Most of us inherited Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — as if grief were a tidy hallway you walk down. Kübler-Ross herself never meant it that way; she was describing what dying patients told her, not a roadmap for the bereaved. Contemporary grief researchers have largely set the stage model aside. [1]
What's replaced it is the 'dual process model' from Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut. People in grief oscillate, often within a single day, between loss-oriented coping (crying, remembering, longing) and restoration-oriented coping (paying the bills, learning to cook for one, building a new identity). Both are necessary. Neither is avoidance. [2]
There is no correct timeline, and 'closure' is largely a media invention. Most people don't get over a major loss; they get around it. The grief becomes smaller relative to a life that grows around it.
If you're in it: don't apologize for crying in week 60. Don't apologize for laughing in week 2. Both are how a healthy nervous system processes something it was never going to be ready for.