The 6,000 stages of grief

(I wish there were only six.)

Of course, the six I’m referring to are the initial well-known 5 as outlined by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and the recent addition of #6 by her colleague David Kessler. To review, they are, briefly:

Denial
Denial, the first stage of grief, is necessary to help you survive a loss. You're in a state of shock because the world as you knew it no longer exists.

Anger
The next stage of grief, anger, is a transition from the denial stage. The direction of anger, even if it's "unfair" in hindsight, can begin to bind you back to a sense of connection with others. It's something to grasp onto.

Bargaining
Bargaining is a form of "negotiation" with yourself or with a higher power that serves as a way to try to avoid the grief. After death, bargaining often takes the form of guilt, or "what if" statements. What if you had found the disease sooner? What if you had just delayed your loved one by 30 seconds?

Depression
Depression is the phase where reality begins to set in, and grief tends to enter your reality in a major way. It could manifest in feelings of wanting to withdraw from life, feelings like nobody could possibly understand what you're going through or help you feel better, and feelings of pure sadness.

Acceptance
Acceptance should not be confused with everything suddenly being "all right." In fact, most people never again feel "all right" after a major loss. The acceptance stage is simply about coming to terms with the fact that your loved one is no longer physically with you and realizing that it's a permanent reality. To be clear, it's not about learning to like the new reality.

Finding Meaning
As mentioned above, David Kessler has recently documented a sixth stage, which is finding meaning. Many people talk about finding "closure" after a loss, but Kessler talks about learning to remember those who have died with more love than pain and learning to move forward in a way that honors our loved ones.
(descriptions found on this site)

I suppose having a list to point at and say, “oh, here I am at anger” or “feels like a denial day to me” can be helpful in managing the myriad of feelings grief brings, but I am the first to point out that the stages don’t come in order. (Maybe I’m not the first, but I wholeheartedly second it.) I believe the presence of stages has an underlying message of “finishing” as in, once I’m done with these stages, I’ll be over my grief. But, anyone reading this who is grieving knows that is not true. Besides, as I suggested, there are way more than 6—there might even be 6,000. For me, there are 86,400—as many seconds as there are in each day.

The addition of “finding meaning” makes the stages more open-ended and allows people to make sense of the grief. But as someone in one of my grief writing groups said once, “what if I don’t want to find meaning.” And I had to agree with that. Sometimes grief is grief no matter who puts what label to it.

I’m not crazy about “stages”, but, in the interest of helping to identify some of the other overwhelming feelings of grief, I’ve decided to add a couple more to the list. For example:

Snark. If you were raised as a smart-ass (or you raised a couple yourself) it is likely that there were some shared moments of not-so-kind banter between you and your lost loved one over the years. There’s no reason to think that it’s all going to stop now that you’re grieving. For me, there’s simply no escaping having a bit of acerbity creep into my griefiness at times. And, I confess, those times are mostly inopportune. Like when some poor soul is trying to be sympathetic to me, but ends up being kind of a jerk. It’s worse when I imagine what Annie would have quipped or observed. So far, I haven’t said anything out loud. I don’t think.

Lassitude-I think you can be mentally and physically weary without the depressive qualities. There are days that I surrender to my recliner under a blanket, and I can be weepy, but I don’t feel the weight of sadness or loss. It mostly feels like a hollowness preventing me from too much activity—like I’m conserving energy or recuperating. Which, I guess, I am. So, I say, just do it.

(Antonym Lassotude-the irrepressible urge to coach soccer in England.)

Guilt. The only reason I added this one is to dispel it. I know it’s covered a little in “Bargaining”, but I want to be clear about this: We are already having a hard enough time with the loss we’re bearing—why do we insist on making ourselves feel guilty about our grief?

One day, soon after Annie’s death, I realized I had a recording on my phone of the lake in Maine where our family cottage is. The waves were gentle and soothing and the loons were calling. It would have been perfect for her. I decided that forgetting to play it for her as she died was enormously neglectful on my part. Why didn’t I play it for her?? I beat myself up about it for at least a day, maybe longer, before I stopped myself. I am certain I could make up a dozen more stories in my head of ways I fell short at the end of Annie’s life, but I’m not going to. I have chosen not to. I have enough to do with remembering her and loving her—I don’t need to feel guilty about any of it.

And neither should you.

I write these essays about grief to share my story and invite you to share yours. If you’re new to Silver Linings, please feel free to say hi or share your own story. Why not have a little company in our grief? xo