The DNA of Grief

I’ve come to see that love, grief, and life-force itself are not separate streams, but the same current of energy.

Grief is deeply interwoven into all aspects of life. How could it not be, when everything we love eventually changes, fades, or falls away? Yet our culture resists this truth. We are taught to chase only what is young, new, and beautiful. We are rarely taught to see grief as natural, essential, and even sacred.

Instead, we avoid grief because of a nameless fear and the shame our culture has wrapped around it. But grief, like love and creation, is part of the great mystery. When we approach it with curiosity, it can open into discoveries that are poignant, liberating, and even enlivening.

The Helix of Grief

I often imagine grief as a strand of DNA:

• On one side are sorrow, despair, fear, and the underworld depths of loss.

• On the other side are gratitude, expansion, joy, and the freedom that sometimes comes with surrender.
  

Twisting together, these strands create the double helix of life itself.

Martin Prechtel, in The Smell of Rain on Dust, teaches that grief and praise are inseparable. To grieve is to praise what has been lost. To praise is to recognize what we love, knowing it will one day be gone. These strands spiral endlessly together.

My Own Journey with the Helix

For many years, I could only see and feel the despair. The losses were too many, too relentless. I lived in the bottom strand of the helix, submerged in the underworld currents of grief.

But over time, through ritual, community, and devotion, something shifted. Now I can see and feel both sides. The sorrow remains — it always will — but alongside it is gratitude, tenderness, and even joy. Grief has taught me to hold both, to allow the strands to twine together without forcing them apart.

The Models of Grief

Over the past fifty years, various thinkers have tried to map grief, to give us guideposts through the unknown. These models can be useful, but they are also limited.

• Five Stages (Kübler-Ross, 1960s): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Originally meant for people facing their own death, not for grief after loss. Linear, often misapplied, and it creates pressure to “move forward.”

• Four Stages (Bowlby–Parkes, 1970s): Shock and Numbness, Yearning and Searching, Despair and Disorganization, Reorganization and Recovery. Suggests “recovery,” which many of us never feel.

• Tasks of Mourning (Worden, 1976/1982): Accept the reality of the loss, process the pain, adjust to life without the deceased, and find an enduring connection while moving forward. Allows more flexibility, but still implies progression.

• Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut, 1999): Oscillation between loss-oriented activities (feeling, remembering, crying) and restoration-oriented activities (daily life, rebuilding, new identity). This model honors the natural back-and-forth rhythm.

• Grief Styles Model (Martin & Doka, 2000): Distinguishes between intuitive grievers (emotional, expressive, supported by sharing) and instrumental grievers (action-oriented, process through doing). It helps normalize different ways of grieving.
  

Each of these models carries wisdom, but none can capture the whole. They are like maps of a landscape too vast and mysterious to be charted.

The Mystery of Grief

The truth is, grief does not move in neat stages, tasks, or styles. It is not linear. It spirals, just like DNA.

Within its twisting pattern are countless other threads: anger, faith, ancestral echoes, and the shamanic wonder that can arise in deep mourning. Each person’s grief is a unique sequence, carrying the imprint of their love and their losses.

To live fully is to walk with this helix inside us — to allow both the darkness and the light, the sorrow and the sweetness, to shape who we are becoming.

Grief is not the enemy of life. It is life. It is the golden thread that reminds us, again and again, of our love and our belonging.