How Long Does Grief Last?

Someone at work asks how you’re going and you say “better”, because it’s been eight months and that feels like the right answer. Then you get home, their name pops up in an old message thread, and you’re back on the kitchen floor. Part of you wonders whether something’s wrong with you. Shouldn’t this be over by now?

Here’s the turn. Grief doesn’t run on a clock, and the belief that it should is one of the things that makes it harder.

The Stages Were Never a Checklist

Most people have heard of the five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They come from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a psychiatrist who in 1969 wrote about her conversations with people who were dying. She was describing how terminally ill patients faced their own deaths. The stages were later applied to bereavement and, over the years, hardened into a sequence, a kind of progress bar for grief. She later wrote that they were never meant to tidy messy feelings into a neat order.

Real grief is messier. You can feel something like acceptance on Monday and fury on Thursday. Some people never feel anything they’d call bargaining. If you’ve been measuring yourself against the stages and coming up short, you can put the measuring stick down.

Moving Between Two Kinds of Coping

A more useful picture comes from two bereavement researchers, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. In 1999 they described what they called the dual process model. In plain words, grieving people move back and forth between two kinds of work. One is facing the loss: crying, remembering, looking at photos, missing them. The other is getting on with life: paying the bills, learning to cook the meals they used to make, going back to work, sometimes just watching something silly for an hour.

The key idea is the movement itself, which they called oscillation, meaning swinging between the two. Taking a break from grief is part of how people cope, and it isn’t the same as denial. The model suggests trouble is more likely when someone gets stuck at one end, unable to stop facing the loss or unable to go near it at all.

So if you laughed at a friend’s joke last week and then felt guilty, that laugh was probably part of the grieving.

Why It Comes in Waves

Grief tends to arrive in waves. Early on they’re huge and close together. For most people they gradually spread out and lose a little of their force, though a big one can still knock you over years later.

Some waves are predictable. Birthdays, anniversaries and holidays are the obvious ones, and Christmas and other hard dates can be especially heavy. Others come sideways: a smell, a song, the brand of biscuits they always bought.

Why the Second Year Can Be Harder

Plenty of people are caught off guard by the second year. The first year has its own strange momentum. There’s shock, admin, a long run of firsts, and usually more support. People check in. By the second year the meals have stopped arriving, the shock has worn off, and the permanence settles in. It’s not unusual to feel worse in year two and wonder what you’re doing wrong. Usually, nothing. You’re feeling the loss without the padding.

What Prolonged Grief Disorder Is

For most people grief stays painful but slowly becomes something they can live alongside. For a smaller group it stays at full intensity and keeps getting in the way of life. Since 2022 that pattern has had a name in both major diagnostic manuals: prolonged grief disorder.

Put gently, it’s grief that hasn’t been able to move. The core feature is an intense longing for the person, or being preoccupied with them, most of the time, along with intense emotional pain. That pain can look like feeling part of yourself has died, a deep sense of disbelief, avoiding reminders, numbness, intense loneliness, real difficulty re-engaging with life, or feeling life has no meaning now. It also has to be getting in the way of daily life.

The two manuals differ on timing. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 says at least six months since the death, and the grief has to clearly go beyond what’s expected in your culture and community. The American DSM-5-TR says at least 12 months for adults (six months for children and teenagers), with symptoms nearly every day for at least the last month.

Most grieving people don’t develop it. When researchers pooled studies of adults bereaved by natural causes, roughly one in ten met the criteria. It’s more likely after sudden or violent deaths, which is a big part of when grief is also trauma. A diagnosis doesn’t mean you grieved wrong or loved too much. It’s a way of recognising that some grief needs more help to move.

Signs It’s Worth Getting Help

You don’t need to meet any criteria to deserve support. That said, it’s worth talking to someone if:

• it’s been many months and the pain hasn’t eased at all
• you can’t stop thinking about the person or how they died, or you go to great lengths to avoid any reminder
• you feel part of you died with them, or that life has no point now
• you’ve pulled away from people and things you used to do, and can’t find your way back
• you’re leaning on alcohol or other things just to get through the day
• you’re having thoughts of not wanting to be here

Grief and depression can overlap, and they’re worked with a little differently, so depression counselling may be part of the picture too.

Treatment Exists, and It Helps Many People

The hopeful part is that prolonged grief responds to treatment. Researchers have tested structured, grief-focused therapies in randomised trials, where people are assigned by chance to one approach or another so the comparison is fair. Approaches such as grief-focused cognitive behavioural therapy and complicated grief treatment reduced prolonged grief symptoms more than the treatments they were compared with. They tend to combine gently facing the loss, including the hardest memories, with rebuilding a life that still has some meaning in it. Sound familiar? That’s the dual process model, put to work.

Grief won’t run to anyone’s timetable, including yours. What most people find is that it changes shape over time, becoming less constant and more like weather. If it’s a mother or father you’ve lost, Grief After Losing a Parent looks at what that particular loss can stir up.

If you’re in crisis or not safe right now, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, any time, or 000 in an emergency.

However it’s going for you right now, you’re allowed to ask for help. None of this is a diagnosis, and it’s not a substitute for individual assessment. If you’d like to talk it through, the first 15-minute call is free. Stabilise is available in Carlton, Melbourne and online.