Most of what gets said about grief assumes it moves in one direction: sharp at first, then gradually, reliably softer, until one day it’s simply part of the past. For a lot of people, that isn’t what actually happens.
Instead, grief arrives in waves – long stretches where it feels manageable, even absent, followed by a sudden return that can feel just as raw as the first weeks.
A song, a date on the calendar, a smell, a stranger’s laugh. Nothing about this means the grieving went wrong the first time around.
The stage-based model of grief – shock, denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, in that order – is so widely repeated that it’s easy to assume grief that doesn’t follow it is somehow abnormal. It isn’t.
Grief that comes in waves is arguably the more common experience, not the exception – it just doesn’t fit as neatly into a diagram. The waves are the same grief returning, not a new one starting, and their unpredictability is part of the pattern rather than a break from it.
Worth knowing…
A few patterns make the waves easier to recognise, once you know to expect them:
- The waves don’t mean you’re back at the start. A hard day eighteen months on isn’t a relapse – it’s a normal shape grief takes, not a sign that the earlier progress wasn’t real.
- Triggers are often small and unpredictable. It’s rarely the big anniversaries that catch people off guard – it’s the ordinary, unremarkable moment that happens to intersect with the loss.
- The gaps between waves tend to lengthen over time. The waves themselves may not get much smaller, but there’s usually more steady ground between them as time passes.
- A wave can be set off by good news, too. A wedding, a new job, a milestone the person isn’t here for – celebration and grief aren’t mutually exclusive, and often arrive together.
- Waiting for grief to “finish” can make the waves harder. Expecting a fixed endpoint turns each new wave into evidence of failure, rather than just what grief actually is.
What actually helps
It helps to expect the waves rather than be ambushed by them – not by bracing for loss constantly, but by knowing that a sudden hard day, long after things felt settled, doesn’t undo anything.
It also helps to let a wave be brief. Waves that are allowed to move through – rather than fought, minimised, or explained away – tend to pass in hours or days, not weeks.
Naming what set it off, even just privately, can take some of the disorientation out of it. “This is the wave, and this is what caused it” is often enough to make it feel less like being ambushed and more like something familiar passing through.
The long view
There’s no version of grief that’s actually finished – there’s only grief that’s become less frequent, and easier to carry when it comes.
Most people find the waves never fully stop, even decades on – they just get further apart, and less likely to derail an entire day.
If the waves are getting more frequent or more intense over time, rather than less, or if they’re consistently making it hard to function, NHS Talking Therapies is worth looking at – free, evidence-based, and self-referral in most of England, no GP needed. If it feels more urgent than that, the Support directory has crisis contacts.
Recommended reading
Julia Samuel’s Grief Works draws on twenty-five years of clinical case studies to show what grief actually looks like in practice, waves included, rather than the tidy stages most people expect going in.
Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK is the clearest direct challenge to that tidy, five-stage version – it argues against the idea that grief is a problem to be fixed on a schedule, which makes it a natural fit for anyone caught off guard by a wave they thought they were past.