Could we have confused grief with something else?

...so you're likely already familiar with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It's been applied indiscriminately since it's inception, but it was originally used to describe the process someone goes through when faced with their own mortality.

...that said, what if this model is just a little bit off? After all, isn't death one of, if not the most fundamental fear(s) that mankind has to face? Wouldn't the person in question be experiencing fear rather than grief?

Denial/Flight

You're probably also familiar with the flight fear response: if you perceive the danger, you run. The survival strategy is to escape the danger.

Well, what is denial but escapism? Obviously, you can't physically distance yourself from the danger, so you mentally distance yourself. People have been known to do this all the time in other contexts.

Needless to say, when people try to dispel the delusion, threatening to destroy the carefully constructed yet ultimately pointless pillow fort that you try to protect yourself with, this can cause frustration that leads to...

Anger/Fight

Furthermore, you may similarly be familiar with the fight fear response. You may have even heard the phrase "anger born of fear". This fear response is the reason we sometimes say people behave like a cornered animal.

This time, the survival strategy is to eliminate the threat, or at least be too much to deal with. Sure, there's nothing to fight physically, but that doesn't mean the response just dissipates.

All that aggressive energy has to go somewhere, so you lash out at others. If you can project your anxiety onto something tangible, if somebody knocks the suspiciously shaped chip off your shoulder, if even the smallest inconvenience happens, what follows won't be pretty.

That said, when fighting doesn't work, you'll start to get desperate and might resort to...

Bargaining/Fawning

The fawn fear response isn't as well known as the fight or flight responses. The survival strategy here is to pacify or appease the other. In other words, you're trying to get on their good side, hoping they will spare you if you do enough to endear yourself to them.

This can look like pleading, begging, grovelling...

...bargaining...

This fear response is the reason why Stockholm Syndrome is a thing.

When you're desperate, you'll do anything, say anything, offer anything for an out. Then, after everything fails and you run out of options, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in as you watch the pendulum swing closer and closer until the dreaded inevitable happens...

Depression/Freeze

The deer in the headlights. The fainting goat. The possum. Even if the freeze fear response isn't the most well known, you've likely encountered it. The survival strategy is to attract as little attention as possible.

...this is less like depression and more like despair. In your final moments, you're watching as your own end approaches and consumes you.

Acceptance/Apathy

...now, you might have been thinking "hold up, aren't there only four fear responses?" Well, it could be argued there were really only four stages of grief. Acceptance isn't a stage, it's the alleged resolution to the process.

However, you only have so much emotional energy. Once you're emotionally drained, you fall into apathy. That isn't a resolution, that's a breaking point. In fact, if anything, this is closer to depression than the previous stage.

This would completely flip the script. If we're dealing with fear responses rather than stages of grief, then we aren't making the passing easier by making space for a "process".

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." - Frank Herbert