Someone has gone, and nothing falls back into place
The main stages of grief
Or how to go on living when the other person has left without warning.
5 phases
They don’t follow each other neatly. You go backwards, you skip squares, you do number three three times. That’s normal.
1 · Autopilot
You get up, you eat, you say “yes, yes”, without really knowing why. The brain has switched to energy-saving mode.
Everything works, and nobody knows how.
2 · XXL sadness, long-life format
It arrives without warning. Sometimes at seven in the morning. Often in front of a sock or a mug.
It’s normal. Very normal, even. Even at eighty, even when you’ve “already lived”: love has no age limit.
3 · Anger, silent version
You rarely start screaming. But you grumble about the weather, the doctor, the neighbour, the whole world.
Translation: it wasn’t meant to be like this.
4 · “But what’s the point any more?”
The landmarks have gone, everyday life has lost its shape, the future is a blur.
It isn’t automatically depression. It’s a major inner reorganisation, with no instruction manual.
5 · The return of the little living things
One day, you laugh at a terrible joke. You accept a coffee. You watch a bird — or a hummingbird, who knows.
Life comes back in little touches, never by miracle.
Supporting someone, without major blunders
Be there. Full stop. No need for grand speeches: a presence, a call, a “thinking of you”. Shared silence is better than misplaced advice.
Avoid
- “You have to be strong.”
- “You have to move on.”
- “You should get out more.”
- Deciding for them.
- Organising their whole life.
- Explaining to them how to grieve.
Go for
- “I’m here.”
- “You’re doing what you can.”
- “You can tell me when it’s too much.”
- A meal.
- A helping hand.
- An appointment, if they want one.
Help without taking the wheel. It’s not a house move, it’s grief.
And make room for laughter when it comes. If they laugh, don’t be shocked, and above all don’t say “oh, you’re feeling better”. Laughter doesn’t replace sadness: it lives alongside it.
Why this page is here
Because it’s the starting point of the novel, even if it never tackles it head-on. At 13, Coraline is asked to keep quiet to protect someone. She keeps quiet. And it takes her 40 years to understand that she had mixed up two things: saying no, and doing harm.
Her parents, for their part, watch over everything, all the time. Not out of control: because they’ve already lost everything once, and for them, separation looks like death.
A shock you weren’t allowed to go through doesn’t disappear. It turns into a way of being. That’s what the book is about, from beginning to end.
You don’t recover from grief.
You learn to live with it.
And sometimes, you have a laugh between two waves.
⚠ This page is not professional support
These are landmarks, written by someone who has been through it — not by a health professional. They don’t replace a doctor, a psychologist or a support organisation.
If the pain doesn’t shift at all after several months, if you can’t sleep any more, or if the will to carry on leaves you: talk to someone whose job it is. That’s the only thing this page asks of you.
Taken from the working documents of the novel The Hammock and the Hummingbirds.