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 grief—and 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 that—with enough time and the right approach—will 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 research—and the work of countless other grief specialists—has 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 wound—the 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 time—sometimes intense, sometimes gentle, sometimes barely noticeable—but 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 together—to live fully despite the ache that remains.
Dr. Neimeyer talks about "continuing bonds"—the 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 ones—through memories, rituals, conversations, or simply holding them in their hearts—often 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 do—refusing to forget what mattered.
So what does healthy grief look like?
It looks like feeling okay one moment and devastated the next—and understanding that both are normal.
It looks like laughing at a memory without guilt, because joy and sorrow can coexist.
