November 2, 2026
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It is the question we hear more than any other, and it almost never arrives alone. It comes with an apology attached, or a nervous laugh, or "I know this is ridiculous, but…"
It isn't ridiculous. And the answer is no — because there is no "by now."
Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed the idea that grief is a process with stages you pass through and a finish line you cross. People time themselves against it. They decide they are behind. And then, on top of the loss, they carry the private conviction that they are also grieving wrong.
Let's take that apart.
The stages most people can name — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — came from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work in the late 1960s, and they described something quite specific: what she observed in people who were themselves dying.
They were never a schedule. They were never ordered. They were never meant as a checklist for the bereaved.
What happened is that the model was clear, memorable and easy to repeat, so it escaped into general use and hardened into a timeline nobody ever claimed it was. Decades of grief research since have pointed somewhere else entirely: grief moves in waves, not steps. People oscillate — into the loss, then out into ordinary life, then back in again — and that oscillation is not avoidance. It is how a person survives something they cannot hold continuously.
So if you felt acceptance in week two and fury in month seven, nothing has gone wrong. That is the actual shape of it.
Grief is rarely the thing people brace for. Here is what it tends to be instead.
It is physical. Exhaustion that sleep does not touch. A chest or throat that feels tight. An appetite that vanishes, or doubles. Brain fog — rereading the same email four times, losing words mid-sentence, losing keys. Getting sick more than usual. Grief is a sustained stress response, and the body runs it like one.
A practical note we give everyone: please get the physical symptoms checked anyway. Grief and a genuine medical problem can look alike, and you deserve to rule things out. And if everything comes back clear, that does not mean it is "in your head." It means your body is carrying something.
It ambushes you. Not at the funeral — in the cereal aisle, because they liked that brand. In the car, because of four bars of a song. When you go to text them something funny and remember halfway through typing.
It is not only sadness. Relief is extremely common, especially after a long illness, and it is the one almost nobody says out loud. So is anger — at doctors, at family, at the person who died. Guilt about what you did or didn't do. Numbness, which frightens people most of all because they assume it means they didn't love them enough. It doesn't. It means your system has reached its limit for now.
It changes who you are, not just what you have. If you have been someone's daughter, or someone's caregiver, or someone's person for thirty years, you did not only lose them. You lost the version of yourself that existed in relation to them. That is its own grief and it deserves naming.
Grief is not reserved for death. These also qualify, and they are often harder precisely because no ritual exists for them:
Clinicians use terms like disenfranchised, ambiguous and non-finite loss for these — grief with no clear ending, and no social permission to grieve it. If nobody has acknowledged yours, that absence is doing real damage on its own. We wrote more about one version of this — grieving someone who is still here.
This is the question underneath the first one, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.
Most grief, however brutal, does not require treatment. It requires time, support, and people who will let you talk about it more than once.
But for a minority of people, grief does not loosen its grip — and in 2022 that pattern was formally recognised in the DSM-5-TR as prolonged grief disorder. The American Psychiatric Association describes it as intense, persistent grief that comes with problems in functioning, where the death occurred at least a year ago for adults (at least six months for children and adolescents), with symptoms present nearly every day for the preceding month.
Those symptoms include identity disruption — the feeling that part of you died too — a marked sense of disbelief about the death, avoidance of reminders, intense emotional pain, difficulty re-engaging with friends or plans, emotional numbness, a sense that life is meaningless without them, and intense loneliness.
The APA estimates this affects roughly 4% to 15% of bereaved adults. That is a clear minority. It is also not rare — and, crucially, it responds to treatment.
We are not listing those criteria so you can diagnose yourself. We are listing them because people spend years assuming that what they're experiencing is simply the price of having loved someone, when in fact it is a recognised condition with real treatment behind it.
A related point worth knowing: the National Center for PTSD notes that strong grief reactions are more common in people who have PTSD. Grief and trauma frequently travel together — particularly after a sudden, violent or traumatic death. We've written separately about what trauma looks like in everyday life.
Not a diagnostic tool. A prompt.
If that last one is true, please stop reading and call or text 988. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is free, confidential and available any hour.
It does not take the grief away, and any therapist promising that should be treated with suspicion.
What it does is give the love somewhere to go. It gives you a room where you can say the unspeakable parts — the relief, the anger, the thing you'd undo — without managing anyone else's reaction. It helps you tell the story all the way through, which many people have never once done. And for a sudden or traumatic death, it can help separate the trauma from the grief, so that remembering them stops meaning reliving it.
Jennifer Otte, LCPC, CGP is a co-founder of our practice and a Certified Grief Informed Professional. That credential means a clinician who will not hand you a timeline, will not treat your love as a symptom, and will not flinch when the story comes out in the wrong order for the fortieth time.
There is no schedule you are failing to keep.
The waves do get further apart. Not smaller, necessarily — people often describe them as just as big, arriving less often. You do not "get over" someone. You build a life wide enough to carry them in it.
Ready to talk to someone? Book with Jennifer — in our Naperville office or virtually anywhere in Illinois.
Not ready for therapy, but tired of doing this alone? The Village meets the first Wednesday of every month — the next one is Wednesday, November 4 at 6:00 PM CT.
The Centered Life Therapy · 1750 N. Washington St., Suite 120, Naperville, IL 60563 · 630-315-0021. Serving Naperville, Plainfield, Oswego, Downers Grove and Wheaton, and virtually across Illinois. Women-owned and women-led.
This article is educational and is not a diagnosis or a substitute for care. In crisis: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, call or text 988.
Sources: Prolonged Grief Disorder — American Psychiatric Association · Grief — National Center for PTSD, U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs
how long does grief last · stages of grief myth · prolonged grief disorder · grief counseling Naperville IL · grief symptoms physical · is my grief normal
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