Five Stages Of Grief Essay

How to Save a Life Everyone dies, this is the painful truth that so many of us try and reshape with a mad flurry of frantic feelings. How can something so common bring so much confusion and frustration? Even to a scholar such as Tim O’Brien, grief is a circular staircase that everyone is forced to walk when death passes their door. In his story “The Lives of The Dead” Tim O’Brien explores and explains the stages of grief that coincide with the death of a loved one. The Five Stages of Grief is a model created by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross when she was studying terminally ill patients. The five stages include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. David Kessler, a man who worked with Kubler- Ross, also corrected the false accusations that these stages are a linear timeline. They are flexible based on every individual, and some stages may reoccur or not surface at all (Kessler). The first stage of grief is denial, and this stage is the most prevalent in O’Brien’s story. Both he and the other soldiers show a denial of death when they are in Vietnam. Whether it was a fellow solider or a random Vietnamese citizen,
Anger can be heard in Timmy’s tone when he is very blunt in denying that Linda could die in a conversation with his mother. Even as an adult O’Brien sometimes feels anger towards the world or God for taking Linda from him. Such a pure and innocent child, taken for a reason only God knows. “Nine years old, and she died” (O’Brien 152). Anger can also be seen in the actions of the soldiers as they bomb an entire village for the death of their friend Ted Lavender. It is not as if every man and woman in that village helped fire the bullet that killed Ted Lavender, but the anger that comes with grief is not the direct cause of any one person. We want to take the pain that we feel and blame someone else for it other than our lost loved one. If someone else could just feel the same pain maybe it wouldn’t hurt as