Kindly Note this is not an expert or medical opinion. The blog is my personal understanding of grief and my own experience.

There are five stages of grief.

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

They look different on everyone.

They feel different to everyone.

They last different for everyone.

They occur in a different order for everyone.

But there are always five stages of grief.

Grief has no set timeline. It is not measured in days or months.

Grief is not linear. It goes back and forth.

Grief has no appropriate amount.

It can be as much or as less, depending on the person.

Grief is not always visible.

The absence of tears doesn’t mean an absence of grief.

The 5 stages of grief may or may not happen in a set order. There is no way to predict what a grieving person will feel at any given point in time.

And perhaps that is why it becomes so difficult to recognise and understand grief.

We all recognise the signs of happiness or signs of anger. They are easy to spot.

But we hardly ever recognise grief.

We relate to tears. To wailing, screaming even, but we rarely spot the different stages of grief.

So, what are these five stages? And how do they feel?

Denial is the stage that initially helps you to cope with tragic news. You try to make sense of what has happened; there is shock, disbelief and numbness. Often, this is the only way for your mind and body to sustain the emotional trauma.

Anger stems from frustration and the feeling of injustice. It is when you ask “why me” or shout “not fair”. It also comes from a place of helplessness and inability to do anything.

Bargaining is nothing but false hope or deep regret. It is when you pacify yourself or live in “what ifs”. Blame is also a considerable part of this process, whether it is self or someone else.

Depression can simply be a phase where you go through numbness, a feeling of withdrawal from the world and living in a fog. It could also be clinical depression.

Acceptance is when you finally realise that you will be okay despite everything. It is when you truly move on and learn to live with the loss you faced.

When I lost my mother 5 years ago, I had no idea about all this.

I didn’t know about the stages; I didn’t know that simply crying it out does not release the grief. I had no idea that grief is not just an emotion but a process that we go through.

My mom died in front of me, so there was little scope for me to linger too much in the denial stage.

I was numb for some time, in a daze. But perhaps within an hour, I was done with denial.

Then came the anger and the bargaining. Sometimes together, sometimes separately.

I was angry for months. Lashing out at people and getting into fights.Angry at myself and the world.

But no one around me was qualified to understand the anger or identify it as grief. People got offended, judged me, and even broke ties with me because their ego couldn’t take my being rude to them.

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