Every individual in this world will encounter grief throughout their lifetimes. It could be caused from the loss of a pet, a bad break up, losing a job, or losing a loved one. The body’s natural response is to grieve, every ones grieving process is unique and different in its own way. This paper will discuss the stages of grief by researching a book called “Lament for a Son” and how the author of the book ( Wolterstorff) found joy after his loss. The author of this paper will analyze and review what is the meaning and significance of death in light of the Christian narrative, as well as how the hope of resurrection can play a role in comforting Wolterstorff.
Five Stages of Grief
Five stages of grief were identified by Dr. Kubler-Ross; Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Everybody will grieve in their own unique way, and the order of the five stages may differ from everybody. Some people may not even go through certain stages at all. Grieving helps us get through a rough time whether is finding out a love one has passed or even your own dying process.
Denial
The first stage of grieving in Dr. Kubler- Ross’s model is denial. When someone goes through the passing of a loved one, they may feel as if it is not real, or that they are in a horrible dream. . Some people may experience denial by not being able to accept that someone has expired from this world, entered the dying process, or has a terminal illness and will leave this world. (Patricelli, n.d.)
The
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler came up with the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although grief is individual depending on the person and the situation, these stages help organize the process of grieving. The stages act more as tools than a timeline. The movie My Girl portrays these stages after the death of Thomas J., Vada’s best and only friend.
The life transition of death and dying is inevitably one with which we will all be faced; we will all experience the death of people we hold close throughout our lifetime. This paper will explore the different processes of grief including the bereavement, mourning, and sorrow individuals go through after losing someone to death. Bereavement is a period of adaptation following a life changing loss. This period encompasses mourning, which includes behaviors and rituals following a death, and the wide range of emotions that go with it. Sorrow is the state of ongoing sadness not overcome in the grieving process; though not pathological, persistent
The grieving that individuals experience with death is unique, but the main stages are universal across cultures (Axelrod, 2017). There are five stages of grief. Nicolas Wolterstorff’s story, Lament for a Son, addresses these five stages as he tries to find joy after the loss of his son. The meaning and significance of death in light of the Christian narrative is also addressed in the story. Having a hope of the resurrection can help comfort individuals in situations similar to Wolterstorff (Wolterstorff, 1978).
8. Some people may be in one stage for such a short time that it seems as if they skipped that stage. Some times the person returns to a previous stage. According to Kubler- Ross, the five stages of dying are:
The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.
During the following paper, I will be analyzing in the book “Lament of a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff, where the author interprets his traumatic recollection of the death of his 25-year-old son on a climbing accident, and how he was able to appease his grief based on his faith in God. Consequently, I will be identifying the 5 stages of grief, how the author finds joy after his loss, the meaning of death in the light of the Christian narrative, and how the hope of resurrection play a role in comforting the author.
There are five stages to Kubler-Ross’s theory. These stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. These stages are felt both by the person who is dying, and other people who grieve the death of their loved one. She based her theory on interviews she held with dying people and the people caring for them in the hospital.
According to American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the five common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance respectively. However, humans are quite fascinating creatures as we might alter the order in which every stage hits us. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain, in every stage of grief of any kind, we must come to terms and accept the cards that are casted in front of us; and it’s entirely up to us how we choose to play them.
As stated by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, and a pioneer in near death experiences, and the author of the world famous book On Death and Dying, which first explores the 5 stages of grief and the key emotional reactions to them. The common stages and effects of grief are accepted as the following; Denial and isolation can be summarized as, “…helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense” Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969.After denial comes anger, which is explained as outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying, 1969, one’s anger can extent to anyone and anything in our surroundings, including God, in the sense, ‘Why did God allow this to happen?’. And under the anger is pain. The next stage in grief is bargaining, to be understood as trying to bargain with the universe or God hoping that ‘it isn’t so’. To quote
The stages of mourning and grief are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life. Mourning occurs in response to an individual’s own terminal illness or to the death of a valued being, human or animal. There are five stages of normal grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.”
Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of
In the first stage that I will discuss is denial. In this stage people may deny the reality of the situation by blocking out the words and hiding from the facts ("5 Stages of Loss & Grief | Psych Central," n.d.-a). For instance, someone could be diagnosed with some form of cancer. That person may not want to know because it might overwhelm them. So they would not want to know the reality of
As presented by Kubler-Ross, the process of experiencing and dealing with loss can be described step-by-step in five stages. The first stage is denial, which Kubler-Ross interpreted to be synonymous to "disbelief" to the grieving individual. At this stage, the individual is in a state of shock that understanding and making sense of the reality that a loved one is already gone is yet to be fathomed by the individual. At this point, the individual is
One theory is by Kubler-Ross she identified five stages of grief which are Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Individuals can spend different amounts of time on these stages and these stages don’t need to be processed in order (www.ekrfoundation.org 2016).
This essay explores several models and theories that discuss the complexities of loss and grief. A discussion of the tasks, reactions and understanding of grief through the different stages from infants to the elderly, will also be attempted.