Grief without stages

Near the end of the last round of presidential primaries in 2008, the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton broke decisively toward Obama. Resolute Hillary supporter Lanny Davis was devastated by the prospect of her defeat. Davis had served as special counsel to Bill Clinton and had devoted much energy to Hillary's effort. He was more than discouraged; he was so grief-stricken and distraught that he googled Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief to pinpoint his location on the emotional journey. "Denial? Yes," he said. "Anger? Definitely. Bargaining? Well, OK. And depression? That's definitely what I was going through." Only when Obama lavished praise on Hillary in his convention victory speech did Davis find himself approaching the last stage: acceptance.

This incident opens Ruth Davis Konigsberg's book The Truth about Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss, which is setting off seismic shock waves in the world of trauma counselors, funeral home providers of "aftercare," and others who help the bereaved navigate the choppy waters of grief. Konigsberg challenges not only Kübler-Ross's tidy scheme of grief stages but also the whole idea that grief is a therapeutically manageable process that moves through any stages whatsoever.

As Konigsberg tells the story, Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying, which outlined the emotional stages through which dying people move, was based on poorly grounded, idiosyncratic and highly impressionistic research. The book might have slipped quietly into oblivion, but it unexpectedly caught fire in the public imagination. Kübler-Ross's wobbly theory  assumed a life of its own in the popular imagination.