SBS 200 Module 8 Death, Dying and a Life-Span Synthesis Example

Not Five Stages: Grief in My Family After My Grandmother's Death, and What a Life Span Looks Like From Its End

Student Name

Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University

SBS 200: Human Development

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Not Five Stages: Grief in My Family After My Grandmother's Death, and What a Life Span Looks Like From Its End

My grandmother Ruth, whose move I wrote about in Module 7, died in March at eighty-one after a short illness, with her family around her in hospice. Afterward, each of us grieved differently. My aunt cried every day for weeks and kept my grandmother's voicemail greeting on her phone. My uncle went back to work three days after the funeral and seemed, to some relatives, untouched; my aunt said he was in denial. I felt guilty when I laughed at a family dinner a week later, as though laughing meant I had not loved her enough. The hospice gave us a pamphlet describing five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. None of us fit the pamphlet. This paper tests the stage model against research and then closes the course by looking back over development across the life span. Ruth is the same composite grandmother as before, and the studies below are real.

The Stage Model

The five-stage model came from the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work with dying patients in the 1960s and was later applied to grief after a death. It became one of the best-known ideas in psychology, used in hospice materials, films and everyday conversation. Its appeal is understandable: it offers order and a promise that grief ends in acceptance. But a model this influential needs evidence, and its use as a description of how people should grieve can cause harm if people who grieve differently are judged.

Testing the Stages

Maciejewski et al. (2007) tested the stage theory with bereaved adults in the Yale Bereavement Study, who were interviewed at several points between one and twenty-four months after a death from natural causes. They measured disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance. Acceptance was the most commonly endorsed response from the first interviews, and it increased over time. Yearning, not depression, was the dominant negative feeling. Disbelief was highest in the first month and declined, and the negative feelings each peaked within about six months. The researchers found that the indicators did peak in roughly the order the theory predicted, but they did not occur as distinct stages that people passed through; acceptance was present from the beginning, alongside the other feelings.

Most People Are Resilient

Bonanno (2004) reviewed research on how people respond to loss and potentially traumatic events. He concluded that resilience, the ability to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of functioning after a loss, was the most common outcome, more common than prolonged distress or gradual recovery. Resilient people still feel sadness and miss the person who died, but they continue to work, care for others and experience positive emotions. Bonanno argued that grief theories had wrongly treated the absence of intense distress as a sign of denial or delayed grief, when it was usually a sign of healthy coping.

Moving Between Loss and Life

Stroebe and Schut (1999) proposed what they called a dual process model of how people cope after a death. Grieving people, in this model, move back and forth between two kinds of activity. Loss-oriented coping involves grief work: thinking about the person, crying, looking at photographs. Restoration-oriented coping involves attending to life changes, taking on new roles and taking breaks from grief, such as distraction or humor. Healthy grieving involves oscillation between the two rather than continuous focus on the loss. The model also allowed for differences across people, cultures and genders in how much each kind of coping is emphasized.

My Family Through the Research

The research changes how I see each of us. My aunt's daily tears and her saved voicemail reflect loss-oriented coping; in Stroebe and Schut's model, they are part of grieving, and Maciejewski and colleagues' finding that yearning is the strongest negative feeling describes her exactly. My uncle's return to work, which my aunt read as denial, fits Bonanno's description of resilience. He told me later that he thinks about his mother every day on the drive to work, and that working steadied him. My laughter at dinner was restoration-oriented coping, a break from grief that the dual process model treats as healthy, not as a betrayal.

Culture and faith shaped our mourning too. My grandmother's Lutheran church held a funeral lunch, and her friends brought casseroles for a month, a practice that gave the family both a place to grieve together and practical help. Other families and cultures mourn with different rituals and timelines, and research cautions against treating any one pattern as the standard.

What the Research Changed for Us

I shared the Bonanno and Stroebe and Schut readings with my aunt and uncle. My aunt said it helped to know that her yearning was the most common feeling, not a sign that she was stuck. My uncle said he had worried that something was wrong with him because he did not cry at the funeral. My aunt apologized for calling him in denial. Research cannot make grief easier, but in our family it removed a layer of judgment, letting each of us grieve in our own way without measuring ourselves against a pamphlet.

A Life-Span Synthesis

Looking back over this course, three themes run through the whole life span. First, nature and nurture interact at every stage: my twin cousins in Module 1 shared temperament but not beliefs, and Ruth's longevity reflected both her health and her relationships. Second, culture and family shape development throughout, from where a baby sleeps in Module 2 to how a twenty-three-year-old's return home is judged in Module 5 and how a family mourns. Third, development is lifelong and includes gains as well as losses; Ruth at seventy-eight was still choosing her relationships and her goals, and my family, in grieving her, is still growing.

Conclusion

Grief in my family did not follow five stages, and research explains why. Maciejewski and colleagues found acceptance present from the start and yearning the strongest negative feeling, Bonanno found resilience the most common response to loss and Stroebe and Schut showed that moving between grief and daily life is healthy. Looking across the life span, development is an interaction of inheritance and environment, shaped by culture and family and continuing to the very end.

References

Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20

Maciejewski, P. K., Zhang, B., Block, S. D., & Prigerson, H. G. (2007). An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief. JAMA, 297(7), 716-723. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.297.7.716

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046