>In fact, the actual grief process looks a lot less like a neat set of stages and a lot more like a roller coaster of emotions.
Roller-coasters still have a specific route and different stages. I'd say in the same way there can be a prevailing sentiment at each stage of grief, even if this or that sentiment comes and goes at times at all stages.
Metaphors are of course imperfect by their very nature, but more importantly, the phrase “a roller coaster of emotions” isn’t even really a metaphor. It’s a figure of speech that means one is going through a wide range of feelings and/or emotions in a (relatively) short amount of time, possibly in rapid succession or even simultaneously. I think it was used appropriately.
I think this sibling comment covers my point well:
"Did you ever expect that there were discrete and linear stages? I always assumed that these were emotional “attractors”, different emotional states that we migrated through without any particular vector. More like a cruise through a dismal archipelago."
