The Five Stages Of Grief

The stages of grief and mourning are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life, across many cultures. Mourning occurs in response to an individual’s own terminal illness, the loss of a close relationship, or to the death of a valued being, human or animal. There are five stages of grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. The five stages of grief are denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Denial and isolation are the first of the five stages of grief. In this stage, we go numb and we try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and isolation help us to pace our feelings of grief and is nature’s way of letting in only as much as
After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. We become lost in a maze of “If only…: or “What if…” statements. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We stay in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first
This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or alright about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. Reaching this stage of grief is a gift not afforded to everyone. Death may be sudden and unexpected or we may never see beyond our anger or denial. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad