The Missing Stage

Perhaps it's a bit foolish to fly in the face of an established field of research and science but after my last post, I began to think even more about the stages of grief.  Kubler-Ross suggested 5:  denial - anger - bargaining - depression - acceptance and the JAMA article suggested a different 5:  disbelief - yearning -anger - depression - acceptance.  While the JAMA stages felt more like my own experience, I suddenly realized they both stopped with acceptance.

That's the best we can hope for -- acceptance of the loss?  I don't think so.  There are too many examples of people who suffer horrible losses and then turn the loss into something new:  Christopher Reeve and his work for spinal cord injury, Candy Lightner forming the MADD foundation after the death of her daughter, and thousands of other examples.  There has to be another stage -- new growth, transformation, something that gives the loss meaning.  Not that every loss has to turn into a charitable foundation but somehow the loss has to provide space for something new that is meaningful.  Acceptance seems to imply a stopping point.  It's over and we're moving on.  But, within loss there is a huge energy that can, eventually, be used to fuel new growth.

So, I think we need to change the model and give people something to hope for, something to watch for, a belief that the phoenix will rise out of the ashes.  My stages of grief proposal would be:  disbelief - yearning - anger - depression - acceptance - rebirth.

In the process of thinking about this, I had to remind myself about the Phoenix myth.  The Wikipedia entry is posted below.

In ancient Egyptian mythology and in myths derived from it, the phoenix or phœnix is a mythical sacred firebird.

Said to live for 500 or 1461 years (depending on the source), the phoenix is a bird with beautiful gold and red plumage. At the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The new phoenix embalms the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis ("the city of the sun" in Greek). The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible — a symbol of fire and divinity. Tears from a phoenix can heal wounds.