I type “5 stages,” and Google follows with, “…of love, of change, of dying.” 

Yes. Google feels me. 

The five stages of grief, as described by the Grandmother of the hospice movement and author of On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, are: 

1.    Denial 

2.    Anger 

3.    Bargaining 

4.    Depression 

5.    Acceptance 

Seems straightforward enough. 

A relationship with grief is uniquely personal. If you are honest with your emotions, there is no easy way through it. My path was set in self-doubt. Doubt made tight around me, binding me to the charred and uncompromising pillars of anger and anguish for too long. 

I watched my daughter suffer through therapy session after session—felt her anxiety and loss as she tried to survive the ragged fracture of her parent’s marriage. My actions and inactions hard to own. 

My friends patiently held me close and tried to help me make sense of my painful, hopscotched path through grief. “My guy Steve,” (my therapist) offered a necessary change in perspective and real tools to dig forward instead of my continuing to lie face down in the dirty, shallow pool of my own story. To them and him, I owe a great debt. 

During a counseling session, I spoke (again) about feeling buried in my want to make sense of what could not be understood. I was stuck. 

Steve explained (again) the grief process and its misconceptions. With sleight of hand, he produced a whiteboard and began to draw. He drew a lopsided pie chart showing the many aspects of loss of a failed marriage—trust, stability, intimacy. Family, friends, and future. And, in my case, loss of self-worth and connection to intuition. 

It was too much. 

Not only too much, the path through this mucked-up grief pie was not a straight line. It’s messy. And there is no timetable for when a person finally processes all that is needed. Sorting through what is and is not theirs so to move on or learn to live peacefully beside it. 

What was this sorcery? I am a visual learner, and as if by magic, his sad grief pie cracked open an important learning center inside my brain. 

“It’s a pizza,” I said. 

“What?” he said. 

“It’s a grief pizza.” 

“I like pizza better than pie. You should totally market that concept.” 

We laughed. 

I felt like a chimpanzee understanding sign language for the first time and finally getting that goddamn banana. 

I understood. 

Finally.