I lost my grandma the spring before my senior year of college. It was hard; she was one of my best friends.
She was funny and warm and one of those people who made everyone around her feel like they were standing in sunlight. We were lucky to have her, and I knew that even then.
I was sad, and even though I was walking into what was supposed to be an exciting year, the grief was heavy. My roommates were girls I didn’t know well, and that made the grief harder to carry.
They’d change the subject whenever I brought my grandma up. I don’t blame them; they didn’t owe me anything, and we were young, and most of them probably hadn’t dealt with death yet. I get it.
But what I did was put my grief on a timeline. I told myself: by this date, you need to be over this.
I picked a point on the calendar and decided that was the finish line, and anything I was still feeling after that was me doing it wrong.
I know now that was the worst thing I could have done. And I know now that the timeline didn’t come from me. It came from every signal around me that said grief was something to get through quickly, not something to sit with.
The timeline was never based on anything real
The reason most people think grief has a schedule is a model that was never meant to be a schedule.
In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a book called On Death and Dying in which she described five emotional responses she’d observed in terminally ill patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
The key detail that got lost almost immediately is that she was writing about people who were dying, not people who were grieving.
The stages were meant to describe what the patient goes through when facing their own death, not what the people left behind go through afterward.
But the model escaped the book and entered the culture, and by the time it reached most of us, it had become a neat set of steps that grieving people were expected to complete in order.
Denial first, then anger, then the rest, and at the end, acceptance, as if acceptance were a destination you could arrive at if you just kept walking.
Kübler-Ross herself said, late in her career, that she regretted how the stages had been misunderstood. They were never meant to tuck messy emotions into neat boxes.
But by then it was too late. The culture had already decided that grief was a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and if yours was taking too long, you were stuck.
The pressure to move on usually comes from people who can’t sit with your pain
My roommates weren’t being unkind when they changed the subject. They just didn’t know what to do with what I was carrying, and changing the subject was the fastest way to make the discomfort stop: theirs, not mine.
That pattern shows up everywhere.
Research on why grief is so isolating finds that people avoid the bereaved not out of indifference but out of uncertainty. They don’t know the right thing to say, and the discomfort of not knowing feels worse than the discomfort of saying nothing.
Being around someone who is grieving also reminds people of their own losses and their own fragility, and most of us will do almost anything to avoid sitting with that.
So the timeline gets imposed from the outside, not because anyone studied how long grief takes and came up with a number, but because the people around the grieving person need the grief to be over.
They need the room to feel normal again. They need you to laugh at the joke and stop bringing her up at dinner and be the version of yourself they’re comfortable with.
The timeline was never about my grief. It was about everyone else’s ability to be around it.
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People who’ve been through it would never hand you a deadline
Something I noticed, later, once I started talking about my grandma with people who’d lost someone too, is that none of them ever told me to move on.
Not once. Nobody who’d been through real grief said it’s been long enough. What they said was Tell me about her.
That tracks with where grief research has gone in the last twenty years.
The old model said the goal of grieving was to let go, to detach from the person you lost and move forward without them. Modern grief theory has moved away from that entirely.
What researchers now call “continuing bonds” recognizes that most people maintain a relationship with the person they lost, through memory, through ritual, through the way they carry that person into the rest of their life. And that’s not avoidance. It’s adaptation.
I wish someone had told me that when I was twenty-one. That I didn’t need to let go of my grandma by October.
That keeping her close, talking about her, feeling her absence at Thanksgiving and at graduation and on ordinary days: that was the grief working, not the grief stalling.
There is a line, and it should be named
This isn’t a case for grief without any boundary at all. There is a real difference between grief that moves through you at its own pace, heavy some days and lighter on others, and grief that stops your life entirely.
The kind that keeps you from eating, sleeping, working, connecting with anyone, for months without any movement at all.
That second version is real, and it needs professional support. But the line between normal grief and the kind that needs clinical attention is drawn by doctors, not by roommates or coworkers or well-meaning relatives who think six months should be enough.
The people holding you to a timeline aren’t drawing it from expertise. They’re drawing it from discomfort, and those aren’t the same thing.
I cut my grief short, and I wish I hadn’t
I hit the deadline I’d set for myself, and I packed my grandma away. I stopped bringing her up. I stopped letting myself cry about it in front of people.
I smiled when I was supposed to smile, and I performed being okay until the performance became the thing I was doing instead of grieving.
It took years to understand what that cost me. I didn’t skip the grief. I just delayed it.
It came back in pieces: in a song on the radio, in the smell of her perfume in a department store, in the way my mom laughed one afternoon and sounded exactly like her.
Each one of those moments cracked the container I’d built, and every crack felt like starting over.
If I’d known what I know now, I wouldn’t have forced myself to let her go so quickly. She deserved more of my time than I gave her.
So did I. So does anyone sitting with a loss right now, wondering whether they’ve been sad too long, checking the calendar like grief comes with an expiration date.
It doesn’t. Take whatever time the grief asks for. The people who love you will wait. And the ones who can’t wait were never holding your grief in the first place; they were just standing near it, hoping it would finish.
