Finding Meaning After a Death

David Kessler recently added a sixth stage to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief, and that is Finding Meaning. The original stages left something important off the table: what happens after acceptance? How do we go forward? 

Remember, the Five Stages weren’t originally meant for the grieving at all, rather they were created to help the dying come to terms with what was happening to them. (And those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.)

David Kessler co-authored several books with Kubler-Ross and watched as the stages were taken over as a tool for the grieving. He has worked tirelessly to educate society about how they can best be applied to grief, if at all. As it is, people often feel they’re grieving “wrong” if they skip a step or bounce back and forth. They worry that they will get “stuck” in grief or assume they should check each stage off their list in a particular order. Grief is not linear and it doesn’t really have an end date. 

After Kessler’s own son died, he found himself in a support group, next to literature he had written! He discovered that once a person has accepted their loved one’s death, finding meaning is the profound next step. To be clear, our task is not to make sense of the senseless. Hustling for an explanation to everything that happens is futile. Sometimes things just are. Kessler says that meaning is not in the death itself, but in we the grievers and how we choose to honor their deaths.  

OK, so how do we do that? What are the Three Simple Steps to Finding Meaning?! Understand that finding meaning isn’t going to be quick and easy (until you’re ready- it could suddenly come to you, but much like “overnight fame,” there’s usually an unseen, uphill climb ahead of that instant success), and often the best way to honor a death will come to us organically. For example, I became a grief and death educator by accident, but in sharing about my suffering, others reached out to me to tell me how much my stories had helped them. The path was made clear for me, and yours will, too.

You can buy a copy of Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief here (not a sponsored link).