Grief Is Not Linear Quotes

Grief is not linear. People kept telling me that once this happened or that passed, everything would be better. Some people gave me one year to grieve. They saw grief as a straight line, with a beginning, middle, and end. But it is not linear. It is disjointed. One day you are acting almost like a normal person. You maybe even manage to take a shower. Your clothes match. You think the autumn leaves look pretty, or enjoy the sound of snow crunching under your feet. Then a song, a glimpse of something, or maybe even nothing sends you back into the hole of grief. It is not one step forward, two steps back. It is a jumble. It is hours that are all right, and weeks that aren't. Or it is good days and bad days. Or it is the weight of sadness making you look different to others and nothing helps.

…crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

Grief isn’t linear. It isn’t logical. There’s no structure or civility to it; it grabs you when you least expect it and digs in its nails until you succumb.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

Healing from psychopathic abuse is a long journey. It is neither linear nor logical. You can expect to swing back and forth between stages, perhaps even inventing a few of your own along the way. It is unlike the traditional stages of grief, because you have not truly lost anything—instead, you have gained everything. You just don’t know it yet.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.

I don’t think grief is linear. Some days are easier. Others will take you out at the knees.

grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

I’d seen enough grief as a priest to know that people never really moved on, at least not in the linear, segmented way our culture expected people to.

Grief isn’t linear, it isn’t logical. There’s no structure or civility to it. It grabs you when you least expect it and it digs in its nails until you succumb.

This is the absolute truth of grief. It is never linear and it is never proportionate or understandable. Especially to other people. It never happens when it should. It doesn't seem to make sense to anyone else.

Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew there wasn't time to waste, that she couldn't go through the motions, steps, build. That the linear trajectory would bring her only to the middle.

Grief isn't linear. There's no formula to it, and sometimes you feel guilty for feeling or not feeling a certain way. That's okay.

Grief is not a linear slide into darkness. It is a cyclical path that eventually rotates into light. Spring comes after the cold, harsh winter. Yes, there are seasons when grief is louder and more disruptive, but there are also seasons when grief backs off, your strength returns, and night turns into morning.

The stages of grief are not linear. They are random and unpredictable, folding back on themselves until you begin mourning all over again.

One thing I’ve learned through this bloody awful time is that grief isn’t linear. You can be doing all right, then it will suddenly come out of nowhere. It’s the silly little things that remind you .

Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal. The stages of grief were not meant to tell anyone what to feel and when exactly they should feel it. They were not meant to dictate whether you are doing your grief “correctly” or not. Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief. They were meant to give comfort, not create a cage.

It’s crucial to emphasize that grief defies a linear path and cannot be confined to a predetermined timeline for “moving on” from a loss. Instead, grief becomes a lifelong journey, transforming and evolving in diverse ways as you integrate it into your life and carry it with you through time.

Once, I saw a remarkable series of photographs which showed the different compositions of human tears. It had not ever occurred to me until that moment that tears of joy might be measurably different from tears of anger or sorrow, but they are. Cause matters. If you cry from slicing an onion, the structure of your tears resembles the undergrowth in a pine forest. Remembrance is a grid pattern, like the map of New York City, but from each block emerge soft, questing tendrils, as if the body of the tear itself reaches out for what is lost. By comparison, other tears are plain. Elation is etiolated and fragile, grief is sparse, rage is linear, horror is jagged. Of all the pictures in the collection, only remembrance was complex. So what tears, now, is my body crying up above in the daylight?

Recent psychological research on grief favors meaning making over closure; accepts zigzagging paths, not just linear stages; recognizes ambiguity without pathology; and acknowledges continuing bonds between the living and the dead rather than commanding decathexis. But old ideas about grief as a linear march to closure still hold powerful sway. Many psychologists and grief counseling programs continue to consider “closure” a therapeutic goal. Sympathy cards, internet searches, and friendly advice often uphold a rigid division between healthy grief that the mourner “gets over” and unhealthy grief that persists. Forensic exhumation, too, continues to be informed by these deeply rooted ideas. The experiences of grief and exhumation related by families of the missing indicate something more complex and mysterious than “closure.” Exhumation heals and wounds, sometimes both at once, in the same gesture, in the same breath, as Dulce described feeling consoled and destroyed by the fragment of her brother’s bones. Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration—of building something new with the “pile of broken mirrors” that is memory, loss, and mourning.

There is no linear way out of grief, and life after loss is not an event with a finish line. While you may notice recurring themes or experiences in your grief, they don’t always appear in order, and they don’t always make sense to your brain. Grief is more like a zigzagging mountain trail than a line on a graph. It’s a mix of uphill and downhill paths, with some switchbacks tossed in for good measure. Know that it’s okay to feel like you’re “back at square one,” because in grief, there are no squares at all.

Now we have common ground: Joy and grief both produce intense linear motion toward a destination, though we do not yet know the destination.

Rather than being linear, grief is more like a rollercoaster than it is a flight of stairs.

Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

Grief is not a linear process; it ebbs and flows, possibly for the rest of your life. Stay with the feelings as they arise. Let them flow through you without judgment.

counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

Grief isn't linear. It isn't logical. There's not structure or civility to it; it grabs you when you least expect it and digs in its nails until you succumb.

Grief wasn’t linear, she knew, but she hated to feel the old sensations return.

What’s more, I realized, is that those among us who have not had to seek refuge in a land of hostile strangers, who have not been persecuted or strangled by the crushing hand of grief, maintain the privilege of deluding themselves into believing in a coherent and linear reality; in other words, metaphysically speaking, they think they are immortal!

She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and

She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

Grief is as individual as love: every life, every path, is unique. There is no pattern, and no linear progression. Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief. Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief. To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.

You take each day as it comes. Healing isn’t linear, El. There’ll be days where the lightshine warms your face and others where you barely want to leave bed. But that is still moving forward. Don’t put expectations on yourself.” “You’re very wise, you know.” Enzo winked. “Not just a pretty face, am I? I’ve known much grief in my life, El. You are not alone in this, I promise.” “My mother always told me it was a curse to feel as deeply as I do. I loved her very much, but I think she was only capable of loving me in her own way, rather than as I needed to be.” “People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.” Elara nodded. “So I locked all these emotions behind a wall. They still bubble around under the surface. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to skim over the surface of life, to never have known pain and sorrow, to not be so attached.” Enzo pulled her away roughly and tilted her chin. “Don’t you ever let anyone tell you that feeling too much is a weakness. Do you know how much strength it takes to feel every ebb and flow of life? To keep your heart open? You treasure it, Elara. There aren’t many who possess such a gift.” Her eyes brightened slightly. “Sometimes it just feels like such a burden.” He looked at her, his eyes so open and trusting that she ached. “Then let me help carry it.

We aren’t necessarily meant to “move on” from these life-altering moments in a linear way. It is in fact normative, natural, and okay—more than okay—to sit in our grief, even when it feels as sharp as the day it first touched us. We aren’t supposed to “move on,” “be positive,” or “push ahead” overnight.

Life is linear until it isn’t.

There is no road map for the dying or the bereaved. No linear path. There are stages that go back and forth. Moments of grace, moments of anguish. Grief is a mess.

grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. The mind can’t handle emotions like grief and terror for any sustained period of time, so it takes some downtime,

Grief isn’t a linear path from loss to rediscovering joy and laughter. It’s a trail of zigs and zags, of ups and downs, that eventually leads to more happy days than sad ones. It’s a journey that never really ends, just becomes easier to travel.