Although grief is "not a linear process with concrete boundaries but, rather, a composite of overlapping, fluid phases that vary from person to person," meant only to be guidelines, normal grief does tend in general to follow Kubler-Ross's (1969) conceptualization of death and dying (Shuchter & Zisook 23). Kubler-Ross identified three partly overlapping phases:
(1) initial "shock, disbelief, and denial,"
(3) restitution (Shuchter & Zisook 23-24).
The shock phase lasts a variable amount of time, anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, and the griever experiences it by going through "varying degrees of disbelief and denial" (Shuchter & Zisook 24). The mourning phase begins at the moment that the griever acknowledges the loss both on a cognitive and an emotional level, and the griever experiences it as "periodic waves of intense emotional and often somatic discomfort," sometimes precipitating social withdrawal and "a painful preoccupation with the deceased" (Shuchter & Zisook 24). This acute phase of mourning may endure for a matter of months before it is gradually replaced by the return of feelings of well-being and a willingness and capacity to go on living (Shuchter & Zisook 24).
As R. Scott Sullender points out, loss occurs because of an attachment; "attachment and loss go hand in hand," and "grief is a reflection not just of the loss, but also of the character of the attachment." Putting it even more simply, Sullender states, "In short, grief is where love was." Malkinson (155) explains that a death denotes "the end of a relationship and the beginning of the painful process of grief, when the individual experiences intense psychophysiological reactions." These explanations describe the universal character of grief. The actual process of grief in an individual is unique each time. What for one person may be just a brief but painful bump in the road can for another be a dev...