A whir of low-volume laughs breaks up her somber introduction.

“So I thought I’d share it with you all in case anyone else might find what I learned helpful.”

Lucy pulls out a sheet of yellow paper from a legal pad with the stages of grief written in a circle: anger, hurt, confusion, etc. It looks as if each of these words is a number on a clock.

“You’re probably all very familiar with each of these. For years, I tried to work through them one at a time and conquer each individually.” Lucy taps her pen from one emotion to the next, like it’s the ticking second hand.

“But that’s not how it works. It starts right here in the middle of it all, in what the therapist called No-Man’s-Land, where you don’t really feel any of these. You just feel numb.” She makes a dot in the middle of all the words and begins to draw a circle that fans out like a spiral, bigger and bigger with each loop of her pen. “Then it starts to get real.”

Her pen strikes through the middle of every word. She explains that grief is about bouncing around from emotion to emotion with no real rhyme or reason. Some days, you’ll be overcome with anger, others it will be more about the denial. There’s no method to the madness.

“Grief isn’t like a storm you can track. You never know what will trigger it or how severe it will be. For me, when I’m driving in my car and I’m all alone and in the quiet, BOOM. It hits me there. And also, much like a tornado touching down, I never feel like I have any time to prepare and head to safety when it does.”

Many women in the room nod their heads in agreement. The car thing gets me, too. Most days, my grief is pretty mellow and it is what it is: just a trip to Trader Joe’s. But in the past especially, it would be a destinationless drive with a singular focus: making sure my legs were touching the same piece of fabric that touched his so that I could still feel his presence, so we could still be connected. Because I wouldn’t know how to function if that didn’t happen.

“Anyway, my therapist said the best thing to do is learn how to treat each specific stage of grief so that whichever one your brain settles on in a given day, you’ll at least be equipped to function. Today, for me, it’s sadness. So I’m working through that. Sadness. Thanks again for listening.”

“Thank you, Lucy,” the room says in concert.

About twenty minutes later, the session wraps. I didn’t say anything during the group chat. That’s not unusual for me. I come here less to talk and more to be reminded that I’m not alone. That all of our stories are essentially the same. I come here for proof that life goes on, because sometimes, you just need that.