Maybe Grief Isn’t So Bad After All - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

By Paula Span

What do we know, or think we know, about the way we respond when a loved one dies?

We pass with the dying through the Kübler-Ross stages — denial, anger and so forth. We realize that people who seem happy or even crack jokes after a terrible loss are faking it and that we will pay a psychological price for not dutifully attending to our own “grief work.” We seek therapy or grief counseling, and if we would rather not, we berate ourselves for living in a harmful state of denial.

But scientists have studied the reactions of thousands of people to loss in the decades since Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, who worked with terminally ill patients, postulated her theories about moving from one distinct, predictable phase of grief to the next. One of the most prominent bereavement researchers — George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist who is chairman of the counseling and clinical psychology department at Teachers College at Columbia University — has just published an intriguing and reassuring exploration of what they had learned. Among the findings is that all the widespread assumptions about mourning I just mentioned are fallacious.
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