Good Grief
collateral tales
Even some cursory glances along my book shelves suffice to suggest that many writers—mainstream as well as genre, but especially genre—tend to deal with their characters’ personal grief and tragedy with Kübler-Ross’s concept of the five psychological stages as a boilerplate. (That’d be Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.)
Somehow, I also always felt that these stages were a given. Now, this concept that has become so deeply ingrained in our cultural memory cores that we even forgot how recent it actually is, might be a story after all. A good one, obviously, and one that we loved to tell each other over and over again, but a story anyhow. Check out this article “Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages” by Michael Shermer on Scientific American Online; together with other “stage theories,” it might turn out to be not something found in nature, but a crude approximation, made up by us pattern-seeking mammals, to much more complex and variable things. But “complex” translates into “more interesting” rather often, and our boilerplates should be subjected to regular spring cleaning anyhow—so I’ll make sure to bookmark that article and get the most mileage out of personal grief and tragedy if nasty things should happen to befall any of my characters again.
