Five Stages Of Grief In Nicolas Wolterstorff's Lament For A Son

Grief is a painful emotion that people experience through troubling times in life, such as losing a loved one. Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler Ross, introduced the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in the year of 1969. She explains that there is no correct way or time to grieve; the stages are used to familiarize people with the aspects of grief and grieving. Grief can over take someone’s life and lead to a negative downfall, such as Hamlet experiences in Hamlet, written by Williams Shakespeare. He undergoes a variety of barriers throughout the novel, such as his father is murdered, which leads to his downfall-death. Although Hamlet grieves, the denial stage is not present in the novel as it

Write a 750-1,000 word paper analyzing Woterstorff’s reflctions in Lament For a Son. In addition, address Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, as they are expressed throughout Lament for a Son, and respond to the following questions:

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler came up with the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although grief is individual depending on the person and the situation, these stages help organize the process of grieving. The stages act more as tools than a timeline. The movie My Girl portrays these stages after the death of Thomas J., Vada’s best and only friend.

The Death of Ivan Illych brings an excellent in-depth description of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s 5 cycles of grief theory. In the book, it shows how Ivan Illych goes through these cycles in their own individual way. The cycles that Kubler-Ross uses in her theory are: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. To get a better understanding of these cycles, this paper will describe each cycle and provide quotations that will help develop an idea of how someone going through these cycles may react.

Everybody goes through grief, and it can be really hard. To grief, there are five stages that everyone experiences. In the novel Drums Girls & Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick, the main character Steven, goes through these grim five stages of grief. The five stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Throughout the novel, Steven shows signs of these in many ways.

Since the start of time, and the preceding generations, death has impacted people and the way they act. A sudden, or even an expected death of a loved one, takes a toll on a person. It’s human nature for people to process and want to make sense of death and the loss it leaves behind. The five stages of grief reflect this process of dealing with the loss of a loved one. Through these stage of grieving, people can get lost either searching for answers or trying to get past it. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare depicts the role human nature plays in the striving for answers and justice surrounding death. Even though Hamlet was written early in the seventeenth century, the depiction of death and human nature still rings true today; people and

The life transition of death and dying is inevitably one with which we will all be faced; we will all experience the death of people we hold close throughout our lifetime. This paper will explore the different processes of grief including the bereavement, mourning, and sorrow individuals go through after losing someone to death. Bereavement is a period of adaptation following a life changing loss. This period encompasses mourning, which includes behaviors and rituals following a death, and the wide range of emotions that go with it. Sorrow is the state of ongoing sadness not overcome in the grieving process; though not pathological, persistent

The theme of parental mourning has been a universal one throughout the centuries. In the literature on bereavement, writers repeat certain themes, thoughts, and reflections; they talk of the powerful and often conflicting emotions involved in "the pain of grief and the

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

According to American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the five common stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance respectively. However, humans are quite fascinating creatures as we might alter the order in which every stage hits us. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain, in every stage of grief of any kind, we must come to terms and accept the cards that are casted in front of us; and it’s entirely up to us how we choose to play them.

"’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, / nor customary suits of solemn black / [ . . . ] but I have that within which passeth show; / these but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare 1.2.76-73, 85-86) says Hamlet when confronted about his way of grieving over his father’s recent death. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a remarkable tale that is centered on the idea of death and grief. While death is a universal occurrence, meaning every person will deal with it, how we grieve after a loss is completely individual. To look at a formula of grief, most turn to the five stages of grief developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist, who studied the topic in her book On Death and Dying. This model consists of denial, anger,

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

“Ordinary people” everywhere are faced day after day with the ever so common tragedy of losing a loved one. As we all know death is inevitable. We live with this harsh reality in the back of our mind’s eye. Only when we are shoved in the depths of despair can we truly understand the multitude of emotions brought forth. Although people may try to be empathetic, no one can truly grasp the rawness felt inside of a shattered heart until death has knocked at their door. We live in an environment where death is invisible and denied, yet we have become desensitized to it. These inconsistencies appear in the extent to which families are personally affected by death—whether they

In her seminal work on grief and grieving, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the concept now very well known as the Five (5) Stages of Grief, enumerated chronologically as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In this concept, Kubler-Ross explored and discussed the normative stages that people go through when they experience the loss of a loved one and feel grief as result of this loss. It is also through these stages that people are now more aware of their feelings and thoughts when experiencing grief and the loss of a loved one. While the stages of loss are mainly developed for grief experienced with the death of a loved one, it is a generally accepted framework in understanding feelings of grief when an individual experiences the loss of a significant individual in his/her life. The discussions that follow center on the discussion of Kubler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief, applied in the context of the Story of Job in the Bible.

One theory is by Kubler-Ross she identified five stages of grief which are Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Individuals can spend different amounts of time on these stages and these stages don’t need to be processed in order (www.ekrfoundation.org 2016).