Stages of grief

The stages of grief are a way of describing feelings many people have after a loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Not everyone has all of them and they come in no fixed order; people often move back and forth between them.

Where they came from

The five stages come from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book On Death and Dying. She wrote them about how the patients she interviewed responded to being told they were dying, not about the people left behind. They were later applied to bereavement and read as a sequence, which Kübler-Ross never said they were. A seven-stage version also circulates, adding shock, guilt and hope; it has no single author and no research base of its own.

The five, as grief guidance describes them

Denial can feel like shock, disbelief, panic or confusion. Anger may mean blaming yourself or other people. Bargaining often comes with guilt, and the questions that start with “if only”. Depression is feeling tired, hopeless, helpless, isolated, or without perspective. Acceptance is acknowledging that the loss is real, and feeling ready to move forward.

What is true in them

The feelings are real, and naming them can help. What does not hold is the order, the sense of finishing, or the idea that feeling none of them, or all of them at once, means you are doing it wrong. There is no set time limit, and feelings that seem chaotic at first usually ease over time. Bereavement services often describe grief instead as a movement back and forth between days focused on the loss and days focused on getting on, and both kinds are grief. If the list helps you name what you feel today, use the words. If you find yourself checking which step you are on, it may help to put it down.