C. Elizabeth Dougherty Consulting

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Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved?

"It has become a truism of the hospice movement that people resist death if they have something left they need to say. After the documentary, Kübler-Ross emerged from her anomie to revisit what she had written about grief. Realizing that the stage theory had grown into a restrictive prescription for grief, she collaborated with David Kessler, a hospice expert, to write “On Grief and Grieving.” Near the end of a chapter about her own grief—which arrived late in life, following the death of her ex-husband—she noted, “I now know that the purpose of my life is more than these stages. I have been married, had kids, then grandkids, written books, and traveled. I have loved and lost, and I am so much more than five stages. And so are you.”