On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss

by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

We are a grief-illiterate nation, and Kübler-Ross dedicated her life to helping people find peace in challenging losses.

I’m a big believer in being vulnerable, open to grief. That is strength. You

can’t know joy unless you know profound sadness. They don’t exist without each other. Kübler-Ross taught us that it is okay to be vulnerable. And in this book, she and David Kessler gave us a framework for how to do it, a road map to survive grief.

On August 24, 2004, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross died.

We always thought of the three books being linked somehow. On Death and Dying was her first and the beginning of many. Life Lessons was our first book together and we almost called it On Life and Living. And then we would do this, her final book, On Grief and Grieving.

Elisabeth always said, “Listen to the dying. They will tell you everything you need to know about when they are dying. And it is easy to miss.”

The legendary expert on death and dying, Elisabeth was also the most alive person I’ve ever met. She liked to be called Elisabeth. To introduce her as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was far too formal for her. She would refer to herself as a Swiss hillbilly, but this simple, ordinary woman did extraordinary things with her life.

Anticipatory grief is generally more silent than grief after a loss. We are often not as verbal. It’s a grief we keep to ourselves.

Forewarned is not always forearmed.

The five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we

lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order.

In this book, On Grief and Grieving, the person who may be in denial is grieving the loss of a loved one. In a person who is dying, denial may look like disbelief.

For a person who has lost a loved one, however, the denial is more symbolic than literal. This does not mean that you literally don’t know your loved one has died.

This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

you can’t get over someone. It is more that you learn to live with the loss and not forget the person.

It is important to remember that the anger surfaces once you are feeling safe enough to know you will probably survive whatever comes.

Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal.

If we ask people to move through their anger too fast, we only alienate them. Whenever we ask people to be different than they are, or to feel something different, we are not accepting them as they are and where they are. Nobody likes to be asked to change and not be accepted as they are. We like it even less in the midst of grief.

Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss.

The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing.

But in grief, depression is a way for nature to keep us protected by shutting down the nervous system so that we can adapt to something we feel we cannot handle.

As tough as it is, depression can be dealt with in a paradoxical way. See it as a visitor, perhaps an unwelcome one, but one who is visiting whether you like it or not. Make a place for your guest.

When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss. As you grow stronger, it may return from time to time, but that is how grief works.

The stages of loss—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—have been widely used and misused. Our society almost seems to be involved in a “stamp out depression” campaign. Sometimes intervention is vital, but most of the time, we do not allow the normal depression that comes with grief to have its place.

our society often considers an appropriate sadness to be depression requiring fixing.

Treating depression is a balancing act. We must accept sadness as an appropriate, natural stage of loss without letting an unmanaged, ongoing depression leech our quality of life. The use of antidepressants remains a controversial topic, especially when a loss is involved.

As difficult as it is to endure, depression has elements that can be helpful in grief. It slows us down and allows us to take real stock of the loss. It makes us rebuild ourselves from the ground up. It clears the deck for growth. It takes us to a deeper place in our soul that we would not normally explore.

Important passage.

We will never like this reality or make it okay, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live.

Everyone experiences many losses throughout life, but the death of a loved one is unmatched for its emptiness and profound sadness.

Your loss and the grief that accompanies it are very personal, different from anyone else’s. Others may share the experience of their losses. They may try to console you in the only way they know. But your loss stands alone in its meaning to you, in its painful uniqueness.

We, like many others, have both felt awkward at times when someone talks about something we said in an exchange about grief and says it “changed” his or her life. Our awkwardness comes from our not remembering those life-changing moments. Whenever anyone does a pure and angelic deed for others, that person is usually unaware of it.

Some people believe that if they become spiritual enough, they will be able to cure their diseases. That, however, is bargaining, not spirituality! Spirituality is not a cure for disease. It’s our reconnection with ourselves, with our soul, and with life, even in the face of death. It is the way we seek peace.

The Grand Canyon was not punished by windstorms over hundreds of years. In fact, it was created by them. Your loss may feel like a punishment, but you are not the product of a God who punishes you with a loved one’s death. You are a creation with the unbelievable power to weather life’s toughest storms.

If someone had tried to shield the Grand Canyon from the windstorm, we would never have seen the beauty of its carvings.

Whatever the truth about life after death, we are certain that death does not exist as we imagine it. If you feel your loved one’s presence, do not doubt it. They still exist. Birth is not a beginning and death is not an ending. They are merely points on a continuum. Death does not exist in its usually traditional form as an “ending to all.” We are not suggesting that when you lose your loved one, you can skip the terrible pain of loss and separation, but we believe with all our hearts that even in death, our loved one still exists.

On the other hand, there are many in our society who believe that when you die, that is it. There is nothing else, and your energy lives on only in those around you. If this is true, then our loved ones live on in us in an even more tangible way than we thought.

It is futile to debate the reality of this, for it is beyond our knowing.

Then why do the authors believe this specific thing about the afterlife?

It seems that whether we believe in heaven, God, reincarnation, or white light, we are comforted by the sense that there is a hereafter, that we are more than bodies and have more than one mortal life with a beginning, a middle, and an end.