grief and time

Grief takes as long as it wants, in various formations, and doesn’t follow rules the way we’d like to think it does. And for God’s sake, it doesn’t pass through stages. Forget stages, I hate that idea, she said to her friend Valery, who had suggested she try attending a bereavement group. They were walking together on a cloudy afternoon, following a path along the river, with the train tracks up the hill to their right and the river, gray and seething in the fall wind, to their left. Valery,…