Stages of Grief

Stages of Grief 

People grieve all over the world. They generally reserve their deepest mourning mostly for the same thing: the death of a loved one. Grief is powerful.

In her book “On Death and Dying”, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross examined what people go through when they discover that they have a terminal disorder. She said that they went through stages of grief. The named of theses stages have become part of the public conversation about grief:

• Denial: This is the first stage, when a person first hears about their disorder and pretty much refuses to believe it.
• Anger: This is the stage when it begins to sink in that the person is terminal, and it really makes them angry.
• Bargaining: This is when people try to negotiate their way out of the bad news. The bargaining can be directed at God, usually an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
• Depression: This is when the person understand that there's nothing he or she can do – nothing will stop the bad stuff from coming.
• Acceptance: This final stage is mostly an emotional white flag. It's often accompanied by a feeling of peace, however bittersweet it may be.

Not everyone experiences all five stages when they grieve – nor does everyone go through the stages in the described order when the stages were present. Some people flit between one stage and another, moving back and forth between them.

Kubler-Ross, more than anyone else, has put our grief responses to death and dying into the public discourse. That includes the research world, and because of that, we owe her a great debt. However she published her book in 1969, a time when our understanding of how the brain works was much more primitive that it is now.

Almost everybody suffers memory loss with aging. Almost everybody suffers from something we call refocusing problems with aging. There are ways to slow down the cognitive decline -or, better, to substantially delay the inevitable. Social interactions and exercise can slow the natural erosion of the aging brain.

 Sadly, memories are susceptible to degradation with time. A cemetary. Photo by Elena.