Since the inception of the Five Stages, we’ve seen a lot of new grief theories enter the stage, and what you’ll find as a common thread in all of them is that they acknowledge that there is no right way to grieve, but common ways that grief can manifest. All of the theories ask us to acknowledge our person’s gone-ness, and that that absence is permanent. But they also ask us to feel all the emotions that that gone-ness brings up. Like we see in Finding Nemo, it might look scary to go through it, but if you try to go over it, you’re going to get pummeled by all the things you want to avoid. 

These grief prompts are not only useful for synthesizing grief over genocide and social and global injustices but are the same grief exercises I’d also suggest exploring for personal grief.

Grief is a hugely multifaceted experience that is impossible to distill down to one trend. One way I like to describe grief is as love, diverted–love that must be redirected from a living person who can absorb and return it, to honoring and remembering that person. More plainly, Thomas Attig says that “grieving is about both experiencing and reacting to loss and actively responding to it. Grieving is about both suffering and resilience, experiencing the devastation and hurt and reaching through them to affirm life.[…]The heart of grieving is making a transition from loving in presence to loving in separation.” bell hooks, in her book All About Love: New Visions tells us that, “In its deepest sense, grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release.”