I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since. It assumes grief is something you can be graded on. But who wrote the rubric? Mostly stage models, the idea of ‘closure,’ and a culture that wants grief to be quick and private. When people say they’re bad at it, they might mean they cry too much, or can’t cry, or feel numb, or feel relief, or are still in it years later. Each of those is just grief taking a form. Rather than wondering if we’re grieving correctly, we could ask a better question- “what helps me stay in relationship with what I lost?”
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