FEATURE | The Five Stages of Grief Evasion

People are dying around me.

I find out through Messenger chats, through Facebook posts that appear on my feed, through verbal words at the most random times, and through names I once knew—now already written in the past tense.

Despite the composition I try to hold, it all comes crashing down.

In more ways than one, I feel like a balloon stretched past what it was ever meant to hold.

My heart in my chest for instance, overfilled and straining against bone.

My lungs too—overexpanding and collapsing inward with every breath.

My mind feels inflated past capacity, thoughts pushing against the inside of my skull.

My eyes swell until sorrow is no longer abstract, just futile attempts to hold the tears in.

Stage One: Denial

Rejection is easier than acceptance.

This stage presents itself as dismissal of reality, a refusal to let the news fully hit you. It is uttered in familiar phrases: “this isn’t happening,”a “this is just a dream,” “this can’t be,” “I don’t believe it.” The mind loops these in a moment not because they are true, but because they delay everything that follows.

Same with the first stage of actual grief, this is supposed to protect us from reality. But when the goal is evasion rather than processing, it becomes more persistent—stubborn. Messages are left unread for longer, posts are scrolled past too quickly; anything that requires emotional confirmation is postponed, procrastinated instead.

Life continues in a strange dichotomy: the body physically moves forward as the mind refuses to mentally move forward. People speak, events occur, the world doesn’t stop revolving—but internally, nothing has ever been filed correctly.

In a way, this is tactical; a dangerous strategy.

Stage Two: Distraction

When denial tends to fail, distraction actively takes over.

Personally, work becomes the most reliable structure available. Tasks are accumulated beyond necessity. Deadlines are sought out even when they are not labeled as urgent. Productivity becomes a method of self-containment rather than self-efficacy.

I reach for anything that could potentially disrupt the moments I have with myself. Stupid conversations that technically serve zero value. Social media notifications to keep my dopamine ringing. Plans that didn’t exist five minutes ago. Anything that projects the attention externally instead of internally. I ask friends to meet me more often than I admit to myself. Not always for connection, but because being alone makes everything louder than I can manage. Even food, even shows, even routine habits become tools for occupying attention. If something can hold my focus long enough, it delays the return of everything else.

There is an intentional filling of time to prevent collapse into stillness. Rest is avoided not because it is undesirable, but because it removes the barrier between thought and memory. So the day becomes dense with activity; responsibilities begin to stack until there is no remaining space where reflection can occur. It is the maintenance of constant motion to avoid what emerges when motion stops.

Stage Three: Humor

Dark humor, am I right?

It’s the easiest way to make something unlivable—ironically—sound manageable for even a split second.

On the surface, it can be mistaken for detachment, but I would argue that it functions as the opposite: a way of staying close to an experience without being fully consumed by it. It appears in brief remarks—sharp, often self-directed—phrased in a way that deliberately reduces the weight of what is being carried.

Humor becomes a coping mechanism. If something is turned into a joke first, it becomes less immediately available to hurt. In social settings, this creates a version of stability that is performative but effective—close enough to acknowledge what is true, far enough to remain functional within it.

However, there are limits to it. Used without care or context, it can flatten experiences that require space and respect. It should not be meant to mock what has happened, nor to erase the dignity of the human person at the center of it. In its more honest form, it is a coping mechanism that attempts to keep grief within reach, without letting it fully take over the act of living.

Stage Four: Avoidance

Over time, jokes seem to wear off—avoidance becomes more precise.

Contrary to distraction, which seeks attention across multiple tasks and noise, avoidance narrows it into controlled absence—removing access to genuine emotion.

It becomes a targeted elimination of triggers:

Certain places are no longer visited.

Certain objects are left untouched.

Certain names are no longer searched.

The environment becomes selectively edited based on emotional risk. What remains in daily life is not necessarily what is most important, but what can be encountered without immediate consequence. Everything else is gradually removed from routine interaction, not through the means of forgetting, but through deliberate non-engagement.

This creates a smaller version of the world—one that is easier to move through, but constantly shaped by what has been excluded from it.

Stage Five: Shutdown

When all other strategies lose effectiveness, shutdown becomes the final response.

This is where emotional numbness and rejection are intensely perceived. Sleep increases as withdrawal rather than recovery; it is the only state where engagement fully stops. This is not rest in the restorative sense; it is the discontinuation of interaction with everything that continues to accumulate while being in the state of wakefulness. The body takes over what the mind cannot sustain. Hours pass without resolution, and upon rising, nothing is resolved—only paused.

Upon return to wakefulness, the underlying conditions remain unchanged.

Dealing With It

No matter how much we evade grief, it eventually returns to us.

This feature article has focused on evasion not as a solution, but as a pattern that often appears when grief feels too immediate to process directly. At some point, what is being carried still requires acknowledgment, even if it arrives later than expected.

Painful experiences are not deviations from normal life; they are part of it. The inability to process everything at once does not make the experience less valid, and the ways people attempt to survive it do not erase its legitimacy. There is no need to resolve grief in a single, defined moment. But there is a need to face it when it becomes impossible to keep postponing.

Death is a painful concept—losing someone is heartbreaking and destabilizing in ways that do not follow a clear timeline or structure.

It is okay to cry.

It is okay to feel what needs to be felt.

It is okay to grieve in whatever way a person can manage.

It is all okay, as long as it does not harm oneself or others.

There is no single correct method of surviving loss. Life and death can feel like parallels that intersect in ways that do not always make sense. That comparison may not hold logically, but grief doesn’t either, right?

And still, even when nothing else feels coherent, there is often only one sentence left to reach for: at least they are not suffering anymore.

Rest in peace, in whatever form peace can take.