Grief is often framed through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 model of five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet lived experience rarely conforms to such orderly progression. I have long felt that Kübler-Ross’s framework, however influential, risks suggesting a universality that grief simply does not possess. In my life, grief has been neither linear nor predictable, but deeply personal, shaped by the singular bonds that defined each loss.

My journey began twenty days before my twenty-third birthday, when I lost my father—my mountain, the finest human being I had ever known. His death came after eight months of enduring the final stages of lung cancer. I had accepted his diagnosis early, but acceptance did not soften the blow of his absence. When he died, I felt numb. I could not cry. Instead, the grief turned inward, manifesting physically as chest pain and shortness of breath. A doctor later explained that the strain came from unexpressed emotion tightening my chest muscles. Only then did the tears begin, accompanied by the first real conversations about his life, his legacy, and the quiet ways he had shaped mine.

Even in those early days, the so-called stages did not unfold as promised. There was no denial; we had lived with the certainty of his death. There was no anger—only a deep, unrelenting sadness. Bargaining felt meaningless. Acceptance came first, but it was not peaceful. It was a reluctant recognition that death had, at last, released him from suffering.

Decades later, my mother’s death followed a different path. Years of illness preceded her passing, but I was not present in her final days, and that distance altered everything. This time, I cried often—in public and in private. The grief was more visible, more fluid. Yet again, the prescribed stages failed to materialize. What remained constant was the emotional core: a quiet, persistent relief that her pain had ended, even as my own deepened. Her loss was not defined by shock, but by the steady ache of absence.

Five months after her death, I faced a loss that eclipsed all others. My husband—my partner of thirty-three years—died suddenly of a massive heart attack in his sleep. I had known him since I was twenty. He was my companion, my cheerleader, a man whose kindness extended across every boundary of race, class, or gender. We had grown even closer during the COVID-19 pandemic, spending each day side by side, navigating uncertainty together.

Despite his history of heart disease, I was unprepared. The night before, he walked upstairs on his own. By morning, four paramedics carried him down on a stretcher. Grief, this time, was no longer abstract. It felt like trying to breathe beneath a collapsed building—alive, but buried.

Our home remains full of him, yet unbearably empty. The light feels dimmer. The air itself seems altered, stripped of something essential. In reflecting on these three losses, I have come to understand that the five stages of grief were never my guide. At best, they offer a language for beginning a conversation. They cannot contain the experience itself.

Other frameworks have come closer. The Dual Process Model, which describes grief as an oscillation between confronting loss and adapting to life without the deceased, resonates more deeply. So too does the idea of meaning reconstruction—the effort to integrate loss into one’s evolving life story. My grief has been precisely that: an ongoing negotiation between memory and absence, between the person I was and the person I am becoming.

It has no fixed endpoint. It shifts, recedes, returns. It reshapes my identity in ways both subtle and profound. As Barbara Karens writes, “grief is like a wound. At first, it’s open, bleeding, raw, and incredibly painful.” That is still true for me. I would like to say the wound has closed, that it has hardened into a scar. But certain moments—a white SUV, a bald man, a tailored suit, the smell of cologne, a favorite dish, a familiar song—tear it open again. The bleeding resumes. And I am reminded that grief does not end; it transforms.

In recent months, I have found myself questioning whether I ever truly processed the loss of my parents, or whether my husband’s death has eclipsed everything that came before. His absence feels different—deeper, more disorienting. He was my anchor, my final source of stability. Without him, I am left with anger and unanswered questions. What were his last moments like? What did he feel? What did he think? Where is he now?

I take some comfort in believing he is at peace. He is free from pain. I am not.

I do not indulge in self-pity. I am, at heart, a realist. Life does not promise resolution—only inevitability. Death comes for all of us. Kübler-Ross identified acceptance as the final stage, though she acknowledged not everyone reaches it. In my case, acceptance arrived first, in every loss. Not as serenity, but as recognition.

I have never denied what happened. I have felt anger, but I have not bargained for a different outcome. I do not define my experience as depression; to me, depression reflects unresolved stress, and I choose to confront rather than suppress what I feel. My anger has no target. Instead, I channel it—into the gym, into writing, into painting—transforming it into something that can be carried.

Life, I have come to believe, is not a contest between winning and losing. It is a cycle in which joy and sorrow coexist, with death casting its long shadow over both. The task of grief is not to “move on,” as we are so often told. It is to move forward while carrying what—and who—we have lost.

Grief is not a process to complete. It is a companion that evolves alongside us.

I know my loved ones will not return. I do not wait for them. But if there is a place beyond this life where we might meet again, I will make sure they know to wait for me.