Lyrical Muse

As Grief Awareness Month comes to a close, perhaps the harder conversation is not about how we grieve, but about why we keep expecting other people to grieve in ways we recognise.

There is a peculiar guilt that can arrive in the middle of grief. It’s not necessarily when the tears come, or when the house feels unbearably quiet, or when a familiar song suddenly makes the loss feel immediate again.

Sometimes, it arrives on an entirely ordinary afternoon, when, for a few minutes, you forget.

You laugh at something a friend says. You go out for dinner or enjoy a film. You answer a message without thinking about it. You make plans for the weekend. Perhaps, unexpectedly, you have a genuinely good day.

And then you remember that, for a moment, you were happy.

Somewhere along the way, we have absorbed the idea that happiness after loss must be earned. There should be a respectable distance between tragedy and pleasure, and if someone we love has died, our sadness should remain visible enough to prove that we loved them. It is an absurd standard, but one we recognise almost instinctively.

Grief has its own social grammar. We know what mourning is supposed to look like: tears, silence, black clothes, withdrawal, a retreat from ordinary life. These are the signs we have learned to read.

But loss does not always announce itself in a language we recognise. It can look like returning to work on Monday because there is work to be done, seeking out friends because being alone is unbearable, or telling an absurd story about the person who died and laughing before remembering why you were telling it.

This is where our discomfort with grief begins to show. We do not simply want to know that someone is grieving. We want to be able to recognise it.

That expectation is partly cultural, and the five stages of grief may be one of the clearest examples of how it took hold. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance have become so embedded in popular culture that they are often treated as an emotional itinerary, a sequence through which the bereaved are expected to travel before arriving, eventually, at some version of acceptance.

But that was never quite what the model said, and the reality is considerably less orderly.

The American Psychological Association describes Kübler-Ross’s five-stage model as hypothetical and nonlinear: the stages need not occur in sequence, for a fixed period, or at all, and may overlap or recur. The NHS makes the same point in less theoretical terms, noting that people may not experience every stage, may not experience them in order and may move back and forth between them.

“A hypothetical model, originally described in 1969 by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, depicting psychological states, moods, or coping strategies that occur during the dying process or during periods of bereavement, great loss, or trauma… The model is nonlinear in that the stages do not necessarily occur in the given sequence or for a set period of time; moreover, they can recur and overlap…”

[American Psychological Association]

Kübler-Ross developed the model through her work with people facing terminal illness. It was later applied to bereavement and, somewhere along the way, became cultural shorthand – the public vocabulary of mourning. A framework for thinking about emotional responses to dying became a checklist for the living, and checklists have a way of turning experience into performance as it becomes easier to start policing it.

We start looking for signs. We call the person who is composed “strong”. We wonder whether the person who is laughing has accepted things too quickly. We become concerned when someone does not cry, then concerned again when they cry months later. A person can be judged for looking too well and for not looking well enough.

The irony is that numbness, shock and automatic functioning are all recognised responses to bereavement. The NHS notes that there is no right or wrong way to feel after a loss, and that powerful emotions can appear unexpectedly rather than remain constant.

Yet socially, we remain attached to the idea that grief should be visible.

Perhaps that is why happiness can feel so illicit after a death. The rest of life does not stop to observe the funeral, and the capacity for joy does not disappear. Your friends still make terrible jokes, and your body knows how to laugh. Work still sends emails, music still sounds good and food still tastes of something.

There are birthdays, errands, meals, children, obligations and evenings when somebody asks if you want to come out. There are conversations that have nothing to do with death, and sometimes you laugh before you have remembered that you are supposed to be sad. Life continues, often without waiting to see whether we are ready for it, and we continue with it too which can feel almost like an act of disloyalty to some.

Then the guilt arrives.

Was that too soon? Should I be enjoying myself? What does it mean that I could sit through dinner without thinking about them? Does laughing at something they would have found funny somehow mean I have forgotten them?

Grief does not work that way. NHS Bereavement guidance recognises that mourning can contain sadness alongside anger, guilt, relief, calm and moments of feeling okay. These feelings can coexist and fluctuate rather than follow a clean emotional progression.

But as a society, we have a tendency to treat emotions as evidence. Tears reassure us because we know what they mean, but laughter makes us hesitate. We can understand devastation as proof of love; happiness, for some reason, makes us question it.

That is the strange moral weight we have attached to grief, where suffering can begin to feel like a form of loyalty.

A good afternoon becomes suspicious but it does not cancel a terrible morning. A night out becomes evidence that someone is “moving on”, and not crying can become denial. Returning to work can be interpreted as indifference, and finding the capacity to laugh at a memory can somehow be mistaken for forgetting the person who made the memory possible.

But a laugh does not undo a relationship. A dinner does not erase a funeral, and returning to ordinary life does not mean the person has become less important. It means ordinary life is still there. The discomfort, then, may not belong entirely to the person grieving. It belongs to the people watching, too, and part of it is projection.

And this may be the part we find hardest to accept: grief has to exist alongside everything else. It does not get the courtesy of suspending the world around it.

There is another reason we are so quick to measure someone else’s grief against our own. We know, or think we know, what we would do. We imagine that if we loved someone deeply enough, we would cry, withdraw, stop functioning, talk about them constantly, or do whatever it is that our own emotional history has taught us to associate with loss.

Without quite noticing, our own emotional vocabulary becomes the measuring stick for somebody else’s loss.

But grief is inseparable from the relationship that produced it. The loss of a parent is not the same as the loss of a friend; the death of a partner is not the same as the death of a sibling. Even two people mourning the same person may be mourning entirely different relationships with them, and entirely different futures that disappeared when they did.

What looks like composure from the outside may be shock. What looks like busyness may be survival. What looks like cheerfulness may be the only hour that day in which someone has managed to breathe. We cannot know.

And perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what makes other people’s grief uncomfortable. Death is one of the few experiences for which there is no useful performance of competence. There is nothing to fix or reverse, there’s no right sentence that can make it better, and there’ no timetable that guarantees when the person in front of us will feel better. So we look for signs we can read.

Visible grief gives us that reassurance, and when it is absent, concern can become judgement almost without us noticing. A colleague who returns to work becomes “too unaffected”. A friend who goes out becomes “over it”. Someone who cannot cry becomes “in denial,” and someone who cries months later becomes someone who “hasn’t moved on”.

These are ordinary observations, often made without malice. But they carry an assumption: that grief has a correct pace and a correct appearance, and that everyone else is entitled to know when we have reached it.

Few phrases expose that assumption better than “move on”. Move on to where?

The phrase suggests that grief is a place we are supposed to leave, and that the person who died belongs to a chapter that should eventually be closed. But a death can take far more than a person. It can take a routine, a future, a role, a private language, a voice at the end of the phone, the person you called first, or a version of yourself that existed only in that relationship.

The calendar cannot measure any of that. It can tell us how long it has been since somebody died, but it cannot tell us how long we should miss them.

Grief can change with time, but time is not a deadline. A person can function for months before a song, a birthday, a supermarket aisle or an old photograph suddenly makes the absence feel immediate again. That does not necessarily mean they have gone backwards. Sometimes the loss was never entirely absent; life had simply become louder around it.

This is also why the promise that “time heals all wounds” can feel so inadequate. Time passes, people adjust, and they learn new routines and acquire new memories. But the point is not to reach some final state in which the person no longer matters. The point, if there is one, is to build a life around the fact that they are no longer physically in it.

For some people, grief eventually becomes quieter. For others, it remains disruptive enough to require professional support. There is a difference between acknowledging that grief can persist and assuming that prolonged, overwhelming distress should simply be endured. Recognising when someone needs help is part of caring for them; deciding that someone needs help because they are not grieving in a way we recognise is something else entirely.

As Grief Awareness Month comes to an end, perhaps that distinction is worth carrying with us. There is an understandable temptation to let the subject end with it, as the awareness posts will disappear, the resources will become less visible and the calendar will move on. But the people grieving do not necessarily move with it.

Perhaps we can stop watching so closely. We can stop treating tears as proof of love, composure as evidence of strength and laughter as evidence that somebody has moved on. We can stop asking whether enough time has passed. We can resist the urge to turn another person’s mourning into something that makes sense to us before we are willing to take it seriously.

There is a strange generosity in admitting that we do not know what someone else’s grief looks like. Some people will want to talk, others will work. Some will need company to talk incessantly about the person they lost; others will disappear for a while. Someone may spend an evening laughing with friends and cry on the way home. Someone else may sit quietly through the entire evening and feel nothing at all.

None of it is a reliable measure of love. And eventually, if we are fortunate enough to keep living, happiness will return. Not necessarily as some triumphant recovery, but in small, almost ordinary ways: a joke that catches us off guard, a meal we enjoy, an evening that feels easy, a song we can finally hear without bracing ourselves for what comes next.

It may arrive before we think we are ready, and when it does, perhaps we should not ask whether we are allowed to enjoy it.

Happiness is not the opposite of grief. It is neither a betrayal of the person who died, nor an evidence that the loss mattered less. It is simply part of the life that remains. And perhaps that is the thing we have been getting wrong all along: grief does not ask us to stop living in order to prove that we loved someone.

We can miss them terribly and still laugh. We can carry the loss and still make plans. We can love someone who is gone without making our unhappiness the permanent evidence of that love.

Note on support: Grief has no single timeline or outward expression, but overwhelming or persistent distress that significantly affects daily life can warrant professional support. If you or someone you know is struggling, consider speaking with a qualified mental health professional or bereavement service.

If grief has ever looked different for you than it did to the people around you, we’d love to hear your perspective. Tell us what mourning has taught you about love, loss and living on X and Instagram.

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