Most famous for her work on death and dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined the seven stages of grief as
- Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
- Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
- Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
- Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
- Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
- Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
- Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward.
As mental and other health professionals began to pay more attention to the grief process they realized that not only does the terminally ill patient go through these stages but so does the patient’s family and, indeed, anyone who is experiencing a loss that she perceives to merit grief – losing a job, moving, breaking up with someone, dissolution of a friendship – all of these situations trigger this cycle of emotions.
These stages are perceived, at least in popular culture and certainly by some mental health professionals, as discrete periods of time. Indeed, mental health professionals view cycling among the stages as a form of avoidance in coping with the reality of the new situation. My perspective is a little different.
See, just because you find a way forward, whether that way forward is finally deleting the deceased’s office phone number from your cell phone contacts list or figuring out where you’re going to have the family dinner that was traditionally hosted by the deceased, doesn’t mean that you stop feeling any of the shock that the person is gone or any of the anger over the unfairness of it or any of the sadness that goes with the lack of that person in your life. I think you still feel them, you just feel them less acutely in the same way you learn to live with the chronic, low-grade pain of a torqued out joint or a pinched nerve that’s taking way too long to heal. It hurts, just not as much all the time.
My uncle Chuck would have been 60 today. So, discrete stages be damned. Yeah, I’ve accepted that he’s gone but that doesn’t mean I’m any less pissed off about it.
I’m thinking about death too: my aunt’s death this week (at 98) hasn’t hit me too hard, but I know the serious grief my mother is going through.
There’s one stage in the grieving process that I haven’t seen mentioned, but I saw it clearly in myself in the two deaths that have touched me most closely (my father, and, believe it or not, one of my favorite cats.) Perhaps it had to do with the fact that both deaths were sudden – entirely unexpected, and in my father’s case, the shock was totally numbing.
In both instances I also had empty time and space for grieving – I was very fortunate that I didn’t have to bottle it up. And the grief seemed unending. I’d always heard how one should cry (or whatever) and then one would feel better. Right. For me, one cries and then one is just empty of tears for awhile – then one cries again.
But at some point something says, enough. Not that I’m through grieving, or that I feel any less anguished – it’s just that eventually a choice is necessary. I can stay with the dead or come back to the living and my own life. Some people choose to stay with the dead, or at best to ignore the choice.
Choosing to come back to the living means just getting on with life, trite as that sounds. It doesn’t mean everything is ok – somehow all happy again. But it’s very different from getting stuck in one particular frame of the past. I suspect it’s the only option that makes further change possible –
I’m trying to visit as many of the NaBloPoMo blogs as I can and I thought I’d say hi, I liked your blog.. 🙂 Note that she doesn’t say you reach a stage of stopping being pissed off about it.. 😉 I think we all feel that pretty much all the time – well, once the realisation that nobody’s going to invent a cure for death in our lifetime sinks in..