Gareth O'Callaghan: Grief does not follow five stages — it lasts a lifetime when love is real

A chance encounter on a flight reveals how love, loss and memory shape the lifelong experience of grief

‘Once upon a time I was a grief counsellor. I left because grief is all-consuming. There are no answers to offer or solutions.‘ File picture

Returning on an overnight flight from New York some years ago, I woke to the sound of gentle crying.

A man sitting next to me had covered his face in his hands. He was rocking back and forth sobbing. I thought maybe it was fear of flying.

After a few moments, he relaxed enough to explain that he was bringing his wife’s ashes home to scatter them close to a walkway overlooking Lough Curra in the Glen of Aherlow, where they both loved to walk whenever they returned to Ireland for holidays down through the years.

“It’s where I proposed to her all those years ago,” he said. “She’s listened to enough of my sadness.”

When I asked him how long before our conversation she had died, I had assumed it was recently. “Seventeen years ago, but I couldn’t bear to be without her,” he replied. 

The loss I feel for her is part of who I am every moment.

Two hours later as our chat continued our plane touched down at Shannon. We exchanged numbers but, as so often happens, we lost contact with each other somewhere along the way. Then, out of the blue, two weeks ago, his son messaged me on Facebook to tell me Larry had passed away peacefully at home in New York.

His ashes would be brought back to Aherlow, and he would be reunited once again with Maureen, the woman he could never be parted from in life along that old lakeside walk. His death notice said, “Larry died of a broken heart”.

Grief never ends, despite what the experts tell us. We’ve been told for years that it passes through five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As if just one of them isn’t cruel enough, we’re reminded they’re not always sequential. Any of them can trip you up at any time.

While I agree that each one is part of grief, there is no such thing as a grieving process. If anything, it makes a mockery by trying to quantify the power that our mortality has over us, and those we love, from a very young age.

In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, an acclaimed pioneer in death and dying, developed these five stages of grief to describe how people cope with death and loss. Her book On Death and Dying became the bereavement bible for decades after its publication.

It has sold millions of copies. During her career, she wrote more than 20 books on death and related subjects.

Death is big business, ask any undertaker; but grief is a proverbial goldmine for anyone who dares to cash in on someone else’s misery.

Each of us is at our most vulnerable when death stares us down. We’re even more vulnerable, and utterly helpless, when its focus is on the person we love more than a vocabulary can ever describe.

Love and grief have much in common. When we invest our hearts in the ritual of loving someone else, we’re inevitably setting ourselves up for a fall. Grief is the price of love.

It’s possibly the bravest of all existential relationships, because it leaves us open to everything we never would have wanted in our lives, namely fear, anxiety, and other feelings that are caused by thinking about human existence and death.

When I bought On Death and Dying, all I knew was that it was a book about grieving. The youngest daughter of a close friend had died of cancer, and I wanted to reach out to him but didn’t know how. It was my earliest experience of witnessing grief so extreme and traumatic. I can still recall the scenes in the cemetery as the small coffin was being lowered into a grave.

But this book wasn’t for those left behind in the shadows and memories of what was once a beautiful life, even though that’s where it found its strongest connection. Kubler-Ross’s principle of the five stages of grief were based on research about people dying of terminal illness, which strikes me as quite different to those who are grieving their loss. That said, it quickly became a behavioural concept for what grief was in society.

The cost of love 

Grief doesn’t follow a pattern. It can make us so desperate, often in the most emotionally shocking ways. I recall a visit to a friend’s grave many years ago. He had been a soldier all his life, until cancer took him. As I stood at his grave, quietly briefing him on the war in Iraq, I became distracted by the sound of wailing.

Across a narrow pathway, a woman stood over a grave crying uncontrollably, thumping the headstone and lambasting her dead husband for leaving her to care for three young children. “I fell in love with you, and you left me. Please come back to me,” she begged. Grief skips far beyond physical endurance to tear us apart in ways that are unfathomable.

Clint Eastwood’s character Luther Whitney said in the 1997 movie Absolute Power, “Remember, tomorrow is promised to no one”. Perhaps that’s what makes grief so shocking.

When you fall in love in a way that never made sense before it happened, life becomes filled with hope based on an innate belief that all our tomorrows will be a shared experience to live for and look forward to. It’s not something we’re consciously aware of, but it’s real when you focus on it.

During our chat on the flight from New York, Larry told me he married Maureen because “I didn’t want to waste another second on my own without her”. I thought it summed up what’s at the heart of love. It’s about giving and sharing. So when death takes one of you, there’s nothing left to share or to give. So grief steps into what all those tomorrows promised.

I was once asked what real grief looks like, if it could be seen. Misery, I answered. The wretchedness of life becomes bearable when your heart doesn’t have to make the journey alone. Tragically the wretchedness becomes compounded by the misery of the fear of our own depths when death robs us of the plans we had made for all those tomorrows.

Once upon a time I was a grief counsellor. I left because grief is all-consuming. There are no answers to offer or solutions. When you watch a coffin being lowered into a grave, the sense of finality goes against everything that love once promised. But then you must ask yourself, what did love promise?

There is nothing to compete with knowing you are loved, and knowing the one you love feels the same. The opposite is unbearable to dwell on, and that’s what grief is.

Moving on 

Is it possible to move beyond grief? I don’t believe it is. 

When you come to an understanding of how love can transform your life, then nothing can replace that transformation, except emptiness.

Grief is not pathological, as psychiatry would have us believe. That only serves the pharmaceutical industry. In 2022, prolonged grief disorder became a recognised diagnosis, limiting ‘normal’ grieving to one year. After that period, psychiatry considers many forms of grief as illnesses in need of treatment.

If we’re going to prescribe drugs for grief, then we’re losing sight of what it represents; namely love, attachment, hope, and then heartbreak. The pain of grief is proportionate to what has been lost.

It’s not just a deeply-loved human being, but every conceivable aspect of life that they touched with their presence while the love became the glue. The deeper the love, the more intense the grief. That’s not an illness, that’s an experience.

Larry told me he believed that someday he would be with Maureen forever, and that was what sustained him through his grief: “If I have to wait ‘til I can be with her again, then that’s what it has to be”. I like to think the wait is over now.

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