Thou who is't welcome may look and see, thou is't not will perish.

The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that

makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we

may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of

them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain,

making us better equipped to cope with life and loss. At times, people in grief will often report more

stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are.

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DENIAL

Denial is the first of the five stages of grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world

becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and

denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try

to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival

possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way

of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask

yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming

stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying

begin to surface.

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ANGER

Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may

seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will

heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is

the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not

only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to your

God / Gods. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural

to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it

can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being

lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t

attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that

your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger

becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto;

and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more

about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your

love.

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BARGAINING

Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please

God,” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss,

bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping

others? Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze

of “If only...” or “What if...” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one

restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly,

stop the accident from happening...if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The

“if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We

may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in

the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting

weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or

hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual

stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.

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DEPRESSION

After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and

grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as

though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It

is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness,

wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is

too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask

yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very

depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience

depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization

that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If

grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.

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ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “alright” or “OK” with what has happened. This is

not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or alright about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about

accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the

permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to

live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where

our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was

before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot

keep the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize

roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more

good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we

are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new

connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we

listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and

become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We

begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.