Five stages of grief, and how to get through them

Proposed by late psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the five stages of grief are a well-known framework for what grieving people experience after losing a loved one. Read this to learn what they are, the caveats and how to get through each stage.

One way people cope, added psychologist Sherry Cormier, is by trying to find some sort of certainty. This need for structure is probably one factor behind the popularity that latched onto the "five stages of grief" over 50 years ago and hasn't yet let up, said David Kessler, who founded grief.com, a resource aiming to help people deal with uncharted territory related to grief. Kessler coauthored "On Grief and Grieving" with the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A Swiss-American psychiatrist and pioneer of studies on dying people, Kübler-Ross wrote "On Death and Dying," the 1969 book in which she proposed the patient-focused, death-adjustment pattern, the "Five Stages of Grief." Those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.