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Grief is not a straight line
Grief is not a list of stages. It is about how absence and ordinary life sit beside each other.
People talk about grief as if it were a staircase. First denial, then anger, then acceptance, and whoever finishes the steps is done. Anyone who has grieved knows it does not work like that. On a Tuesday morning you can deal with the post, and in the afternoon a smell or an empty chair pulls you back to where you started.
The stages help someone who is trying to understand from the outside. For the person inside, they become a burden if it feels like falling behind a list. Grief is not an exam. There is no failure in crying a year later, and there is no lie in laughing sometimes.
What there is instead: a relationship that has changed and has not disappeared. The person who died is still part of your story. The question is not when you get over it. The question is how you live with it.
Nora McInerny says the same thing: going on is not the same as moving on. Work, dinner, a new sentence to someone who is still here, these sit beside the person who is missing. They do not overwrite them.