The stages of grief, and why yours will not follow the list

Almost everyone who grieves has been told about the stages, and almost everyone who looks for themselves on the list fails to find themselves there. That is because the list was never about them. This guide is what the stages are, where they came from, why they were stretched over bereavement, and what the people who actually support the bereaved describe instead.

The five stages

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. They come from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book On Death and Dying, and she wrote them about something specific: the way patients she interviewed responded to being told they were dying. Not about the people left behind. Not about grief after a death. She was describing, with great care, how a person faces their own end.

The seven stages

Shock, denial, guilt, anger and bargaining, depression, hope, acceptance. This is a later expansion by other writers, built for bereavement, and it appears on posters, in leaflets and in the leaflet you may have been given. It has no single author and no research base of its own; it is the five, stretched, with guilt and hope added because grieving people so often describe both.

What happened to the stages

They were taken from the dying and applied to the bereaved, and then they were turned into a sequence: first you deny, then you are angry, then you bargain, then you are depressed, then you accept, and then you are done. Kübler-Ross never said that, and said the opposite near the end of her life. But a list of five words in order looks like a staircase, and people climbing a staircase expect to reach the top. So when a grieving person is angry at month eight after being “past” anger at month two, they conclude they have gone backwards, and when they feel nothing at all, they conclude they have not started.

Neither is true. The stages were an observation about the range of things a person might feel, not a route.

What bereavement services describe instead

Two models, and both fit what people actually report.

Oscillation. Grief moves between two kinds of days: days focused on the loss, when you sit with it, cry, remember, and cannot do much else; and days focused on getting on, when you work, cook, deal with the bank and feel almost ordinary. You go back and forth between the two, sometimes within an hour, and both are grief. The second kind is not avoidance and the first kind is not falling apart. Researchers call it the dual process model, and Sue Ryder describes it to bereaved families because they recognise it at once.

Tasks rather than stages. The other model, from the psychologist William Worden, describes not stages you pass through but things grief asks of you, in no fixed order and often at the same time: to accept that the death is real; to feel the pain of it; to adjust to a world without the person, practically and emotionally; and to find a way of keeping a connection with them while going on living. Nobody finishes these. People do them, and redo them, for years.

What is true in the stages

The feelings on the list are real, and naming them helps. Shock and numbness are almost universal in the first weeks. Anger is common and people are ashamed of it. Guilt is nearly universal and almost always undeserved. Bargaining, the “if only I had”, is what a mind does with a fact it cannot change. Depression, in the ordinary sense of a heavy sadness, is grief itself. And acceptance, if it means anything, means the point at which the death is a fact you live with rather than a fact you fight, and it comes and goes rather than arriving.

What is not true is the order, the completion, and the idea that a person who feels none of them, or all of them at once, is doing it wrong. Is it normal to feel relief, or nothing at all is for the people the list leaves out entirely.

What to do with the list

Put it down. If it helps to name what you feel today, use the words. If it makes you check which step you are on, it is doing harm. How long does grief last describes the shape grief actually takes over a year, and coping with grief in the first weeks is for the part the list calls shock and which, in life, is mostly paperwork and not sleeping.