When most people think about grief, they think about the five stages.
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced this model in 1969 and it became — for better or worse — the dominant cultural framework for understanding loss. Most people have heard of it. Many people have used it to make sense of their own experience. It gave language to something that had previously been largely unspeakable.
But here is something Kübler-Ross herself said that tends to get left out of the conversation.
She never intended the stages to be a linear progression. She never suggested people moved neatly from one to the next in order. She was describing patterns she observed in people facing terminal illness — not a universal roadmap for grief that everyone should follow in sequence.
The way the model got applied — as a checklist, a journey with a clear beginning, middle and end, a process you complete and come out the other side of — was never really what she meant.
And for many grieving people, the gap between what the five stages suggest and what grief actually feels like has been quietly, additionally painful.
Because grief doesn't move in a straight line.
It doesn't end at acceptance and then leave you alone.
And you don't get smaller as it gets bigger.
Which brings me to a fried egg. Don’t worry fellow vegans, we don’t eat this one.
Dr. Lois Tonkin and the Model Nobody Taught You
In 1996 a New Zealand grief counsellor named Lois Tonkin published a paper that offered a different way of understanding what happens when we grieve.
She had noticed something in her work with bereaved clients that didn't match the prevailing model. People weren't moving through grief and coming out the other side, reduced and then recovered. They were doing something different. Something more complicated and — once you see it — more hopeful.
She drew two circles to explain it.
The First Circle — What We Expect
Imagine a large circle. This represents your life.
Inside that circle, in the early days of loss, sits another circle — smaller, contained within the first. This inner circle is your grief.
The expectation — the cultural story — is that over time the inner circle of grief gets smaller. That grief shrinks. That you process it, work through it, move on from it, and eventually the grief takes up less and less space until it becomes a small, manageable thing in the corner of your life.
That is how most people expect grief to work.
And it is why so many grieving people feel like they are failing when, months or years later, the grief feels just as large as it ever did.
The Second Circle — What Actually Happens
Tonkin's observation was different.
In her experience the grief doesn't get smaller.
The life gets bigger.
Over time — not quickly, not linearly, not without difficulty — people begin to grow around their grief. New experiences accumulate. New relationships develop. New meaning is found. New capacity for joy gradually returns — not replacing the grief, not pushing it out, but existing alongside it.
The inner circle — the grief — stays roughly the same size.
But the outer circle — the life — expands around it.
And this is where the fried egg comes in.
The Fried Egg
Picture a fried egg, in a frying pan sizzling away.
The yolk — sitting in the centre, dense and contained — is the grief. It doesn't disappear. It doesn't shrink away to nothing. It stays. It is always there, yes I said always. At the centre of things.
The white of the egg — spreading out around the yolk, growing wider — is the life growing around the grief.
In the early days of loss the egg is all yolk. The grief takes up almost everything. There is barely any white visible. The loss is consuming, overwhelming, all-encompassing in the way that acute grief genuinely is.
Over time the white grows. Life expands. Joy becomes possible again — not instead of the grief, not after it, but around it. Alongside it. The yolk remains. But it is no longer the only thing.
This is not a model about getting over grief.
It is a model about growing around it.
And that distinction — small as it might sound — makes an enormous difference to how people understand and relate to their own experience of loss.
Why This Matters
The five stages model, applied as a linear checklist, can leave grieving people feeling like they are doing it wrong.
If they are still devastated two years later — wrong. If the grief comes back suddenly and overwhelmingly after a period of feeling better — wrong. If they never reach acceptance, or reach it and then lose it again — wrong.
Tonkin's model removes the wrongness.
It says — your grief is not too large. You are not stuck. You are not failing to move on. You are doing the only thing that can actually be done with a loss that matters.
You are growing around it.
And growth is not linear. It is not consistent. It does not proceed in an orderly direction from worse to better without interruption. Growth involves good days and terrible days and days that ambush you from nowhere with a wave of something you thought you'd already processed.
All of that is normal. All of that is grief doing exactly what grief does.
Grief Is Not Just About Death
It is worth saying clearly because it matters and it is often missed.
Grief is not only a response to bereavement.
We grieve relationships that end. We grieve versions of ourselves we've had to leave behind. We grieve the life we thought we were going to have. We grieve health, opportunity, childhood, safety. We grieve things that were never quite real — the parent we needed but didn't have, the childhood that should have been different.
Ambiguous loss — a term developed by therapist Pauline Boss describes grief without a clear ending. The grief of a relationship that has broken down but not officially ended. The grief of a loved one living with dementia who is still present but somehow gone. The grief of estrangement.
These losses are real. The grief they produce is real. And Tonkin's model applies to all of them — not just the losses that come with a funeral and a condolence card.
If you are carrying something that feels like grief — whatever its shape or cause — it deserves to be taken seriously. Not minimised because it doesn't fit a recognised category of loss.
What Growing Around Grief Actually Looks Like
It looks like laughing at something, genuinely, and then feeling guilty about it — and then, gradually, feeling less guilty.
It looks like a day that is mostly okay followed by a day that is not, and learning to hold both without concluding that the okay day was a lie.
It looks like building new things — new routines, new relationships, new sources of meaning — not to replace what was lost but to give the life more room to breathe.
It looks like the grief becoming, over time, something you carry differently. Not lighter necessarily. But differently. More integrated. More part of who you are rather than something happening to you. Something controlling you and taking away your autonomy.
It looks like the white of the egg growing slowly, steadily, around the yolk that remains.
A Final Thought
If you are in the early days of a loss — when the egg is all yolk and the idea of the white ever growing feels impossible — I want to say something simply.
You don't have to get over it.
You don't have to reach acceptance on a schedule. You don't have to feel better by a certain point or process it correctly or move on in the way other people think you should, or that other people do.
This is your journey and it is unique to you.
You just have to keep living.
However imperfectly. However slowly. However much it hurts.
Because living — even when it is painful and small and barely functional — is how the white of the egg grows.
Not through force. Not through positive thinking. Not through being strong.
Just through the quiet, persistent, often invisible work of continuing to exist.
And that — as Tonkin so beautifully observed — is enough.
Please note: This article is written for educational and informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional mental health support. If you are experiencing grief and finding it difficult to manage please speak to your GP or a qualified professional.
