What you were told
How long is grief supposed to take?
Ask anyone and they have a number. A year. Two. Until the first anniversary. Until you can say the name without stopping.
Nobody taught them the number. Nobody agreed it. Nobody can say where it came from. But they will defend it, and when they are grieving they will measure themselves against it and find themselves wanting.
This page is about where that number came from.
Where do the five stages come from?
One book. 1969. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
It was not a book about grief. It was a book about dying.
Where it came from
What did Elisabeth Kübler-Ross actually do?
She sat with people who were dying. In Chicago, at a time when doctors often did not tell patients they were dying at all, she interviewed people who were facing their own deaths and asked them what it was like. The five stages are what she heard from them.
Not from widows. Not from parents. Not from anyone left behind.
The book was brave. It changed medicine, and it was an argument against silence around death. That is our argument too. Nothing on this page corrects her. It corrects what happened next.
Did she say the stages happen in order?
No. She said the opposite, and almost nobody knows it.
Her own caveat was that the stages need not come in order, that they can happen at the same time, and that they can come back round. The list travelled around the world. The caveat stayed in the book.
What happened next
How did a list about dying become a timetable for grief?
The word did most of it. A stage is a step on the way to the next one. Call five feelings stages and the sequence is already in the name, before anyone has read a page.
Then the five words got out. They landed on bereaved people, who were not who she studied. And the last word in the list was acceptance. A finish line, with a name that says you should be moving towards it.
Why does a timetable hurt?
The feelings were never the problem. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. All real, all recognisable. The problem is what a sequence does to a person.
A description became a schedule. And you can be behind on a schedule.
Nobody is ever told they are grieving badly. They work it out themselves, against a clock they were handed by accident.
Which stage am I in. Why am I back at anger. I should be at acceptance by now.
Where does David Kessler stand on this?
David Kessler co wrote On Grief and Grieving with Kübler-Ross, the book that brought the five stages to the bereaved. He has spent the years since saying, kindly and repeatedly, that they were never a ladder and never a test. After his son died he added a sixth stage, meaning, and he is clear that meaning does not make a death acceptable.
A good man changing his position in public, on the thing his name is on.
I studied his online grief educator programme, alongside a cohort of around two hundred people. He runs it several times a year.
The hard questions
So are the five stages wrong?
No. The feelings are real. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance all happen, and Kübler-Ross was right about what she heard.
What is wrong is the word. They are not stages. They are more like the flippers on a pinball machine. You get knocked between them, in no order, sometimes two at once, sometimes back to one you thought you had left. Nobody is climbing anything.
If not stages, then what?
Not another model.
Grief is messy, it is hard and it is yours. There is no timeline and no scaffolding needed. What is needed is older and simpler than a framework. Your grief heard by someone. Ritual. Movement. Care.
Those are what people have always reached for, long before anyone wrote the feelings down in a list.
Why did one book become everything we know about grief?
Because there was nothing else on the shelf.
A culture with no language for loss was handed five words and held on. The stages did not take over by being persuasive. They took over by being the only thing there. Five words and an empty shelf.
It has taken fifty years for the shelf to fill. The hospital chaplain J.S. Park put the answer in a title: As Long As You Need.
Acknowledge, Talk, Act. Is that not three stages?
No. They are not stages of grief and they say nothing about how grief goes. They are what MORTAL can give a person.
Somewhere a loss is acknowledged. Words for it. Something to do with it. You take whichever you need, in whichever order, as often as you need it.
Where we are
What does MORTAL do with this?
The stages leave people assessing their grief internally. Which one am I in. Am I where I should be.
MORTAL aims to give people the confidence and the tools to express grief outward. To have it heard, to do something with it, to let it be seen.
You are not behind. There was never a schedule.
A prototype of the Guide is being tested with a first group of people now. There is nothing to download yet.
Further reading. J.S. Park, As Long As You Need. Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, the dual process model. Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, Continuing Bonds.
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