On Death and Dying: "Good Grief!"

This is a really tremendous article about death and dying, "Good Grief" from poet Meghan O' Rourke, which I learned about from the always interesting Slate Cultural Gabfest podcast at Slate.com.


"Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. Though [Elizabeth] Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process—sometimes one that never fully ends."

Complicated and untidy. Just like life.