Grief is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition. It’s something that, alas, everyone will experience — and more than once in the average lifetime. And yet, despite its commonality, that experience will be different for everyone.
In fact, it can be different each time the same person experiences it, depending on the type of loss and when it happens. Dealing with grief has stages, and each stage has a different impact for everyone.
The Stages of Grief
Although the process of grief is unique for each of us, it is indeed a process with certain similarities, something that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross understood. In the 1960s, her professional experiences with terminally ill patients not only led her to be a champion of hospice and palliative care — a woefully understudied and undervalued branch of medicine at the time — but also resulted in her writing the landmark 1969 book On Death and Dying.
It’s in this book that Kübler-Ross first articulated what would become known as the five stages of grief. Over time, these stages would come to be applied not just to the terminally ill (and their families) faced with the imminent reality of death, but to anyone coping with loss in their lives, whether they were bereaving the death of a pet, the breakup of a relationship, the termination of a job, or some other form of loss. These stages would also be expanded in a variety of ways over time.
