What Is the Testing Stage of Grief? The Part Where You Quietly Audit Everyone You Know
Three years after his wife Gabby died, Pete found out on-mic that some versions of the grief model have seven stages instead of five, and that one of them is called testing. He'd never heard the word before that week. He decided on the spot that he'd been parked in it the whole time.
The textbook answer to what is the testing stage of grief is this: it's the phase where you start experimenting with ways to cope, trying out new routines and strategies to see which ones hold, before anything like acceptance turns up. That's the definition on every grief site. Pete's version is not that one, and his is the more useful of the two.
What Is the Testing Stage of Grief, Exactly?
The testing stage of grief is the point where a grieving person stops simply absorbing the loss and starts experimenting with life around it, trying different coping strategies and different arrangements of their days to find out what actually works now that the old arrangement is gone.
Testing is not a clinical stage, though, and that's worth saying out loud. It comes from an informal seven-stage expansion of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's original model, the one that adds shock at the front and testing near the back. It circulates widely through grief-support material, and there's very little research behind it. It's a folk taxonomy with a useful word buried in it.
The Five Stages Grew Two More While Nobody Was Looking
Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying in 1969. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, built from years of interviews with terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths. Five stages, one audience, and that audience was the dying.
In 2005, she and David Kessler published On Grief and Grieving, which pointed the same framework at the people left behind. In 2019 Kessler added a sixth stage, meaning, with the blessing of the Kübler-Ross family and foundation. Somewhere along the way, separately and with much fuzzier authorship, the seven-stage version started showing up in hospice pamphlets and counseling handouts.
So when Pete says he just learned there's a testing stage, he's not quoting Kübler-Ross. He's quoting the folk edit. Which is fine, as long as you know that's what it is.
Pete Doesn't Test Coping Strategies. He Tests People.
Handed a stage that's supposed to be about experimenting with your own behavior, Pete pointed it straight outward: "I've literally spent three years testing my friends."
Not testing whether they're good people. Amanda said it better than he did, and he admitted as much on air. The test is whether someone is safe enough to process in front of. Can you say the ugly thing, the unfair thing, the thing you already know is irrational, and have it land without being corrected, redirected, or fixed? Gabby was that for him for decades. Now he's running an audit to find out who else can be.
By his own count, people get it wrong 98% of the time. His circles rearranged themselves accordingly — some people he'd been close to for thirty years drifted out, and some near-strangers walked straight in.
Nobody Consents to This Test, and Everybody Takes It
The uncomfortable part is that the testing stage runs whether the griever means it to or not, and the people being tested never get told.
Pete describes having a judgy antenna that was already sensitive before Gabby died and went to eleven afterward. The only thing that gets through it is unbroken authenticity, and he'll admit he's not handing out the benefit of the doubt. Perform sympathy at him and he clocks it. Which is why the thing that scored highest wasn't a speech at the funeral. It was Amanda turning up at a rinky-dink podcast studio every week for two and a half years to argue with him about a word of the week.
His line about the anniversary makes the scoring rubric plain: he doesn't care whether anyone loved on him on July 11th, because there are 364 other days to have done it. The test isn't graded on the hard days. It's graded on the ordinary ones.
Testing Is Triage, Not a Grudge
The other thing the definition misses is how much labor this takes. Every old relationship needs Pete to explain the new Pete, and he says that explaining costs him something. For some people he spends the energy. For others he's stopped.
It isn't cruelty. He's working from a budget, and he does the math out loud: Amanda has maybe 16% of herself available after her marriage and her own best friends, and everyone else is splitting what's left. New people are the relief, because there's no old version of him they're waiting to get back.
The Stage That Never Hands You a Diploma
In the seven-stage diagram, testing is followed by acceptance. You experiment, you find what works, you move on. Very tidy.
Three years in, Pete's answer is that it doesn't get easier, it gets different, and he's careful even with the word healing because better would imply he's fine without her. If the model is right that testing leads somewhere, he hasn't found the door. If it's wrong, then testing was never a stage with an exit at all. It's what rebuilding a life out of people looks like, and there's no particular reason that would ever finish.
Either way, everyone standing near a griever is being tested right now. The good news is that the passing move is embarrassingly simple: keep showing up as the person you already were.
Episode 114 of Sorta Sophisticated is Pete handing the microphone to Amanda and letting her interview him three years out, which is not a format we've tried before. It gets into the parts that didn't fit here, including why faith is the only place he can still talk to his wife, and why his kids' graduation ceremonies turned out to be harder days than the funeral.
Hear the full episode here 👇 Nobody Knows What to Say After Grief (Here's What Actually Helps) (Episode 114)
