Losing someone you love is different for everyone but experts agree that for most people there are five stages of grief: denial, depression, bargaining, anger, acceptance. However, it’s misleading to think of these as linear stages. You don’t pass from one to the other over time. They can occur in any order, you may experience all of these at once and some not at all.

Depression

Grief is one of the central themes of my novel Green Shoots. In the opening pages, the protagonist John Adamson is in despair on the edge of a cliff. He feels he has nothing left to live for, having lost his wife Christina. Luckily for John, he is brought back from the brink by a phone call and so it is not the end of his journey but the beginning of a new one, navigating through grief to some form of healing.

This is John’s internal struggle through the novel – he is deeply depressed and suicidal at the beginning and needs to find reasons to keep going. How can he deal with his grief over his wife’s death and pick up the pieces of his life? When writing it, I drew on my own personal experience of losing my wife Carolina to cancer in 2013. At first, I found this extremely challenging and wondered what I was putting myself through. I also worried that I would begin to confuse my own feelings with John’s, but over time it became cathartic and I found a way to express so much through John. I have found creativity perhaps the most effective method of getting through the depression stage of grief because it gives me a sense of achievement and allows me to share the experience with others.

Denial

My own experience was different to John’s. He lost his wife very suddenly. My wife suffered from cancer, which progressed from illness to remission and then terminal over the course of nearly two years. Therefore, my grief started early but was wrapped up with denial and hope. By the time Carolina died, the denial was gone though, and it was a case of dealing with all the other emotions. For those who lose a loved one suddenly, denial can last a long time, particularly in children. It’s difficult to digest the enormity of what has happened but repressing it will most likely lead to reality hitting hard later on, so it’s very important to work through this stage.

Bargaining: guilt and regret

After he steps back from despair, John’s internal dialogue in the book charts his journey through grief. Chapters frequently begin with memories and ruminations on what has happened. He daydreams about how he could go back in time and stop it all from happening – a very common daydream of mine and probably for anyone who has experienced loss of a loved one. He remembers times when he argued with his wife and regrets what he said, wishing he could have done things differently.

Guilt is wrapped up in the bargaining stage of grief – “I should have done this, what if I had done that”. I would ask myself what I could have done to stop my wife’s cancer or if I could have taken her to a different doctor or noticed the symptoms earlier. Bargaining can be excruciating and I found it to be the most potentially damaging stage of grief. Regrets and guilt are certainly the most insidious feelings.

Anger

Anger is another equally damaging emotion. Loss creates a swell of anger in many people but the problem is what to do with this anger, where to direct it. Often the anger is directed against who you think is to blame – in my case, it was the doctors. But later on, it was directed at myself and, in darkest moments, even at my wife. Blaming the person who left you is quite common but of course it’s futile and traumatic, leading to a cycle of guilt at experiencing such an awful emotion.

If you have nowhere to direct the anger, then you lash out at anyone and everyone, often without due cause. Behind every angry person, there is usually pain. John experiences frequent outbursts of anger in the book and in one scene talks about how he hates seeing two lovers together and how he hates the entire world and everyone in it. I always remember a quote from Buddha – that holding onto anger is like holding a hot coal. You only hurt yourself.

Getting help: grief counselling

John briefly tries counselling in the book but is not engaged with it initially, although he returns to it later. I sought out counselling to try to address the anger, guilt and regret, with some success. I engaged with several courses. Firstly, through MacMillan, then Cruse Bereavement and later on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) through the NHS.

I found CBT to be the most useful therapy because it prompted me to document and reflect on my own thought processes and begin to have some kind of control over them. If I started to ruminate, I would check myself and try to stop. If I got very angry about something, I would try to stop and consider if it’s worth getting so angry. If I found myself triggered by a bad memory, I reflected on how the trigger happened. Just because a character is on her deathbed in a TV movie, that doesn’t mean I have to re-experience my own loss. It felt empowering to have some measure of control over my own thoughts.

This does not mean I repress emotions. Sometimes they have to come out. Sometimes a rage at the world may be cathartic, and sometimes voicing regrets helps to let go of them. The key to getting through grief is that you are somehow able to deal with it and how you do that is up to you.

Acceptance

“Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again,” sang Paul Simon in one of my favourite songs The Sound of Silence. Acceptance does not mean that you don’t have dark moments. There is a place for all the emotions and grief does not obey a linear timeline – you don’t just wake up one morning and the sadness is gone. Reaching the acceptance stage means that you learn to live with your grief, engage with it, but don’t let it overwhelm you. It will always be a part of you, just as the person you lost will always be a part of you.

• Find out more about Green Shoots by Ben Westwood on Good Reads.