Discovering the Five to Ten Stages of Grief

Grief is an emotion that can take over your life, if you let it. If there is something funny to be found in grief it is the more you try and control that particular emotion the more it controls you. There are said to be anything from five to ten stages of grief. The number is dependent on the person who has studied and written about grief.

Following the loss of my daughter this was not news to me but I was interested and needed to explore the stages in more detail. After all, I was about to go through all five or ten stages if what I had read previously, was true. The initial five stages were said to be denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

According to psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 she observed these stages of grief while studying responses from people facing terminal illness and wrote about it in her book ‘On Death and Dying’. This may well be true for many people preparing for their own death and in a way I was able to relate to not only the stages but the sequence upon hearing the news of my daughter’s condition.

But the grief I experienced following Emily’s death did not fit in with these tidy categories and there were many more emotions that I could have used to describe where I was headed. What about the sadness, the sense of loss and the hope that had gone from our daily lives? This had been a part of my reason for getting up every morning. A sense of purpose and chasing after miracles for another day on earth for my daughter.

Later I read somewhere that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had admitted her explanations on the stages of grief were never meant to ‘tuck messy emotions into neat packages’ but said ‘there is no typical loss. Our grieving is as individual as our lives.’ If only I’d known that when I started my journey of grief but sadly, she hadn’t written it when I was supposedly in denial.