The five stages were never meant for the people left behind

In 1969 a Swiss psychiatrist published a book about dying.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had spent months sitting with terminally ill patients, around two hundred of them, listening to people describe what was happening while it was happening. Almost nobody was doing that. Death was handled quietly at the far end of a corridor, and the person it belonged to was the last one anybody thought to ask. She asked.

Out of those conversations came five words that have outlived nearly everything else written about loss. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

She was writing about the dying. Not about the people left behind.

The model got lifted across to the bereaved within a few years, mostly by other people, and it fitted well enough that nobody stopped to check. Kübler-Ross said more than once, later, that the five were never meant to be a route. They were states she had watched, in no fixed order, and not everyone went near all of them.

By then it had gone. It was in the leaflets, the sympathy cards, the training courses, and eventually in every film where somebody loses somebody.

And it helped. That part tends to get lost in the corrections.

Before the stages, grief in this country was mostly silence. You were expected to be composed, and then quietly, at some unnamed point, finished. The model broke that open. It said out loud that you might be furious with someone for dying, which almost nobody had permission to feel. It said the flatness was part of it rather than a failure of character. It gave families a way to talk about something they had no words for at all.

A great many people got through the worst year of their lives holding onto those five words. That is not a small thing, and no correction should pretend otherwise.

What it also did was give grief a shape.

Five things, in an order, with acceptance sitting at the end. A description of states became a map with a destination on it. Once there is a destination there is a distance, and once there is a distance you can be behind.

The question underneath the question

So you check.

Two years on, mostly functioning, back at work, and the question arrives at odd hours. Is this anger, or is this just what I am like now. Did I do depression, or is that still to come. Is this acceptance, or have I gone numb and started calling it progress.

You ask the people around you whether this is normal. They say yes, and they mean it, and it holds for about an afternoon. Then you are asking somebody else. It is reassurance that never quite lands, because the question underneath it was never really about normal.

What you are asking is whether you are doing this properly, and whether the fact that it has not lifted means something has gone wrong in you.

Checking where you are in something takes attention. And the attention it takes is the same attention the grief was asking for.

You are not behind. There was never a schedule to be behind on.

What holds a loss in place is almost never the order the feelings arrived in.

It is usually one moment. The phone going at a time of day the phone never goes. A corridor with a vending machine in it. Fifteen seconds in a car park where somebody told you. A thing you said, or did not say, and can now neither take back nor give.

Something in you stopped there. You carried on, because people do. You went back to work, you made the tea, you were pleasant in shops. And underneath all of it some part of you is still standing in that one place, braced, waiting for it to finish arriving.

That is not weakness and it is not stage three. It is a loss that is still going on underneath, at the same hour of the same afternoon, while the rest of your life runs along above it.

The anger is the part people recognise least, because it rarely turns up looking like grief.

You are not angry at the person who died. Or you are, and there is nowhere to put it. So it comes out at a brother who handled the house badly, at a hospital that could have moved faster, at a driver pulling out in front of you on a Tuesday. A temper that was never yours before, landing on people who have done nothing much.

Then the guilt about the temper, which is its own weight, and which nobody warned you about either.

Talking about it helps more than people expect. Being listened to properly, by somebody who is not also grieving and not waiting for their turn, does something that private thinking never manages. Bereavement groups do it. The people who run them are often very good, and they ask for nothing back.

What talking does not always do is move the thing it is about. You can describe the corridor forty times and still be standing in it.

I work with people who are three years past a death, or nine, or longer, and cannot understand why it has not softened the way they were told it would. Ordinary people, mostly. They went to the group. They talked. They kept going for the children. What is still running underneath is not a stage they failed to complete. It is a moment that never finished, and a body that has been holding its breath at it ever since.

When that shifts, and it can, the change is not that you miss them less. People expect that, and it is not what happens. You do not lose them a second time.

What changes is where you are standing. The moment moves into the past tense, which is where it belonged all along, and the rest of the person comes back with it. Not the phone call and not the last fortnight, but thirty or fifty years of somebody you actually knew.

Kübler-Ross spent a good deal of her later life saying it. Not a ladder. Not an order. Not a thing you complete and hand in.

She had sat with dying people and written down what she saw, which was human beings looking for a shape to put round something that does not have one. The five words were an attempt at that. So is the checking you do at two in the morning.

Neither one is the grief. The grief is the ordinary Tuesday when you go to tell them something, and remember halfway through, and carry on to the shop.