Am I grieving "wrong"?

Does grief only count if someone has died?

No. Grief is the response to any significant loss: a relationship ending, a divorce, a friendship fading, a diagnosis that changes your future, redundancy, a miscarriage, an estrangement, or the loss of a version of yourself or your life you expected to have. It's still grief even when there's no funeral and no one sends a card.

It's been a long time. Why am I still not "over it"?

Grief doesn't run on a fixed timeline, and "getting over it" isn't really the goal. Most models of grief now understand it as something you learn to carry and integrate, rather than something that resolves and disappears by a certain date. If people around you expected you to have moved on by now, that says more about common misunderstandings of grief than about how you're doing it.

Why does grief keep changing? Some days fine, some days awful.

That unpredictability is one of the most consistent features of grief, not a sign something's wrong. It tends to come in waves rather than a steady decline, often triggered by anniversaries, smells, songs, or nothing identifiable at all. The waves usually do become less frequent and less overwhelming over time, but they rarely disappear entirely, and that's normal.

Is it normal to feel relief, anger, or guilt alongside sadness?

Yes, very. Grief is rarely just sadness, it can include anger at the person who died or left, relief if a relationship or caregiving role was difficult, guilt about things left unsaid or feelings you're "not supposed" to have, and confusion about all of it happening at once. None of that makes you a bad person or means you didn't love someone.

What does grief counselling actually involve?

There's no set formula for processing something as personal as loss. It usually means having a space to talk about the person or thing you've lost without managing anyone else's discomfort, making sense of complicated feelings, and finding a way to carry the loss that lets you keep living, rather than pretending it should be resolved on a schedule.