Inspirational Quotes
Far away there in the sunshine are my height aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
Louise May Alcott
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The most familiar model of how people react to their own dying is the 5-stage model proposed in 1969 by psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. The basis of her model was a series of interviews she conducted in her attempt to determine how people react to their own imminent death. From their responses, she developed a list of five predominant “defense mechanisms” these people used to face the stress of their situation.
Dr. Kübler-Ross’s five stages (also known as DABDA) and how they are typically expressed are:
- Denial - “Not me!”
- Anger - “Why me?”
- Bargaining - “Yes, it is me, but…”
- Depression
- Reactive - Responding to past and present losses
- Prepatory - Anticipating and responding to losses yet to occur
- Acceptance - “almost void of feeling”
While Dr. Kübler-Ross’s book and model helped bring the issues related to death and dying out into the open, both public and professional, and she highlighted the importance of “unfinished business,” there are some serious flaws with her model, many of which are the same ones associated with using stages and phases as a model for mourning. For more of a description of the shortcomings of stages and phases in modeling how a person copes with his/her own impending death, see my blog Dying: Stages and Phases.
Instead of using stages and phases, I prefer to think of coping with dying as being a group of active and individualistic Tasks.
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