Who hasn’t heard of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her stages of grief? Her seminal 1969 bestselling book “On Death and Dying” introduced these to us and they have been taken as gospel ever since. Her original purpose was to describe the stages that the dying go through, but since then they have been generalized to explain the course of grief in survivors as well. The stages include, in order, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I don’t remember when I first heard about these, but it may have been in my undergrad psychology courses. I’m pretty sure they were mentioned in my theatre courses as well—there’s a lot of overlap there. I’m sure I encountered them again in medical school, probably as part of my “Patient as a Person” curriculum designed to turn number loving science geeks into touchy feely practitioners.
I know they feel ubiquitous, and yet they haven’t seemed to fit my grief for Eric and that has worried me. Yes I know, I’m anal. I don’t think I have gone through denial—at least not once I saw him lying there unresponsive in the hospital. I haven’t bargained, what was there to bargain for? I have experienced anger and depression. I’m reluctantly accepting.
Imagine my surprise to see an entire article in Time Magazine this week on grief and the news that these stages MAY NOT BE CORRECT! In fact, Kubler-Ross made them up based on her interviews with dying patients. I don’t mean to demean Kubler-Ross in any way. Her book started the discussion of acknowledging and treating grief in both the dying and the living and she never claimed to have all of the answers. Somehow that’s how it was translated to me though.
According to Time, there is now a whole field of study on grief and what it takes to make it through or not and surprisingly (or not), it just takes time. No counseling needed, no specific steps, no one way for everyone. That’s not to say that counseling can’t help or that other things might not help, just that they aren’t necessary. Apparently most people manage to get over the majority of their grief symptoms in 6 months with or without treatment.
6 months? That seems a little quick to me, but then again I haven’t conducted any studies. Most of the studies mentioned in Time were conducted on people who have lost spouses. That may be a special kind of loss. I also think sudden unexpected loss probably is different to recover from than the long drawn out loss from illness. The loss of the young is also different from the loss of an older person.
No matter how we recover or how long it takes, a part of me is relieved that I don’t have to follow the Kubler-Ross stages.
Of course another part of me didn’t like the part of the article that said discussing and writing about your experiences didn’t help with recovery. Maybe, probably, I would have gotten here anyway (if I’m considered recovered), but I know this blog helped. But I also know it wouldn’t help everyone.
I feel like I’m rambling here, but maybe that’s the point. Not everyone grieves the same way and not everyone has to. I feel a little freer now.
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