You're Not Going Backward: Grief Is a Spiral, Not a Staircase

The five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Here's what almost nobody tells you: she wrote them to describe how terminally ill patients feel about their own impending deaths. Not for the guy standing in a hardware store six months after burying his father, staring at a wall of WD-40, completely undone by a smell he can't even name.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

The Map Was Drawn for a Different Country

Somewhere between 1969 and now, Kübler-Ross's framework got repurposed. It moved from clinical observations about terminal patients into grief books, therapy handouts, HR bereavement policies, and the cultural vocabulary of loss. The five stages became the model — the thing people reach for when someone dies and they're trying to make sense of what's happening inside them.

But the model was never meant to be a checklist for the bereaved. It was a descriptive framework for people confronting their own mortality, built from interviews with dying patients. The emotions Kübler-Ross identified were real and important. The problem came when the world started applying them as a linear sequence to an entirely different kind of grief — the grief of the person left behind.

The result is that millions of people have spent years measuring their experience against a framework that was never designed for them, then quietly wondering why they keep failing it. Why they hit anger twice. Why acceptance feels like it arrived and then vanished. Why they thought they were fine — genuinely fine — for three months, then heard their dad's ringtone on someone else's phone and had to sit in their car for twenty minutes.

Nobody told you the map was for a different country. That's not a small thing.

What Grief Actually Does

Neuroscience has started to catch up with what grieving people have always known instinctively. Grief doesn't process in a straight line because the brain isn't built that way. Loss gets integrated across multiple systems simultaneously — memory, emotion, identity, bodily sensation — and those systems don't operate on the same schedule or follow the same sequence.

Researchers like Mary-Frances O'Connor, whose work examines how the brain learns to live with absence, describe grief as a kind of recalibration. The brain has to update its model of the world — a model that included your father — and that updating isn't a one-time event. It happens in layers. It happens over years. It happens every time reality presents you with a gap where he used to be.

That's why the spiral model is more accurate. You don't move through emotions; you revisit them at different depths and intensities as time passes. The sadness you feel at the six-month mark is not the same sadness you feel at five years — it may be quieter, or it may be sharper in a different way, touching something you weren't ready to touch earlier. But it's the same loop. The same spiral, just at a different point on the curve.

This is a relief, if you let it be.

The Grief Ninja and the Hardware Store

There's a reason the Dead Dads podcast talks about "the grief that hits you in the middle of a hardware store." That image isn't random. It's one of the most universally reported experiences men describe after losing a father — the ambush grief, the moment that comes from nowhere on an ordinary Tuesday.

You're fine. You've been fine. You went back to work, you've been sleeping okay, you've had some genuinely good days. Then you smell cut wood, or you see a particular brand of paint thinner, or someone at the register makes the same dry joke your dad always made — and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely. Not okay. Not fine.

If you're measuring yourself against the five-stage model, this feels like regression. Like you slid back down the staircase. Like you were almost at acceptance and then something broke.

It's not regression. It's the spiral. You're revisiting grief at a new depth, triggered by a sense memory or a moment of connection that your nervous system hasn't finished processing. This is what normal grief actually looks like in practice — not a clean march from denial to acceptance, but a life lived alongside loss, interrupted periodically by waves you didn't see coming.

When Grief Blindsides You: The Ordinary Moments That Hit Hardest After Losing Your Dad gets into this in more depth. The short version: the ambush is not a sign you're broken. It's a sign you loved him.

The Performance of Grief, and the Guilt That Follows

There's a specific kind of shame that comes with non-linear grief, and it tends to hit men harder than the loss itself, at least in the short term. It goes like this: you have a good stretch. Maybe a few weeks where you feel functional, even happy. You laugh at something. You make plans. You feel, tentatively, like you're getting your footing back.

And then something in you quietly asks: should I feel worse than this?

This is performative grief guilt, and the five-stage model feeds it directly. If grief is supposed to be this distinct sequence of named emotional states, and you're currently in a state that doesn't fit the sequence — if you're laughing when you think you should be in depression, or if you feel something like peace when you've skipped over what felt like closure — you start to wonder if you're grieving wrong. If you didn't love him enough. If something is off in you.

One listener described it in a review on the podcast site as "the type of pain that I bottle up and keep to myself" — the grief that doesn't perform on cue, that doesn't look like what movies have taught us grief should look like. That bottling impulse is at least partly a response to feeling like your grief isn't tracking correctly against a model you've absorbed from culture.

The spiral reframes this entirely. Good days are part of the spiral. Relief is part of the spiral. Laughter is absolutely part of the spiral — and the Dead Dads tagline puts it plainly: Death. Jokes. Closure. Not always in that order. That's not a brand gimmick. It's an accurate description of how grief actually moves through a life.

The Dates You Don't Expect

The spiral also explains why grief anniversaries are so disorienting. The dates you prepare for — his birthday, Father's Day, the anniversary of the death — you can brace for those. You know they're coming. You can make a plan, be somewhere safe, do something intentional.

It's the dates you don't expect that catch you. The Tuesday in March when nothing particular happened. The first time you go back to his town. The first time your kid asks a question he would have answered better than you. These are spiral moments — places where the loop brings you back around to loss in a context you weren't ready for.

The Unexpected Anniversaries: Grief Dates Nobody Warns You About After Losing Your Dad maps these out in more detail. What matters here is the framework: when a date or a moment hits you harder than you expected, you're not going backward. You're just further along the spiral, encountering something at a different depth than you were ready for.

The distinction between regression and the spiral is not just semantic. It changes what you do with the experience. Regression implies you failed, that you have to climb back up. The spiral implies you're exactly where you're supposed to be — processing a real thing, at the depth it's asking to be processed right now.

What to Do With This

Honestly? Not much. This isn't a framework that comes with homework.

Knowing grief is a spiral doesn't stop the hardware store ambush from happening. It doesn't eliminate the guilt when you have a good week. It doesn't make the unexpected anniversaries less sharp. What it does is change the story you tell yourself about those moments when they arrive.

"I'm going backward" is a story that adds suffering to suffering. It makes the grief mean something about your progress, your love, your capacity to heal. It implies you were further along than you are, and now you've lost ground.

"I'm on the spiral" is a different story. It says: this is what was always going to happen. This particular depth of this particular emotion is what's up today. It doesn't mean the good days were fake. It doesn't mean the okay stretches weren't real. It means grief is doing what grief does — circling back, going deeper, integrating what can't be integrated in a single pass.

Men in particular tend to approach grief as a problem to be solved. Get through the stages. Complete the process. Come out the other side. That framing turns grief into a task you can fail at, and the spiral into evidence of failure. It's worth sitting with the alternative: that grief is something you carry, not something you clear. That it changes shape over time without ever fully leaving. That the spiral isn't a bug in the system. It's the system.

John Abreu, a guest on the Dead Dads episode from April 2026, described receiving the call about his father's death and then having to turn around and tell his family. That moment — holding news that has already changed everything, then having to say it out loud to the people you love — doesn't resolve on a timeline. It keeps being true. The spiral carries it forward.

You're not going backward. You're just being human about something genuinely hard. That's what the spiral looks like from the inside.

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Dead Dads is a podcast for men figuring out life without a father — one honest, occasionally humorous conversation at a time. Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.