A Personal Spin on the Stages of Grief

Source: Vladislav Muslakov / Unsplash

As I trudge towards the four-year anniversary of Tom’s death, my grief continues to morph. You probably know Elizbeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). I’ve invented my own version of the stages: numb, wailing, distracting, collapsing, slogging. Like Kübler-Ross, my stages aren’t linear, but this is the order in which they happened to me.

First came numb

Numbness in the first stage is commonplace. I knew Tom’s death had happened, but I didn’t really know it had happened. My brain protected me from the harsh reality, nestling in a soft, fuzzy fog of what Kübler-Ross identified as denial. Numbness was nice. It was helpful. If the reality of our loss hit full force right away, I don’t know that we could survive. Our brain rations out the pain over time—a long time. Grief doesn’t stay the same over years, but it stays pretty raw for longer than many people think it should—and they don't know what they’re talking about. A long grief timeline is healthy and functional as we digest the enormity of our loss a bite at a time.

Then, I cried. A lot

I took a long, dreamy road trip during my numb stage, alighting here and there, where friends or acquaintances offered succor. But back home, the fog dissipated and the wailing stage set in. Sobbing, screaming, fist shaking, pillow pounding. Over the course of about a year, I experienced pain more terrible than I could ever have imagined. I wanted to reach into my chest and rip out my heart. It felt unbearable, but I lived through it and continued on to distraction.

Distraction helped

Realizing that I could keep the pain more or less at bay when I was busy, I kept very, very busy, seeing as many people as I could, scheduling as many activities—live music, gallery openings, parties, lectures—as I could fit in my calendar. You might have even mistaken me for an extrovert during this time, so busily social was I. Often, though, driving home alone afterward, I would cry.

Until it didn't

Right around Christmas 2023, I hit the wall. Drained by all the busyness, I stopped everything and collapsed. I was tired of people, tired of getting dressed, tired of putting on makeup, tired of doing, doing, doing. I was tired of swallowing my envy of everyone blithely enjoying their marriages, blissful in their ignorance. This churlishness—which I kept to myself—was unfair and unpleasant, but I couldn’t control it, so I just stopped subjecting myself to it. For a few months, I wrapped a dark cloud around myself and sat very still, leaving the house only as much as was necessary.

Enter the slog

Now I’m out and about again—though not as feverishly—but everything feels a little bit like work. I’m in the slogging stage. I still yearn for Tom all the time—to the point where the emotion has become tedious. I don’t want the pain to go away because it’s also love, but the sadness has become almost . . . boring. I want to feel something different. It’s like an uncomfortable shoe, rubbing on the same spot until a blister forms, a bubble of irritation on top of the pain. I want it to stop, I don’t want to it stop, I can’t make it stop.

And besides all that, I have life to tend to, and this is the heart of the slog. Right after a death, there are a million details to manage, especially if the death was sudden, as Tom’s was. There are credit cards to cancel and death certificates to mail out and insurance to change. I had to shut down Tom’s picture framing shop and sell his equipment and contact customers to come fetch the art they’d left for framing. I had to do Tom’s taxes—and he refused to manage his accounts on a computer; I used to call him Bob Cratchit as he hunkered over his big green ledger book.

These days my life is not devoid of pleasure. I have a nice house, a couple of nice(ish) dogs, I like my work and it sustains me. I have good friends. Objectively, my post-Tom life is just fine, and I am training myself to pause and notice the good moments—when the sun is out, the birds are singing, the dogs are cute. Or, conversely, when it’s storming out, I have a cup of coffee, a good book, and no reason to get out of bed.

Life alone is hard work

But in this stage, even the silver linings have clouds. It’s sinking in that I am the only one left to manage everything. If it needs to be cleaned, I must clean it. I must take out the garbage, scrub the bathroom, pay all the bills. My big, beautiful yard is endless labor. If I want to eat, I must prepare it. And the dirty dishes...so many dirty dishes . And while the dogs are the light of my life, they’re also a lot of work. Dog walking alone takes a sizeable chunk out of my day. Tom used to handle morning walks while I did afternoons. Now it's all me.

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I must make every decision, which can be fun when it comes to choosing a rug but not so much fun when deciding whether to get a new roof. I must keep an eye on anything that might need fixing and negotiate with workmen for jobs that are beyond my abilities. I’ve had to overcome my fear of ladders and learn to use a power drill and a chain saw. I hire people for some things, but I’m also down to one income.

I understand that single people must do these things themselves too, but their lives were designed around one person. Mine was designed around two and I live larger than I did last time I was single, a thousand years ago, as a twenty-something with few needs. And if nothing else, living solo is a huge adjustment. Everywhere I look, chores vie for my attention. Some days this fills me with despair, some days it makes me cranky, sometimes I berate Tom loudly for leaving me alone with all this.

This is my life. What's next?

At the same time, deep, existential loneliness is setting in, which activity can’t help. All the people and parties in the world can’t replace Tom, and nothing can bring him back. This is it. The epiphany that this is my life now hits me over and over. I have no choice but to keep moving, doing what I have to do day to day and hoping the future will take care of itself.

It's a slog.

I’m sure there are more stages ahead in this long, complicated odyssey. Grief expert David Kessler, who collaborated with Kübler-Ross, has already come up with a sixth stage of grief in that model: finding meaning (also the title of one of his excellent books).

I’ll let you know what my next stage is, once I get past slogging.