Why Does Grief Come in Waves?

You were fine in the parking lot.

Then you were in aisle six, reaching past the cereal you still buy out of habit, and something took your legs out from under you. Eleven weeks in. Or eleven months. Or four years, on an ordinary Tuesday, with a cart you now have to hold on to.

That is a wave. It is not a relapse. It is not a stage you failed to complete. And you did nothing to bring it on.

Almost every page on the internet treats waves as something to get past — a phase on the way to somewhere calmer. We are not going to tell you that, because nobody can tell you that honestly. What we can do is explain what is actually happening, name the things that set it off, and say what other people do when one lands at the worst possible moment.

Here is one of ours.

We hear one of my nephew's favorite songs, and we feel sad and we miss him.

Then another day the same song comes on, and it does something else entirely. It reminds us of him. Or somebody says one of the things he always used to say, in the funny way he said it, and we laugh.

Same song. Both of those are true.

That is the part nobody warns you about. A song does not sort itself into a safe one or a bad one. There is no list to learn and nothing to mark and skip past. There is only which day it is, and no way to know in advance which thing the song is going to do.

Why does grief come and go instead of fading steadily?

Because grief is not a reservoir that drains. The researchers who study bereavement describe people moving in and out of it by necessity — and the moving in and out is the coping, not a failure of it.

Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut set this out in Death Studies in 1999 as the Dual Process Model. They described bereaved people in "a dynamic, regulatory coping process of oscillation, whereby the grieving individual at times confronts, at other times avoids, the different tasks of grieving." Their argument was that taking respite from it is "an integral part of adaptive coping" — not a detour around grieving, but part of how human beings survive it.

Read that again if it is useful: the week you felt almost normal was not a betrayal of your child. It was the other half of the same process.

The National Cancer Institute's PDQ health professional summary on grief, updated in June 2024, says the same thing from the clinical side. There is "not a preestablished linear process" through which a person moves, and people "may move back and forth" between the different parts of grieving with no "expectation of a predefined path."

So the shape is not a slope. It is closer to tide. And nothing about that is a malfunction in you.

Why does it hit out of nowhere, months later?

Because some of it is set off by a reminder and some of it has no cue at all — and the second part is documented, not a quirk of yours.

The National Cancer Institute's patient summary, updated in February 2025, calls these "grief bursts or pangs," and describes them as "short periods (20-30 minutes) of very intense distress." It names reminders as a cause. Then it says the part that matters most here: "At other times they seem to happen for no reason."

For no reason. In a national cancer institute's patient handout.

If you have spent the drive home trying to work out what you did differently that morning — what you ate, what you watched, whether you have slipped — the answer may genuinely be nothing. Sometimes there is no trigger to find, and hunting for one is an exhausting second job on top of the first.

The months later part surprises people most. Some find the early stretch was spent doing rather than feeling: arrangements, people in the house, forms, somebody's casserole in the freezer. A wave needs a gap to arrive in, and the gaps come later. That is also part of why so many parents describe the second year as the harder one — we wrote that one separately.

What sets a wave off?

Reminders, mostly. The National Cancer Institute's summaries name holidays, the anniversary of the death, and sorting through the person's belongings among the common triggers. But the ones that actually knock people over are rarely the ones anybody plans for.

Things people describe:

• A song, two bars in, in a shop with no quick way out.
• A hospital corridor smell, which is the same smell in every hospital in the country.
• Somebody else's child in a parking lot, roughly the right height, wearing the wrong coat.
• A form asking how many children you have, with no box for the real answer.
• An automated reminder from the dentist, for an appointment nobody canceled.
• A sibling getting taller than they ever got.
• Your own handwriting on something you wrote before.

Some of them you can see coming, and those are a different problem — not easier, but at least on a calendar. The anniversary, their birthday and the first Halloween each have their own page, because the dated ones can be prepared for and the aisle-six ones cannot.

And belongings deserve their own warning. The National Cancer Institute names giving things away as a trigger, which anyone who has opened the wrong drawer already knows. There is no schedule for that either, and no requirement to do it at all: what to do with their clothes.

Does the gap between waves get longer?

I don't know, and I am not going to pretend to. Anyone who gives you a number is guessing — that argument is set out in full in how long does grief last, and the short version is that the research does not support a timetable and neither will we.

What people do describe changing is not the waves. It is what happens around them.

Some find they get a little more warning. Some find they recover their footing faster afterwards — still flattened, but able to finish the shopping. Some find that a wave in year five is no smaller than a wave in month five, and that what is different is that they have been through enough of them to know it will pass without their having to do anything about it.

And here is the one piece of genuinely useful arithmetic in this whole post. The National Cancer Institute puts a pang at twenty to thirty minutes. Not an afternoon. Not the rest of your life. A burst has an end even on the days when the grief doesn't, and knowing the shape of the thing you are inside makes it survivable in a way that not knowing does not.

A wave arriving in year four is not evidence that you have gone backwards. There is no back. There is just the tide, and you, further along the same beach.

What do I do when one arrives at the worst possible moment?

Leave. You are allowed to leave. Nobody at that party, in that meeting or at that school pickup is owed an explanation on the spot.

Beyond that, there is no correct procedure, and anybody selling one is selling. What some people find helps:

• One sentence, prepared in advance. I need five minutes, I'm all right. Something you can say without having to think, so you are not composing an explanation while you cannot breathe.
• The car. It is the one place nobody asks you anything.
• Letting the clock do some of the work. Twenty to thirty minutes, per the National Cancer Institute's 2025 summary. It will not feel like twenty minutes. It is still twenty minutes.
• One person who already knows. Somebody you can text three words to, who will not need the whole story and will not try to fix it. If the people around you do not know how to be that person, we wrote the page for them — and you are allowed to send it instead of explaining.
• Not doing the post-mortem. The urge to work out what caused it is strong. Sometimes there is nothing to find.

If a wave arrives and does not recede — if it stops being a wave and becomes the whole sea, or if you find yourself thinking about ending your life — that is a different thing and it does not wait. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is open 24 hours a day. Call or text 988. You do not have to explain it well, and you do not have to have the words ready.

One last thing

A wave is not a message. It is not evidence that you are failing at this, and it is not a sign that you have been sent back to the beginning.

It is what loving somebody who is not here does inside a body that is still here. On a Tuesday. In aisle six. Next to the cereal.

You are allowed to put the groceries down and come back later.

Save this for the day you need it.

Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family.