This topic was covered in depth on the Radiolab podcast entitled The Queen of Dying. It discussed how Elisabeth Kubler-Ross originated the theory of the five stages of grief through her work. Her radical idea was to talk to dying patients about dying at a time when most doctors wouldn’t even tell a patient that he/she WAS dying. Out of that work, she developed her theory about the five stages of grief to describe how people experience the process of dying. The podcast concluded that many people don’t experience grief as the five sequential steps described. The phases may come out of order, or people may cycle through one phase multiple times, etc. BUT, it also pointed out, and this is important, that the model was meant to describe the process a person goes through when they know they are dying. It’s clean and concise so it’s been generalized in media to apply to all forms of grief, but that wasn’t what it was ever meant to do. It was meant to describe a very specific moment in life, not life in general. The podcast made a strong argument that no one who’s grieving should feel like they’re doing it wrong because their experience doesn’t match the model because it’s just a theoretical model and a very specific one at that.