Is there something wrong with the way you’re grieving? When my mom died it felt like the world stopped. The air around me was wrong. I didn’t know what to do. Is there a wrong way to grieve your parent’s death? Perhaps naturally, as we do in these modern days, I did what many do when they need an answer—I turned to Google.

I was in bed, under the covers, surrounded by a white mountain of tear-filled Kleenex when I googled “my mom died now what”.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I didn’t find it. The search results led me to general, basic pages describing the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In that order. Many articles implied I would experience each of these five stages in a linear manner, hopping from one stepping stone to the next, until at last I reached acceptance. (Yay?)

That is totally not the way that I did it or that I’m still doing it! So is my grief abnormal? What is the normal way to grieve?

I’m a believer in doing things my own way. Your mileage may vary, or YMMV, has always applied to me, even before I knew what the acronym meant. I tend to vary from the societal norm in most ways (Does anyone else reading this have a neurodivergent brain like me?)

Anytime I try to complete a project by copying another person’s method or modeling my work after what someone else does successfully, my work inevitably goes wrong. It falls flat. Something is just off about it. It doesn’t feel smooth. It doesn’t ring true. It warbles when I want it to sing.

At the lunch reception after my mom’s funeral, I was approached by several well meaning friends and relatives, who must have felt compelled to instruct me on exactly what was going to happen to me over time with grief. I remember freezing in place, remaining still and silent, just hoping that soon they would be done talking. I needed to grieve in my own way. No other path would work.

There is no wrong way to grieve, and many factors affect how it will happen for you.

Internalizing Grief Vs. Externalizing Grief

Do you tend to internalize your feelings? Some people might be withdrawn and quiet, crying when they are alone while observing the thoughts swirling inside their minds. Others may tend to externalize their feelings and find comfort in talking to friends, repeating stories or facts about their deceased parent, or simply crying openly in the company of others. You might be angry or in despair over your parent’s death and need to talk about it, or you might be just as angry and despairing but keep the feelings to yourself. Both ways are valid and allowed! However your personal grief surfaces and manifests, whether it is internal or external, there is not one way to do this. Don’t feel pressured by (well meaning?) friends who goad you into grieving in a way that doesn’t feel right.

Mind Grief Vs. Body Grief

After my mom died, grief took over my mind. What felt like a few minutes of silently staring at the ceiling was actually hours of listlessly tuning out the world and retreating into my head. It rendered my body almost useless, as if I knew I was inside my body, but often I couldn’t make it move. Thoughts of losing my mother and life without her spread through me, replacing blood and breath and bones with a heaviness that at times made it feel like I’d never get back up and live again. Mind grief hit me hard.

Some people feel their grief manifest in their bodies, and movement helps them process it. They might not know what to think, and so they don’t–they shut off their thinking and move their bodies instead. Or perhaps moving helps the thoughts flow and settle while their hands or legs are busy with an activity. They suddenly begin a running habit and end up becoming a marathoner. They train and hike to the summit of Mount Saint Helens. They ferociously take up gardening. They move in ways that let them shut off their minds. After a friend of mine lost her mom, she was excited and motivated to clean out her mother’s home, remodel and repair it, then repaint every room. She had body grief, which somehow gave her the energy to take on such a large project so soon after her mom’s passing.

The One And Only You

While your grief experience might loosely line up with those five basic stages of grief, there is only one you, and your unique brain and heart bring special factors into how you experience and express grief.

Just as no one else has the same fingerprints as you and no one’s irises swirl the same way in their eyes as yours do, your grief is one of a kind. What happened in your childhood or in the past might affect how you grieve today. Have you faced other losses in your life or was losing your parent your first one? How you grieve the death of your parent will be informed by your life experience, your beliefs and values, your personality, and your perspective on life where you are right now.

It can be helpful to take a look at how people in your life responded or supported you through a loss in the past, especially if you didn’t find the love, care, or assistance you needed. Did your friends and family give you space to freely express your feelings and needs in the past or did they urge you to tamp down your emotions that they considered too big or too difficult to manage?

Of course it’s important to note that possibly the only thing that could be considered wrong versus right in grief is meeting your basic needs. As long as you are taking care of yourself and not hurting yourself or others, you can process grief however you like, go through those stages in any order, or follow your own path. Basic needs include drinking water, eating nutritional food, sleeping enough, and moving your body. Are you getting those?

Do you need to reach out to a friend, family member, doctor, or therapist to ask for help? Telling my doctor I needed to find a grief therapist after my mom died felt like one of the hardest things to say out loud at the time. I simply didn’t want to talk about it, and yet I needed to talk about it. There are also grief support groups on Facebook or through local organizations like hospitals or churches that you can join to make contact with others who can relate. (If you need help finding resources, leave a comment below, and I will do my best to help you find support!)

You have the right to change how you cope with grief anytime. It may not look the same tomorrow as it does today, and that is okay. Sometimes things that are new or unfamiliar can feel wrong to us, and grieving a parent’s death is possibly the most or one of the most unsettling major events you’ve had to endure. That doesn’t mean the way you grieve is wrong. It’s simply your way of blazing your path forward. I’m grateful that our paths have crossed here. Keep going.