- It is not the threat of death, illness, hardship, or poverty that crushes the human spirit;
it is the fear of being alone and unloved in the universe.
– Anthony Welsh
The first time I remember someone close to me dying was as a child when my grandfather Papa Jack died. I knew I was supposed to feel something profound, and as everyone stared at me with sad eyes waiting for my reaction to the news, I felt the weight of their expectation on me. I escaped to our driveway, shooting baskets and wondering how I was supposed to feel – what the ‘right’ way to respond was.
I have had mercifully few occasions to explore that same question in the ensuing years, though life instead has brought me face to face with many others who are dealing with dramatic loss in their lives, be it the loss of a job, the demise of a dream, or the death of a loved one.
Not long ago, as the Southern California fires raged ever closer to our house, we were forced to face up to the possibility of losing our home. No sooner had the unexpected rains washed away the danger than the temporary nature of life showed itself even closer to home, when a neighbor phoned to let us know that her daughter’s baby had died in her tummy while in labor the night before.
In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross first published On Death and Dying, the book which introduced the five stages of grief into the common parlance, but my first introduction to them was in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical film, All That Jazz. Throughout the film, Fosse’s alter-ego, Joey Gideon, is editing a stand-up comedy routine on the five stages of grief, comparing them to the names of the partners at an upscale law firm.
“Hello,” the comedian says in a female receptionist’s nasal twang. “Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance – can I help you?”
In this article, I am going to briefly explore the five stages and offer up a sixth as part of our potential – going beyond mere acceptance to a full embrace of the reality of our lives.
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
- Gratitude
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“Denial is not a river in Egypt.”
-Paul Pearsall
The first stage we often go through when dealing with loss or impending loss is denial. In his bestselling book Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson illustrates this kind of denial in sharing the difference between humans and rats. When the cheese is moved in a maze, the rats quickly move on in search of more. Stuck in the same maze, the humans sit around where the cheese used to be and rail against the unseen hand which moved it.
This points to the second stage of grief, when many people begin to experience a fierce and burning anger.
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“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”
– Dag Hammarskjold
‘How could a kind and loving God take away my husband/mother/daughter/son?’, people ask. And with no satisfactory answer to be found, they rage against what Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called ‘the dying of the light’. Yet ultimately, the hot white fire of anger burns itself out. At this point, it is common for the griever to begin bargaining with God or life.
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“I used to think crying was something that only children did, but as I grew older, I realised that it was only crying loudly in the hopes that someone might hear you and come to your rescue which was the province of children.”
– Neal Stephenson
When our anger has run its course, we then seek to make a deal. “I’ll be a better person”, we say, “if you’ll just promise to spare my job/partner/child”. Unfortunately, these bargains are doomed before they’re made, not (in my opinion) because God doesn’t care, but because impermanence is the very essence of what it is to be alive. The realization of our true helplessness in the face of life often leads us initially into depression.
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“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
– John Keats
I remember a friend of my wife asking me if I thought she needed treatment for depression. “What’s been going on in your life?’ I asked. As she unfolded her tale of woe involving the loss of her fiancé to the ‘loving embrace’ of his secretary, it occurred to me that she really didn’t need treatment for depression – rather, she needed to take the time to be depressed. If we rush through loss without taking at least a bit of time to pull back from our outer lives, we may never get to stage five – acceptance.
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“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
-Friedrich Nietzche
At some point, it dawns on us that life moves on – indeed, it has never stopped moving on, though we may have gotten off the merry-go-round for a while. Acceptance no longer fights with reality, not, as Byron Katie would say, because of any great spiritual insight, but because fighting with reality hurts. In acceptance, we are finally free to move on – sadder, wiser, and often stronger than before.
It is this newfound wisdom and strength that points to what I believe to be a potential sixth stage in the grief process – gratitude.
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“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few years back, I was hiking in the mountains above the Option Institute with four men, all of whom had autistic children. I expected the conversation to be a commiseration of woe, and even mentally prepared some of my own sad stories to share so that I might ‘fit in’. To my amazement, they each in turn expressed their heartfelt opinion that having an autistic child was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them.
One man spoke of how dealing with his daughter’s illness had led him to re-evaluate his priorities and leave a job he hated in order to spend more time with his family. Another told me that he and his wife’s shared commitment to accept and deal with his son’s autism had saved his marriage. The third man shared how his previously rebellious teenage children from an earlier relationship had come back into his life as they shared in the care and responsibility for their autistic sister. And the last man said that when his son finally made eye contact with him after more than a year of working with him, he rediscovered his faith.
When I finally processed that their common joy was not the product of ‘happy-clappy positive thinking’ but a genuine expression of gratitude for what seemed to me to be the tragedy of their lives, I remembered a conversation with a client who had lost her baby less than a year after it was born. She had told me that what she came to realize as she passed through her own unique version of the five stages of grief was that having a child had given her access to a kind of love she had never imagined possible. Even though her baby was no longer with her, she could still feel that extraordinary love whenever she thought of him- that had been her baby’s gift to her.
While I am a firm believer in feeling your feelings and am loathe to belabor the point for any of you who are still struggling in the early stages of grief, I find this an incredibly comforting thought – that it is possible to come out the other side of any tragedy enriched with more love, gratitude, and faith than you had going in.
Michael Neill is the author of "The 7 Myths of Success" audio program and a globally sought after life coach and speaker, with a client list ranging from prominent members of the entertainment industry to the Saudi Royal Family. He writes a weekly coaching column available on the internet at www.geniuscatalyst.com, currently read in over 80 countries around the world.
