Stages implies a progress through time, gives the illusion of linearity—but this is not my experience of grief. Even when I listen all the way through to the end of the Chaconne, I don’t have any sense of having worked through the grief it makes me feel. The sadness is still there, as raw as it ever was. What I do have, or have had in that moment, is a complete experience (perhaps even embrace) of the feeling in all its myriad forms, its painful variations. I have let myself feel; I have let myself remember.
