Grief and Near Death Experiences

Are there stages of grief?

In 1969, based on her years of working with terminal cancer patients, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced what became known as the “five stages of grief.” While these stages represented the feelings of people who were themselves facing death, they also have come to be applied by many to people who are experiencing other negative life changes (a break-up, loss of a job) and to people facing or experiencing the death of loved ones.
Kübler-Ross proposed these stages of grief:

* Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”
* Anger: “Why is this happening? Who is to blame?”
* Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will ____.”
* Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything.”
* Acceptance: “I’m at peace with what is going to happen/has happened.”

However, Kübler-Ross herself never meant these stages as a rigid framework that applies to everyone who mourns. In the last book she wrote before her death in 2004, she said of the five stages, “They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.”

So there is no single pathway through grief. People can feel multiple emotions at once; they can reach a point of acceptance only to have a birthday or bit of news plunge them back into despair. Siblings mourning the same parent can experience their grief in completely different ways.
That said, some recent experts have described three general categories of a beginning, middle, and resolution to grief:

Shock: The first reaction to loss, shock can involve just minutes or last for days. You might feel numb or be in disbelief. You might be unable to make simple decisions or attend to your daily routine.

Suffering: When the shock wears off, the pain begins and can last for weeks, months, and intermittently for years. If you’re suffering from a loss, you’ll typically experience waves of emotions that can involve sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or any combination of those feelings and others. The pain is as palpable a physical experience as it is emotional. You might also experience physical symptoms such as loss of appetite, sleeplessness, or chest pain, and behavioral symptoms such as withdrawal from society, mood swings, or inability to concentrate.

Recovery: Recovery represents not the end of pain over a loss but the ability to reconnect to the interesting and joyful parts of life — to refocus your attention from your pain of loss to living with meaning and purpose

Again, though, remember: There is no timetable for grieving. While the sense of loss and the intermittent sadness never go away completely, people experience the cycle of grief differently. Some find that within a few weeks or months, the period between waves of distress lengthens, and they are able to feel peace, renewed hope, and enjoy life more and more of the time. Others may face years of being hit with what feels like relentless waves of grief.

For a more detailed list of physical and behavioral symptoms that can accompany the emotional pain of grief, see the description of the second phase of grief as offered by the American Cancer Society.