I lost my stepfather on the Friday of "dead week" at the end of the semester, and no, that irony was never lost on me. He was a part of my life for about eight years. Although we disagreed on a few matters over those years, that never stopped our family from being a family. Losing my stepfather was one of the most difficult challenges of my life, and it still is a burden from time to time. I’ve found ways to cope with this loss, and I learned that what people need most during this time is support, understanding, and knowledge of how to handle it. I learned that:

1) The five stages of grief are real, but not so organized.

According to psychology, there are 5 stages of grief. These 5 stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They aren’t so neat and tidy as they appear in a textbook as they do in real life. They will come in waves and not always in the order as in a textbook. My denial consisted of me driving to my house to see that my stepfather was no longer there to fully grasp that he was gone.

2) You can’t run away from your feelings.

I tried. I studied abroad in South America, which is as far as I could run away from my past. You can’t run away from something that is a part of you. I found that coping was easier when I acknowledged it and was more focused on healing.

3) The people who truly care about you will support you at this time.

Real friends will be supportive and patient. Anyone who thinks it’s appropriate to be mean to you while you’re grieving for a loss of a friend/family member does not have their heart in the right place. Some won’t know how to talk to you about it, and others might try to get your mind off of the grief with jokes and fun. I know my friends didn’t always know what the right thing to do or say was. I felt like I needed to openly tell them. I learned that since other people weren’t sure what I needed, I had to tell people what I needed.

4) You’ll want a balance of distraction and moping.

Sometimes I only wanted to cry. Other times, I just wanted to completely forget. It’s important to get a balance between the two.

5) You’ll either shut people out or get very clingy.

After losing one person, you won’t want to feel this way again. You’ll either shut people out in order to not feel any grief from losing anyone, or you might want to hold onto people and seek out the most meaningful relationships.

6) The only real thing you can blame is Mother Nature, which isn’t completely real.

My stepfather died because of natural causes. No one escapes natural causes.

7) You’ll probably have an existential crisis or two or twelve.

It may even become a part of your daily routine. Emotional pain makes us all question our purpose and worth in life. It’s not fun, but re-evaluating what means the most to you can also have its benefits. As awful as this sounds, sometimes it takes an extreme loss for people to realize what means the most to them.

8) You’ll feel guilty for every little detail that went wrong.

Once he was gone, I felt guilty for not being the perfect stepdaughter. What I needed to realize was that people just want you to be there and to care about them, not to be perfect. My stepfather didn’t want the perfect stepdaughter. When people really care about you, they want you because they love you, not because you have to earn their love from being perfect. People love you because of who you are, and love is not earned by perfection.

9) People telling me that he is in a better place doesn’t actually make me feel better.

Regardless of what anyone believes will happen after death, he is physically gone. I’m never going to talk to him the way I used to, and I am grieving for that. If people would like to comfort me, then they shouldn’t tell me that he is in a better place, I’ll see him again someday, or he is with me in spirit. My human experience with him is over, and that’s what hurts.

10) You’ll want to preserve their memory.

The physical loss will be too much, and you’ll want to preserve their memories in so many ways. I didn’t want to feel like losing him was done in vain. I still have my stepfather’s wallet, the last item he bought for himself that he never used, and it is my personal wallet that I use every day. My stepfather loved puns, so I found joy from making them. When I lost him as a pun-maker, I felt like I needed to fill the void in the conversation that he used to fill.

11) Everyone grieves a bit differently.

Ignoring the fact that the point of this article is to explain that there are patterns that everyone goes through when grieving, there are also unique parts to the grieving process. My version of grieving was crying when I was alone, acting like nothing was wrong when I was around people, carrying my stepfather’s wallet everywhere, and making puns. We don’t always know what people go through, so we shouldn’t judge them if we don’t know what they’re struggling with. Everyone has their own unique coping mechanisms for what they go through. We don’t need to give people a reason to use those coping mechanisms. They don’t need the practice.