereaved, they provide a container for something overwhelming. But they can also close off the conversation just when it most needs to be opened.

Indian rituals such as antyesti (last rites) and the 13-day mourning period offer structured avenues for grief, but Indian joint family systems and community structures mean grief is often expressed collectively rather than individually, which can leave personal grief unaddressed. — International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, 2025

A patient I’d known for years, I will call Meena, came for her follow-up to me eight months after her mother died. I’d condoled with her on her mother’s demise by a message back then.  I just happened to ask how she was doing and she suddenly opened up about things she couldn’t discuss within her family or probably she needed validation or maybe she had been carrying the guilt for a long time. She told me that she had not cried at the funeral. She had managed everything — the relatives, the food, the death certificate, the distribution of her mother’s sarees. She had been, everyone said, so strong. Eight months later, she was devastated because she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and had stopped answering her phone. She wasn’t sure if something was wrong with her, because she hadn’t felt anything when her mother died, and now she couldn’t stop feeling everything. 

And that’s the inflexion point, I realised. Our brain is designed to be in survival mode at all times. It always queues up emotions in terms of priority, as what’s needed for each event to flow smoothly. So, for managing the situation or rituals followed by an accident, a disaster or even death, the urgency of management takes over, pushing grief to kick in another day, the day we haven’t marked for grief in our Google Calendar.

So, I guess, nothing was wrong with her. Her grief had waited until she was no longer needed to be strong. That is what grief does, sometimes. It has patience that we do not..

One of the most important things the five-stage model obscures is that grief is not only about losing a person to death. 

• We grieve the end of marriages — not just the marriage itself, but the person we were inside it, the future we had imagined. 
• We grieve miscarriages, which in India are rarely spoken of, as if the brevity of the pregnancy diminishes the reality of the loss. 
• We grieve the child who left home and came back changed. 
• We grieve the parent who is still alive but has forgotten our name.
• We grieve friendships that quietly ended with no explanation. 
• We grieve the version of ourselves we thought we’d be by now. 
• We grieve the country we thought we lived in when we discover it was different from what we believed.

All of these are real. All of these deserve the full language of loss, not the apology of ‘it’s not like someone died.’

I will not give you a list of five things to do. I will tell you what the evidence and my experience suggest.

Being witnessed helps. 

Not advised. 

Not told what stage you should be in. 

Simply witnessed. 

This is what a good therapist does. 

It is also what a good friend can do, if you tell them what you need.

‘I don’t need you to fix this. I just need you to sit with me.’ 

Most people, if you say this directly, will sit.

Naming the loss helps. 

Specifically. 

Not ‘I am sad’ but ‘I miss the way she laughed at her own jokes before she finished them.’ The specificity is not indulgence. It is how the brain processes what it has lost. Vague grief stays vague. Named grief can, eventually, be carried.

Writing helps — and I say this not only as a writer but as a medical practitioner aware of the psychoneuroimmunological research that supports it. James Pennebaker’s decades of research show that expressive writing about emotional experiences produces measurable improvements in immune function, mood, and psychological health. You do not need to write beautifully. You need to write honestly. 

Maybe this piece of writing is my effort to heal myself, sharing a small part of my journey through grief and hoping my experience and research help someone get over theirs.

And time — yes. 

But not time alone. 

Time plus witness. 

Time plus language. 

Time plus the willingness to let the grief be real instead of performing the recovery.

Sources: Kübler-Ross & Kessler (2005); Wortman & Silver (1989); Bisconti et al. (2004); Frontiers in Psychology (2021); IJFMR (2025); Pennebaker expressive writing research.  

When people go to AI platforms with grief, they receive the five stages. 

They receive ‘self-care tips.’ 

They receive validation that agrees with whatever premise they arrive with — because AI is designed to affirm, not to challenge, not to sit in silence, not to ask the question that feels dangerous to ask.

Grief needs a witness. AI is many things, but it is not a witness. It has no skin in the room. It does not feel the weight of what you are carrying. It responds. It does not receive.

That is not a criticism. It is a description. And knowing the difference between what a tool can do and what a human being needs from another human being is, perhaps, the most important piece of information in a world that is increasingly offering us digital substitutes for human presence.

You are not grieving wrong. You never were. There is no wrong way to carry a real loss. There is only your way — and someone, somewhere, willing to sit with you in it.

  If this essay found you when you needed it, share it with someone else who is grieving alone.

Next in this series: Why Talking to AI About Loneliness Might Be Making It Worse

  Sources: Kübler-Ross & Kessler (2005); Wortman & Silver (1989); Bisconti et al. (2004); Frontiers in Psychology (2021); IJFMR (2025); Pennebaker' expressive writing research.