Stages of death

As much as we are sick and have some incurable condition, we don’t want to face the fact that we are going to die. It is in human's nature. The Kubler-Ross Model is a model in which stages of death are presented and the name was given after Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who described stages of death in her book On Death and Dying. In her definition, there are five stages that include denial, anger, bargaining, Depression/grief, and acceptance.

Stages of Death

Denial is a first stage in which a person refuses to accept the obvious; he/she denies to acknowledge the presence of grief or some incurable disease, which leads to anger, which is caused by questioning. In the stage named bargaining, people usually want to change or somehow evade death that is inevitable. After realizing that it can’t be evaded, a person on a death bed falls into depression. And, at the very end, after a long fight that was lead inside of him/her, he/she accepts that the death is at sight.

It is not a rare thing that a person experiences more than one stage of death. It can happen that at the final stage, the acceptance, a person returns on occasions to some of the previous stages. We differ from other mammals, because we have all kinds of perplexed emotions, and this is a unique thing in each and one of us. In that kind of situation when we are realizing that we can die, we all go through all sorts of emotions, from extremely positive to extremely negative, depending on our current emotional state.

It is interesting that these stages can be used in other aspects of our life that are connected with some other changes that have a strong emotional influence on our life. For example, a losing of pet can bring these emotions or some other change that introduces the loss of something. Many people have met with these stages before, but it has to be noted that this rule isn’t the same for anyone. If one who is dying is already familiar with these stages, it can create a mess with his emotions. In the last phase, the acceptance, the grief isn’t completely gone; it can only alter to reminiscence of the past events and aspects of life. After the death of a beloved one, a grief isn’t gone, it is only learned how to live with it.