Does Grief Move in Steps, Like Stations on a Line?

Many people think grief runs along a fixed line of stations.

Many people believe that grief moves through fixed stages, in order, like a train calling at stations on a line. First comes disbelief, then anger, then bargaining, then deep sadness, and at the end of the line, acceptance. If you are still sad after many months, the belief says, you must have missed a connection somewhere, or got stuck between two stops.

Grief does not run on rails. It comes and goes in waves. People move back and forth between feelings, have a calm month and then a hard afternoon, laugh at a funeral and cry at a bus stop half a year later. The famous list of stages was first written about people facing their own death, and it was later stretched over grief as if it were a timetable. There are no fixed stages, and nobody is late.

I believed in the stations myself, until the first week of winter.

The winter timetable went up at the bus stop.

I was walking home from the bakery at noon, with flour still in the creases of my knuckles, when I saw him. A man in a transport company jacket was standing at the bus shelter across the street from our house, smoothing a new sheet behind the glass with the side of his hand. It was the winter timetable. The times change every December, a few minutes here and there, and the last night bus moves earlier.

Our grandmother always collected the new timetable on the first day. She brought it home folded in her coat pocket, spread it on the kitchen table, and went through it with a pencil, marking the buses she might take to visit family, the ferries they connected with, the long waits she would fill with a book. It was one of her small festivals. She liked to point out the places where two lines met for only four minutes, the way other people point out a rare bird. A missed connection, she said, was not a disaster but a chance to sit in a new waiting room. She called all of this reading the year.

I stood in front of the glass and started to cry. Not a little. The kind of crying that takes your breath and makes your shoulders shake, there on the pavement in the cold.

The man in the jacket finished the last corner of the sheet. Then he reached into his bag, took out a spare copy, folded it once, and held it out to me without a word. I took it. I said thank you, I think. He nodded and went on to the next stop.

I thought I had gone back three stations.

For most of the autumn I had felt steadier. I slept, I worked, I laughed at my brother's jokes. After the stormy night and the afternoon visitor at the end of my bed, I had even begun to feel that I knew my way around the year. I had thought, without quite saying it to myself, that I had reached a quiet station near the end of the line.

Now I felt as if someone had put me on a train going the wrong way.

That evening I told my brother about the bus stop. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a pair of drumsticks, tapping very quietly on a folded towel so as not to wake the neighbors. He stopped tapping and listened.

"I had one of those last week," he said. "At band practice. Someone played a song our grandmother used to whistle in the workshop. I had to go and stand in the corridor." He shrugged. "I thought I was past that. I thought I'd done that bit."

"So did I," I said. I unfolded the timetable on the table between us, where hers used to lie. "I've got a story for tonight. It's about someone who stopped being sure of a thing he had been sure of for years. And about seeing."

Tonight's Story

About sixteen hundred years ago, in North Africa, a bishop named Augustine wrote a letter to an old friend of his, another bishop called Evodius. Evodius had written to him after a young man who worked as his secretary had died, with many questions about the soul and about dreams in which the dead are seen. Augustine answered at length. In the middle of his letter, he told a story he had heard from the man it happened to.

The man was a physician named Gennadius. Augustine describes him as a doctor known to almost everyone and very dear to him, a devout man who was generous to the poor. When Gennadius was younger, he had doubted whether there was any life after death at all. He could not settle the question, and it troubled him.

One night, he dreamed that a young man of striking appearance stood before him and said, "Follow me." Gennadius followed him to a city. On his right he heard singing so sweet that he could hardly bear it. He asked what it was, and the young man said it was the hymns of the blessed. Then Gennadius woke, and he thought it was only a dream.

On another night, the same young man came again. He asked Gennadius whether he knew him. Gennadius said he did, very well. The young man asked where they had met. Gennadius remembered the city and the singing. The young man asked whether he had seen those things asleep or awake. "Asleep," said Gennadius.

Then the young man asked him where his body was at that moment. "In my bed," said Gennadius. Did he know, the young man asked, that the eyes of his body were closed and resting, and that with those eyes he was seeing nothing at all? He knew it. Then with what eyes was he seeing the young man now?

Gennadius could not answer.

So the young man answered for him. Just as now, he said, while you lie asleep in your bed with your eyes shut and idle, you still have eyes with which you see me, so after death, when the eyes of your body do nothing at all, there will still be a life in you by which you live and a sense by which you perceive. Do not doubt it any more.

Gennadius told Augustine that after this dream, his doubt went away.

Augustine was careful about what a dream could prove.

My brother rolled one drumstick under his palm on the table. "Do you believe that? That it really happened like that?"

"I believe Gennadius had the dream," I said. "That's what the letter says. What it means is his, and Augustine's. I read it as a story."

Augustine himself was more careful than people sometimes expect. In another short work, written some years later, he points out that living people often appear in other people's dreams without knowing anything about it. A friend may dream that you explained something to her, when you were asleep in your own bed and knew nothing of it. So, he says, a dream of a person who has died is not proof that the person came. The figure in the dream may be an image, made in the dreamer, and the dead person may know nothing of it at all.

I liked him for that. He could tell a wonderful story and still say plainly where the story stopped and the proof did not begin.

What stayed with me was the question itself. With what eyes do you see me? When I dream of our grandmother, my eyes are shut, and still I see her pencil, her glasses, the timetable spread out under the lamp. I do not need the story to be proof of anything. It describes something every grieving person knows. We go on seeing them long after we have stopped seeing them, with whatever eyes it is that dreams and memory use.

Grief arrives in waves, the way a ferry rolls in a swell.

Later that night, when my brother had gone up, I sat at the table with the timetable and thought about the stations. The picture of grief as a railway line is tidy, and I understand why people like it. It promises an end of the line, a platform where you can step off and be finished.

But grief, for me, has felt more like the night ferry our grandmother loved. The ship moves forward all the time, steadily, through the dark. And the swell comes from the side, from far away, lifting the deck and setting it down again. Some hours the water is almost flat. Then a long wave comes in from nowhere you can see, and you hold the rail. The wave does not mean the ship has turned round. It means you are at sea.

People who study grief describe something close to this. Feelings come and go and come back again, often without warning, set off by a smell or a song or a sheet of paper behind glass. Many people keep a bond with the person who died, talking to them, keeping their things, thinking what they would say. That is a normal part of grieving, not a sign of being stuck.

My brother at the corridor door and I at the bus stop were not going backwards. We were crossing in weather.

My dreams of her had changed with the months.

Looking back, I can see that my dreams of her moved in waves too. In the first weeks she was not in them at all, only hospital corridors and the soft voice of the night nurse. In the summer she came in short pieces, busy with her hands somewhere in the house or the bakery. Then for most of the late autumn there were no dreams of her that I could keep, and I had half believed that this was part of reaching the end of the line.

That night, after the bus stop and the story, I dreamed of her again. She was sitting by the window of a night bus with the reading light on, the new timetable open on her knees. She did not look up. She just passed me a pencil across the aisle, the way she used to pass it across the kitchen table, so that I could mark my own connections.

I woke at three for my shift with the pencil still in my hand, or it felt that way. It was not a message. It was a picture my sleeping mind made out of the day, the timetable, the story of seeing with closed eyes, and my love for her. It was a kind picture, and I kept it.

Something to Try Tonight

Here is a quiet thing to do in bed, before sleep, when someone you miss is on your mind. I call it walking through a room with your eyes closed.

Lie down, switch off the light, and close your eyes. Choose a room you knew well that belonged to that person, or that you shared with them: a kitchen, a workshop, a car, a garden. Stand in the doorway in your mind. Then walk through it slowly, and find five small details, one at a time. A cup on a shelf. The sound a door made. The color of a cushion. A smell. A tool in its place. Take your time with each one. If sadness comes up while you walk, let it come, like a wave lifting the deck, and keep breathing slowly, out a little longer than in. You do not need to stop it. Waves pass. When you have found your five details, walk back to the doorway, switch off the light in the room you have been imagining, and let yourself drift.

I did this on the second night of winter. My five details were the pencil, the folded timetable, the click of the workshop lamp, a smell of machine oil, and the bicycle bell she kept on the windowsill for no reason anyone ever found.

Our cousin called on Sunday with news of the baby.

On Sunday our cousin rang while our mother was home. She had told us in the autumn that her baby was due in the middle of winter, and now she said she was standing in her kitchen trying to tie her shoelaces over her own belly, and failing. Our mother put her on the speaker so we could all hear her laugh. The baby kicked, she said, every time music played, especially drums.

My brother looked very pleased about that.

After the call, our mother picked up the timetable from the table and read it the way our grandmother used to, with a finger moving down the columns. She did not say anything. She put a small pencil mark beside the last night bus, then folded the sheet and put it back exactly where it had been.

The clock repairer brought back one of her unfinished clocks.

On the Monday afternoon it began to sleet. The clock repairer across the street came over the road with his collar up, carrying something wrapped in a kitchen towel against his chest. It was one of the repairs our grandmother had not been able to finish, a wooden mantel clock with a cracked glass that belonged to the neighbor who keeps bees.

He set it down on the workshop bench, unwrapped it, and wound it with our grandmother's key, which still hung on its nail above the bench. He said the neighbor had asked for it to stay here a few days before she took it home, so that it could tick in the workshop where it had been started.

My brother asked him whether there would be a story for the longest night, which was only three weeks away. I said there would. I was already saving it for the next chapter.

The mantel clock ticked on the bench, steady as a bicycle chain turning on a long flat road, and outside the window the sleet was slowly turning into snow.