It may be the loss of a someone you are close to, a relationship, career, medical issues that impact quality of life – it’s impossible to put a limit on the kind of loss you can grieve over.

Most people hear about stages of grief and have assumptions about where someone should be when they experience a loss.

But everyone grieves differently: not everyone cries, not everyone goes back to work soon afterwards, some people are talking about it years later, others never mention their loss.

Recently, someone told me that the task of grief is to move on; other people say you need to put it behind you, or you should one day get over it.

What happens when we start to impose our views on grief on how others deal with their own loss is that we are saying they are doing it wrong. That in your mind there is a right way and a wrong way to grieve.

While there are stages of grief, they can happen in any order, you don’t have to experience them all, and it doesn’t necessarily end with moving on.

If you have a friend who can’t get rid of her husband’s clothes, that’s okay; she can take her own time over it and clear them out when she is ready.

Our role as a friend to someone who is going through grief is to listen.

You can’t discount how helpful it is to tell the same story over and over, and how grateful that person is that you are listening. You may be the only person who does.

And if you are worried that they are getting stuck in their grief, you can encourage them to see a professional to help them work through their loss. Not to put it behind them, just to work through it.