Grief and Loss

Grief is a natural part of life. It has become common to talk about stages of grief with an idea that eventually you get to the last stage (acceptance) feeling as if you have made some progress with incorporating the painful loss in your life. However, the creator of the “stages of grief” (Kubler-Ross, 1969) never intended for the stages to be sequential and never thought that this would be viewed as a neat process of progress.

In the image below, all five stages from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s model are noted. Each stage represents an active process (not progress) that can show up at any time and not follow the sequence in the image. Today you might feel denial, but tomorrow you feel depressed and then the following day you might feel anger. One thing that is sure, there is a movement.  Maybe not of acceptance, but of adapting to the loss.

David Kessler’s groundbreaking work on grief, states that the ultimate meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. Dr. Kessler also says that the only way to avoid grief is to avoid love.  In Dr. Kessler’s model, he introduces a 6th stage of grief – Finding Meaning.  Finding ways to honor our loved ones or the loss through meaningful acts and thoughts.

When we experience loss, we want to make sense of it. We want to understand why the loss happened. Exploring how applying meaning to the loss can give the person grieving a sense of hope and gratitude for the moments shared with their loved one. This can help us through the feelings of loss and possibly experience healing in more healthy ways. 

Source: On death and dying. Author: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Publisher: New York : The Macmillan Company, [1969]. Christina Gregory PhD, 5/4/2021

Source: Kessler, D. (2019).  Finding Meaning: The sixth stage of grief.  New York: Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Source: Shear, M. K. (2016). Grief is a form of love. In R. A. Neimeyer (Ed.), Techniques of grief therapy: Assessment and intervention (pp. 14–18). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. 

Source: https://grief.com/frequently-asked-questions-about-grief-grieving/