12/08/2025
This is so important for this time of year. All the memories all sorrow seems to be magnified by this season. Dr. Robert Neimeyer has spent four decades studying grief as a clinical psychologist and researcher.
But it wasn't until he experienced profound personal loss that he truly understood what he'd been studying all those years.
What he learned contradicts almost everything our culture teaches about griefāand it might be exactly what you need to hear.
For generations, we've been taught that grief follows a predictable path.
Five stages. Linear progression. A timeline.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
We're told that if we just move through these stages properly, we'll eventually "get over it" and "move on." That grief is a problem to be solved, a condition to be cured, a wound thatāwith enough time and the right approachāwill fully heal.
We're told that holding onto grief means we're stuck. That continuing to feel pain months or years later means we're doing something wrong.
But Dr. Neimeyer's researchāand the work of countless other grief specialistsāhas revealed something radically different.
What if everything we've been taught about grief is wrong?
Grief is not a linear process.
It doesn't follow stages. It doesn't have an endpoint. It doesn't resolve itself through proper technique or sufficient time.
Grief, Neimeyer discovered, is not something you move through and leave behind.
It's something you learn to carry.
The expectation that we should "move on" from loss creates a secondary woundāthe feeling that we're failing at grief when the pain doesn't disappear on schedule. When we still cry at unexpected moments. When holidays remain difficult year after year. When we still reach for the phone to call someone who's no longer there.
But what if none of that means you're doing it wrong?
What if that's exactly how love works after loss?
Here's what researchers have learned about grief:
It doesn't come in waves that gradually diminish until they disappear. It comes in waves that change character over timeāsometimes intense, sometimes gentle, sometimes barely noticeableābut it doesn't vanish.
You don't "get over" the death of someone you loved. You integrate the loss into a life that continues. You find ways to maintain connection with the person you lost while also engaging fully with the life you still have.
The goal isn't to stop feeling grief. The goal is to find ways to carry both love and loss togetherāto live fully despite the ache that remains.
Dr. Neimeyer talks about "continuing bonds"āthe ways that people maintain healthy, ongoing relationships with those who have died.
This was once considered unhealthy. Pathological. A sign that someone couldn't "let go."
But research has shown the opposite: people who maintain some form of connection with deceased loved onesāthrough memories, rituals, conversations, or simply holding them in their heartsāoften navigate grief more successfully than those who try to sever the bond completely.
Because the bond doesn't actually sever when someone dies.
Love doesn't end just because a life ends.
The relationship changes form. It becomes internal rather than external. Memory-based rather than present-moment. But it continues.
And that continuation isn't pathology.
It's loyalty. It's love. It's the human heart doing exactly what hearts doārefusing to forget what mattered.
So what does healthy grief look like?
It looks like feeling okay one moment and devastated the nextāand understanding that both are normal.
It looks like laughing at a memory without guilt, because joy and sorrow can coexist.