At Psychotherapy Networker, we make it our mission to create space for clinicians to be humans—with their own stories and raw, unvarnished pain. In that spirit, at our annual Symposium, we host an intimate evening of storytelling, where we take in the exquisite vulnerability inherent in our shared humanity. This year, grief specialist David Kessler told a version of the story below about his own grief journey after the tragic death of his son.
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In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified the five stages of dying in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. As a psychiatrist, she saw that patients who were dying appeared to go through common experiences or stages. Her work captured the world’s attention and would forever change the way we talk and think about death and dying.
Decades later, I was privileged to have been her protégé, friend, and coauthor. In the second book we wrote together, On Grief and Grieving, Elisabeth asked me to help adapt the stages she’d observed in the dying to account for the similar stages we’d observed in those who are grieving. The five stages of grief are denial (shock and disbelief that the loss has occurred), anger (that someone we love is no longer here), bargaining (all the what-ifs and regrets), depression (sadness from the loss), and acceptance (acknowledging the reality of the loss). There’s nothing easy about this final stage. It can be extremely painful, and acceptance doesn’t mean that we’re okay with the loss, or that the grieving process is now officially over.
These stages were never intended to be prescriptive, and this holds true for both dying and grieving. They’re not a method for tucking messy emotions into neat packages. They don’t prescribe: they describe. And they describe only a general process. Each person grieves in his or her own unique way. Nonetheless, the grieving process does tend to unfold in stages similar to what we described.
In the years since that book’s publication, I’ve experienced a great loss myself, and I can confirm not only that the five stages really do capture the feelings we experience as we grapple with the death of loved ones, but that there’s actually a crucial sixth stage to the healing process: meaning. This isn’t some arbitrary or mandatory step: it’s one that many people intuitively know to take. In this sixth stage, we acknowledge that although for most of us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end. And we come to understand that through meaning, we can find more than pain.
When a loved one dies, or when we experience any kind of serious loss—the end of a marriage, the closing of the company where we work, the destruction of our home in a natural disaster—we want more than the hard fact of that loss. We want to find meaning. Loss can wound and paralyze. It can hang over us for years. But finding meaning in loss empowers us to find a path forward. Meaning helps us make sense of grief.
What does meaning look like? It can take many shapes, such as finding gratitude for the time we had with loved ones, or finding ways to commemorate and honor loved ones, or realizing the brevity and value of life and making that the springboard into some kind of major shift or change.
Those who are able to find meaning tend to have a much easier time grieving than those who don’t. They’re less likely to remain stuck in grief. Because ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. That doesn’t mean you’ll stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you’ll experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is.
All that said, nothing in either my personal or my professional life as a grief specialist had prepared me for the loss I experienced with the death of my 21-year-old son. This was a loss so shattering that despite all the years I’d spent helping others through their grief, I didn’t know if there was anything that could assist me through my own. And despite my awareness that the search for meaning is one of the keys to healing from grief, I didn’t know if there was any way I could find meaning in this loss. Like so many others who grieve, something in me felt that my grief was too great to be healed.
In 2000, I’d adopted two wonderful boys from the Los Angeles County foster care system. David was four years old and his brother, Richard, was five. By that time the two of them had been in five different foster homes and had one failed adoption. Addiction in their family background had hindered their permanent placement, as had the fact that David had been born with drugs in his system. When I heard that, I feared that it might mean something was wrong with him that wouldn’t be fixable. But it only took looking at the faces of those two little boys to tell me that love conquers all. The adoption went through, and in the years that followed, my belief in the power of love appeared to be confirmed. David and Richard both made an amazing turnaround and were wonderful kids.
Unfortunately, the trauma of David’s younger years came back to haunt him when he became a teenager. At around 17, David began experimenting with drugs. Luckily, he came to me not long afterward and told me he was addicted and needed help. In the next few years, our lives were filled with rehab and 12-step programs. By the time he was 20, however, he was sober, in love with a wonderful woman who was a recent social work graduate, and entering his first year in college. David had shown a real interest in following a career in medicine, and I felt hopeful. But then a few days after his 21st birthday, he made some typical relationship mistakes, and he and his girlfriend broke up. That was when he met up with a friend from rehab who was also having a tough time, and they used drugs again. The friend lived. David died.
I was across the country on a lecture tour when I received a call from Richard, sobbing that his brother was dead. In the months that followed, I was in an agony of grief. Fortunately, I was surrounded by friends and family who saw me not as a grief expert, but as a father who had to bury his son.
My friend Diane Gray, who headed the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation at the time and is a bereaved parent herself, told me, “I know you’re drowning. You’ll keep sinking for a while, but there will come a point when you’ll hit bottom. Then you’ll have a decision to make. Do you stay there or push off and start to rise again?”
What she said felt true. I knew in that moment that I was still in the deep end of the ocean, and I also knew that I was going to have to stay there for a while. I wasn’t ready to surface. But even then, I felt I would continue to live, not only for the sake of my surviving son but for my own sake as well. I refused to allow David’s death to be meaningless or to make my life meaningless, but I had no idea what I would do to wrest meaning from this terrible time.
At first, I wasn’t able to find any consolation in memories of my love for my son. I had a lot of anger at that time—at the world, at God, and at David himself. But in order to go on, I knew I’d have to find meaning in the grief I was feeling. In my deep sorrow, I thought about a quote I share at my lectures: grief is optional in this lifetime. Yes, it’s true. You don’t have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined.
As Erich Fromm says, “To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”
Love and grief come as a package deal. If you love, you will one day know sorrow. I realized I could have skipped the pain of losing David if I’d never known and loved him. What a loss that would have been. In the moment when I really began to understand that, I found gratitude for my son having come into my life and for all the years I got to spend with him. They weren’t nearly long enough, but they’d changed and enriched my life immeasurably. That was the beginning of my being able to see something meaningful in my grief.
As time goes by, I’ve been able to keep finding deeper meaning in David’s life as well as in his death. Meaning is the love I feel for my son. Meaning is the way I’ve chosen to bear witness to the gifts he gave me. Meaning is what I’ve tried to do to keep others from dying of the same thing that killed David. For all of us, meaning is a reflection of the love we have for those we’ve lost. Meaning is the sixth stage of grief, the stage where the healing often resides.
David Kessler
David Kessler, MA, RN, FACHE, is one of the world’s foremost experts on healing and loss. He’s the author of six bestselling books. His newest is Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He coauthored two bestsellers with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
