When hearts break: understanding the journey through grief

THE phone call came at 3am. Priya’s father had passed away suddenly. As she sat by his bedside, holding his still-warm hand, she wondered: “What happens now? How do I navigate this overwhelming pain?”

- SANJITH HANNUMAN

If you've experienced loss, you know this feeling - the moment when life as you knew it changes forever.

The universal language of loss

Grief is the natural emotional response to losing someone precious to us. It’s universal, yet deeply personal - encompassing the complex emotions we feel when saying goodbye to a parent, spouse, child or sibling.

Whether it’s Raj, who lost his mother and found himself angry at everyone, or Shireen, who after losing her husband, kept setting his place at the dinner table for months, these are not signs of weakness — they are the heart’s way of processing the unprocessable.

Beyond the familiar experiences, there’s anticipatory grief (mourning before loss occurs), complicated grief (when healing does not progress naturally), and disenfranchised grief (loss that society does not acknowledge, like miscarriage or an ex-spouse’s death).

Understanding grief models: the winding path

Different frameworks help us understand grief’s complexity.

Dr Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross’s original five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - remain widely referenced. Some practitioners use a seven-stage model, adding shock and testing/reconstruction for a more detailed framework.

These stages are not linear stops, but rooms in a house you might visit repeatedly, sometimes spending days in one, sometimes moving between several ina single hour.

Everyone grieves differently, and stages don’t follow a specific order. Denial protects us from overwhelming reality. Anger gives us energy when we feel powerless. Depression acknowledges loss’s depth. Acceptance means learning to carry loss differently, not being “fine.”

The burden of hindsight:

“If only I had known.”

“Ma kept saying she was tired. I thought she was just getting older,” Arjun reflects months after his mother’s sudden heart attack.