My mom passed away recently.
I’ve sat with a lot of people in grief over the years. I’ve helped clients process loss, walked couples through the pain of watching a parent decline, and tried to be a steady presence when someone’s world fell apart. I thought I understood grief pretty well.
I didn’t. Not really.
Nothing Really Prepared Me: When Grief Starts Before the Loss
When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I remember starting to eulogize her in my head. Even at the time, I didn’t fully understand why I was doing it. Looking back, I think it was shock. Hurt and fear showing up the only way they knew how. Memories started flooding in, and I was mentally reaching for words to describe what she meant to me before I even knew I was doing it. In some ways, maybe that was the beginning of the grieving process, and I just didn’t recognize it for what it was.
Over the next seven or eight years, she kept fighting. And I kept being grateful. I stopped eulogizing and started just trying to be present with her more, to slow down when I was with her, to not take the visits for granted. I honestly believed that by the time she passed, I would be okay. She was ready. I thought I was too.
But here’s what I’ve learned: you can be mentally and rationally prepared for a loss and still be completely blindsided by the emotional weight of it. Those are two different things. Your mind can accept what’s coming. Your heart doesn’t work on that timeline.
Nothing really prepared me for the reality that I won’t get one of her texts anymore. She wasn’t a big phone caller, but she would send these random messages, just “I love you, hope you have a good day,” sometimes a card in the mail with a little note inside. Simple things. When we’d go see her, she’d tell us how much she loved us in a way that made you feel it. That presence, that warmth, that specific kind of love she had for us. You can’t prepare for the absence of that. I couldn’t, anyway.
The stages of grief are real, but they don’t work the way you think
You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They’re real. I’m working through them myself right now. But what I want you to know is that they don’t come in order, and you don’t move through them once and come out the other side. You can cycle back. You might hit some acceptance, feel like you’re getting your footing, and then find yourself back in anger or sadness over a different layer of the loss. That’s not a setback. That’s just how grief works.
Here’s what each stage actually looks like in real life, because they don’t always look the way you’d expect.
Denial isn’t usually someone refusing to believe the person is gone. More often, it’s that stunned, frozen feeling right after. Not knowing what to do or where to go. Standing in a hospital hallway, not sure if you should leave. Telling someone “I’m fine” when they ask how you’re doing, not because you’re lying, but because you genuinely don’t know what else to say or you’re just not ready to open it up yet. Sometimes it’s pushing the emotions down and going about life like everything is normal, because sitting with the reality of it is just too much right now.
Anger can look obvious, like someone who’s short-tempered or irritable or just doesn’t want to be around people. But underneath most grief is not necessarily anger; it’s fear, hurt, and sadness that we’d rather not face or feel and have nowhere to go. Fear of what life looks like without this person. Hurt that they’re gone. Sadness that you won’t get to see them, talk to them, or touch them anymore.
Sometimes anger shows up as looking for someone to blame: the doctors, the circumstances, and even God. Sometimes people get angry at the person who died: for leaving, for not being there anymore, or for not doing what they were supposed to do to take care of themselves. That’s more common than people admit, and it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human.
Bargaining is the “what if” stage. The mind going back over everything, looking for the moment things could have gone differently. What if we had caught it sooner? What if we had pushed for a different treatment? What if I had called more, visited more, said more? It can look a lot like guilt and shame; that quiet voice that says you could have done something and you didn’t. Sometimes it shows up as trying to make sense of it with God and searching for some kind of meaning or negotiation in the middle of something that feels senseless.
Depression in grief looks a lot like clinical depression: fatigue, sadness, crying, not wanting to be around people, losing interest in things you used to care about. The difference is that grief depression is tied directly to the loss. It’s sadness about something specific and real. Clinical depression tends to be a more general hopelessness about life itself. That said, if grief goes deep enough or long enough without support, it can move into something that needs more attention. Pay attention to whether you’re functioning, whether you’re isolating, whether the heaviness is lifting at all over time.
Acceptance doesn’t mean you’re okay with what happened or that you’re over it. It comes in pieces, little by little. You start to get small windows where you can breathe, where you can think about moving forward, where you have a little more clarity and a little more energy. You start to ask what this person would want for you now, what you can still do with your life, how you can carry them forward. It’s not a finish line. It’s more like slowly finding your footing again on ground that shifted under you.
I want to be honest with you. I haven’t finished this process. It’s only been a short while since my mom passed, and I’ve already cycled through all five of these stages multiple times. Some days I move through several of them before lunch. That’s not unusual; it’s just what grief does, especially early on. I feel a little crazy sometimes, and you might feel that way too. You’re not.
What I’m learning is that healing isn’t linear and it isn’t fast. I’m still going to have to go back and forth through these stages as I keep moving forward, as I come to more acceptance, as I figure out what life looks like without her. I’m not on the other side of this. I’m in it together with you.
What has actually helped me
One of the things I’ve been sitting with since my mom passed is watching my dad. He and my mom were always together. He loved her and served her well. And now she’s gone, and he’s carrying that weight every day.
I don’t know exactly what he needs. But I think more than anything, he just needs people to show up. Not to fix it or rush it or say the right thing, but to call, to go sit with him, to take him out to eat, to help with the things that are harder now. To let him know that people are still there.
I’ve been thinking about what’s actually helped me too, and honestly, it’s been similar things. Hugging my dad and crying together, both of us just letting it out, that has meant something. People sending cards or a simple text saying they’re sorry, or “I’m here if you need anything.” People saying they’re praying for me. Someone just calling to talk. It doesn’t sound like much when you list it out, but in the middle of grief, those things land.
I’m a big touch person. A hug goes a long way for me. Just someone physically being there, someone showing that they care enough to show up, that matters more than most people realize.
Here’s the thing about grief and loneliness. Even if you didn’t spend every single day with the person you lost, if they were meaningful to you, their absence creates a gap. A missing of connection. And that loneliness is real, even when you’re surrounded by people. So if you’re the one watching someone you love go through this and you feel helpless, you don’t have to have the right words. You just have to be there. That’s most of it.
Grief doesn’t stop when everyone else moves on
This is something I want to say directly, especially to anyone who has a friend or family member in the middle of loss right now.
The world keeps moving. People send their condolences, they check in those first few days or weeks, and then life pulls them back. That’s understandable. But for the person grieving, it doesn’t work that way. And one of the harder things I’ve noticed personally is that when the texts and cards slow down, when people stop checking in, it can feel like everyone else has moved on and you’re still standing in the same place.
It’s not that people don’t care. They do. They just assume you’re doing better. They don’t want to bring it back up and make it harder.
Continuing to reach out, even weeks or months later, even just a quick “thinking about you” or a phone call, matters more than most people know. Not to keep reliving the loss, just to stay present. To remind someone that they haven’t been forgotten. That the people around them are still there, still paying attention, still showing up.
If you’ve lost someone and you’re reading this and feeling like everyone has moved on except you, I want you to know that’s a real and normal part of grief. You’re not stuck. You’re just still in it, and that’s okay.
If you’re in it right now
I used to sit across from clients who were grieving and do my best to be present with them. I meant it. But there’s something about going through it yourself that gives you a different kind of understanding. I’m pretty good at empathizing and putting myself in other people’s shoes. Even so, I’m still processing this with a viewpoint I didn’t have before. Writing this post is part of how I’m doing that, and I’ll be honest, I’m probably doing it sooner than most people would. But that’s the thing about grief. Sometimes you just have to get it out.
And if you’re in it right now, whether it’s the death of someone you loved, a divorce, losing a relationship, not being able to see your kids, any significant loss, what you’re feeling makes sense. The sadness, the anger, the moments where it just hits you out of nowhere. All of it makes sense.
You don’t have to rush through it. You don’t have to be further along than you are. What you do need is people around you who will let you grieve without rushing you, and enough honesty with yourself to know when you need more support than the people around you can give.
That’s what we’re here for. If you’re in the Augusta or Evans area and you’re carrying grief that’s starting to feel unmanageable, reach out. You don’t have to keep doing this alone.
If you’re looking for practical tools to help you move through grief, writing and journaling are a good place to start. I’ll be covering those and more in an upcoming post.
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