Rethinking the Way We Grieve

Why Love Doesn’t End When Someone Dies

Photo by Rebecca Peterson-Hall on Unsplash

Grief is painful and messy, and it doesn’t follow a linear path. Although we’ve been encouraged to think it follows five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance), we need to update our thinking and recognise that it is a uniquely individual process.

However you’re doing it, you’re doing it right.

If you miss any of the stages, experience them in the wrong order or not at all, that’s all normal.

In fact, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who wrote On Death and Dying, later wrote On Grief and Grieving with David Kessler, acknowledging that not everyone experiences every stage or in the same order and that grief does not follow a timetable.

When I lost my mother 11 years ago, I didn’t grieve. I still haven’t, and I can’t really understand why, or at least don’t feel the need to unpack it and hypothesise. There’s a chance I’m still in denial and, ultimately, that means I may not be ready to grieve, even this far down the road. There’s also a chance I experienced anticipatory grief.

And yet when my dad suddenly died 23 years ago, I was devastated. I went through shock, a strange inability to grasp what had happened, acute sadness and frustration that he was taken too soon and that my children wouldn’t get to know him. But gradually I became used to the fact that he was no longer around. My sadness dissipated, slowly but surely, over the course of about 18 months.

Grief is not only about death. We can also grieve the end of a relationship, a marriage, a home, a career, a role or a future we imagined for ourselves. Divorce, for example, can involve mourning not only the loss of a partner but also the shared identity, routines, family structure and hopes that were woven into the relationship. The person may still be alive, but the life you expected to live with them has changed.

But let me add that “acceptance” doesn’t mean you have to like it. Far from it, it simply means you’ve acknowledged that the person you lost, or the life you imagined, is no longer here in the way it once was and that your own life must be remapped and move forward.

I also want to acknowledge that some losses are harder than others. While my losses may have come early, I view them as being in the natural order and thus somewhat easier to come to terms with than, say, the loss of a sibling or a child. I view the latter as the greatest loss of all, and we can probably best frame this by saying that the closer the attachment, the more profound the grief.

Kessler, who lost his son to an overdose when he was 21, admits that the pain was beyond what he expected:

“I wanted to write every parent that ever had a child die that I’d counselled a note saying, ‘I didn’t get it. And then I got it.’”

We must also be careful not to compare our grief with other people’s. The most important grief will always be the one you’re feeling. It needs to be heard and witnessed. If you feel you don’t have the right support for that, then please find it. If friends and family don’t prove to be enough, there are support groups, therapists and group therapy, as well as books that can help you feel understood.

New research

Now I want to talk a little bit about some research I’ve stumbled across which throws new light on the grieving process.

The first study involved functional MRI scans of bereaved people. People experiencing grief didn’t just show activity in brain areas linked to pain. They also showed activity in the brain’s reward and motivation system, particularly the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in wanting and seeking. In other words, grief is not only sadness but also a powerful longing for someone who is no longer there.

This may help explain why grief can feel so active and searching: a bereaved person may know rationally that someone has died, yet still feel drawn to look for them, expect their return, want to call or text them, or feel a physical ache to be near them. The study suggests that grief involves not only the pain of absence but also the persistence of attachment and longing.

Another piece of research suggests that the brain represents relationships through three interconnected dimensions: space, time and emotional closeness.

In everyday life, we automatically know where important people are, when we are likely to see them again and how connected we feel to them. When someone dies, these deeply ingrained maps do not disappear immediately, which may help explain why the person’s absence can feel so disorientating.

From this perspective, grieving involves gradually adapting to a new reality while maintaining the emotional bond with the deceased.

Together, these findings suggest that after a death, the attachment remains intact even though the person’s physical presence has gone. The task of grieving is therefore not to stop loving the person, but to gradually update the relationship so that it can continue internally rather than through physical presence.

Kessler (2019) suggests that grief is not about severing attachment but transforming it. As he explains, “death has the power to physically take your loved one, but it does not have the power to end your love or your relationship.” From this perspective, healing is not achieved by letting go, but by allowing the relationship to continue in memory, meaning and ongoing connection.

In practice, this might involve talking to the person, celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, sharing stories, creating rituals, writing letters or asking yourself what advice they might give in difficult moments. Rather than seeing these acts as signs of being “stuck”, they can be understood as healthy ways of maintaining an enduring bond while gradually adapting to a life that has changed.

For therapists like me, this shifts the focus away from helping clients “move on” and towards supporting them to develop a continuing relationship with the deceased. The aim is not to extinguish attachment but to help clients carry it in a way that provides comfort, meaning and connection while allowing them to engage fully with life.