Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog
Description: Writing about faith, culture, politics, and policy.
Writing about faith, culture, politics, and policy.
One of the books I’m reading on grief is It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok [sic]: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand , by Megan Devine. I will probably never recommend this book to anyone for several reasons*, the most significant being the underlying Buddhist-nihilistic worldview, but the author’s main point is worth consideration: that our culture has a skewed view of grief and the challenges faced by the grieving.
Our modern American understanding is colored by the work of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ( On Death and Dying , 1969) who postulated 5 stages of grief. More recently critics have disputed the validity of these stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance,) and Kubler-Ross herself has lamented the misunderstanding of her work as some kind of formula for a linear progression through grief that ends with “recovery.”
Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog