The Dual Process Pendulum: How to Grieve Without Drowning
“You will not finish grieving. You will learn to swing — and the swinging is the healing.”
Eight months after my mother died, I laughed at a joke.
A real laugh. The kind that catches you off guard in a crowded room.
And then, half a second later, the guilt arrived like a slap. How dare you. She is gone, and you are laughing.
That moment — the laugh and the slap, back to back — taught me something no one had told me about grief.
The pain was never the sadness. The pain was the whiplash.
The Lie We Are Sold About Closure
We are raised to believe grief is a road.
You start at the loss. You walk through the stages — denial, anger, bargaining, the whole tidy list — and eventually you arrive at a place called closure, where you set down the weight and walk on, lighter, finished.
It is a beautiful story. It is also a lie.
When you lose a parent — one of the people who built the foundation of your entire world — there is no finish line. There is no door you close. If you are waiting to be done grieving, you are standing on a platform waiting for a train that is never going to come.
Here is where most people go wrong. They treat every return of the grief as a failure. A relapse. Proof that they are “not healing right.”
You wake up one Tuesday, months in, feeling almost normal. You answer emails. You make plans. And then a stranger in a grocery store is wearing your father’s cologne, and you are weeping by the frozen peas, certain you are back at square one.
You are not back at square one.
You were never on a line at all.
The Dual Process Pendulum
Psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut studied how people actually grieve — not how we are told they should — and found something that quietly contradicts the whole closure myth. They called it the Dual Process Model.
I want to give you a sharper image for it, one you can feel in your body when the floor drops out. I call it The Dual Process Pendulum.
Picture a pendulum swinging between two poles.
On one side is Loss-orientation. This is the grief work: crying, missing them, looking at the old photos, sitting in the heaviness, letting the absence be real.
On the other side is Restoration-orientation. This is the life work: paying the bills, returning to the job, mowing the lawn, planning a trip, building the version of your life that has to exist now.
And here is the part that always surprises people.
Health is not picking a side.
Spend all day, every day, on the Loss side, and you are drowning — pulled under by a grief that never lets you up for air. Spend all day, every day, on the Restoration side, and you are running — outpacing a wave that will eventually catch you and knock you flat.
Healthy grief is neither. Healthy grief is the oscillation itself — the swing back and forth, the cry in the morning and the grocery run in the afternoon. The motion is not the symptom. The motion is the medicine.
Which means the thing that hurts you is not the swing.
It is fighting the swing. It is gripping the pendulum and trying to hold it still — either clinging to the sorrow because letting go feels like betrayal, or slamming the door on it because feeling it feels like falling apart.
You do not have to choose between honoring them and living. The pendulum was always meant to do both.
Why The Restoration Side Feels Like Betrayal
Let me name the quiet, ugly thing almost no one says out loud.
The swing toward Restoration — the good day, the laugh, the afternoon you forgot for a few hours — does not feel like relief. It feels like cheating on their memory.
I once spoke with a widow who told me about the first time she laughed after her husband’s funeral. “I felt like I was being unfaithful to him,” she said. “And then I realized — he loved my laugh. Silence would have been the insult. My laughter was the tribute.”
Read that again, because it inverts the whole guilt machine.
You do not honor the people who raised you by becoming a monument to your own sorrow. You honor them by living the life they gave you — by letting the pendulum swing all the way over to the side where you are still here, still building, still capable of joy.
The guilt is not a sign you loved them more. It is just the pendulum doing its job, and your fear trying to stop it.
Let it swing.
How To Keep The Pendulum Swinging
You do not white-knuckle your way through this. You build a small, almost embarrassingly simple practice that proves to you, on paper, that you are moving — even on the days you feel frozen. I call it the Pendulum Log.
Step 1: Log the swing. For one week, jot down what you do and tag it. Loss or Restoration. Nothing fancy — a note on your phone is enough.
9:00 AM — Cried in the shower. (Loss) 10:00 AM — Answered three emails. (Restoration) 12:00 PM — Looked at old photos. (Loss) 2:00 PM — Mowed the lawn. (Restoration)
The log is not busywork. It is evidence. When grief tells you that you are stuck and going nowhere, the log shows you, in your own handwriting, that you have been swinging all along.
Step 2: Set the Grief Timer. When you feel yourself sinking into the Loss side and unable to climb out, set a timer. Give yourself twenty honest minutes to fall completely apart. No performance, no holding back. But when the timer sounds, force one swing — wash your face, do a single Restoration task, take out the trash. You are not abandoning the grief. You are checking the Life box, on purpose.
Step 3: Reframe the “backslide.” You will have a good week, and then collapse without warning. The old story calls that backsliding. The pendulum calls it oscillation. When the wave hits, open your log. You have survived this exact swing before — the proof is right there. You will survive it again.
Step 4: Bank one Restoration moment a day. Each day, name one thing you did purely for your life — something that had nothing to do with grief. A good cup of coffee. A finished report. A walk. Say it plainly to yourself: I am building the new room. Then, if the grief rises, let it. The pendulum will swing back, and you will be ready.
What You Carry Instead
The closure myth wants you to leave them behind — to pack up the past so you can walk into the future unburdened.
But that was never the deal, and it was never the goal.
You do not put your parents down. You carry them forward. They are in the way you tie your shoes, the way you argue, the way you steady a frightened friend. The weight of grief does not vanish. Your shoulders simply grow stronger around it, until one day you notice you are carrying it not as a wound but as muscle memory.
So stop waiting to be finished. There is no finished.
There is only the swing — the crying and the living, the missing them and the building, the heaviness and the laugh that catches you off guard in a crowded room.
The pendulum is not your enemy.
It is the proof that you are still alive enough to move.
This essay draws from Parentless, a field guide for the season after losing a parent. Read more about the book →
