Elisabeth Kubler-Ross spent nearly four decades as the person most associated with the idea that grief moves through five stages, and this is the book where she and her longtime collaborator David Kessler finally turned that framework away from dying patients and toward the people left behind. It was finished about a month before she died in 2004 and published the following year. It still sells steadily two decades later, carries a 4.32 rating on Goodreads, and remains genuinely controversial among grief researchers who argue the stages were never meant to be taken as literally as popular culture has taken them. This review works through what the book actually says, what critics and psychologists have actually said about it, and where the pushback is real rather than invented.
What On Grief and Grieving Actually Is
The book takes the five stages Kubler-Ross first laid out in 1969's On Death and Dying -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- and reapplies them, this time not to people who are dying but to people who are grieving someone else's death. Each stage gets its own chapter, worked through with a mix of clinical observation, composite patient stories, and plain, direct prose aimed at a general reader rather than clinicians. Later chapters move past the stages themselves into more practical territory: sections on isolation, on the physical symptoms grief can produce, on dreams and what Kessler and Kubler-Ross call hauntings, and on what healing actually looks like once the sharpest edge of loss has passed. A 2014 tenth-anniversary edition added a foreword by Maria Shriver.
The most important thing the book does, and the thing most readers who only know the five stages secondhand tend to miss, is caveat its own framework. Kubler-Ross and Kessler write directly that the stages "are not stops on some linear timeline in grief," and that not everyone experiences all five, or in that order. That caveat is easy to skip past if you're skimming, but it's central to understanding what the authors actually intended, as opposed to how the five stages have been flattened into a checklist in the decades since.
About the Authors and Why They Wrote This
Kubler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist who became one of the most influential figures in end-of-life care after publishing On Death and Dying in 1969, a book built on interviews with terminally ill patients that reshaped how medicine talked about dying. David Kessler is a grief and end-of-life expert who worked alongside her for roughly the final decade of her life; the two had already co-written Life Lessons together in the mid-1990s, after a series of strokes left Kubler-Ross partially paralyzed and facing her own mortality. Kessler was with her as she was dying in 2004, and the two of them completed the manuscript for On Grief and Grieving together about a month before her death -- making it, functionally, her final book, finished under genuinely difficult circumstances.
Kessler's own stated motivation for the project, and for the grief work he has continued since, is partly personal: he has spoken publicly about witnessing violence as a child while his own mother was dying, and, much later, about losing his adult son suddenly. That personal history is part of why he pushed the five-stage framework further after Kubler-Ross's death, eventually proposing a sixth stage -- meaning -- in his solo 2019 book Finding Meaning. On Grief and Grieving itself, though, was written as a direct collaboration meant to finish the work the two of them had started together, applying the stages framework to loss in general rather than just to a patient's own death.
What Critics Actually Said
Formal newspaper book reviews of a 2005 grief-and-self-help title are thin on the ground compared to literary fiction, but the book carries real, sourced praise that's followed it for two decades:
“The definitive account of how we grieve.”— The New Yorker
“A fitting finale and tribute to the acknowledged expert on end-of-life matters.”— Good Housekeeping
Those two lines have been reprinted on the book's jacket and publisher pages for years, which is itself a sign of how little the reception has needed updating -- the book has settled into a kind of steady-state status as a default recommendation in grief support circles, hospice programs, and therapist reading lists, rather than a book that generates fresh critical takes each year.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The most substantive pushback against this book isn't really about its writing quality -- it's about the scientific standing of the five-stage model it's built on, and it comes from grief researchers rather than casual reviewers. Chris Hall, a psychologist and chief executive of Grief Australia, has said plainly that "there is no evidence that people move through these stages -- or that the stages even exist." Earlier academic work, including a 1989 paper by Camille Wortman and Roxane Cohen Silver, directly challenged the claim that all bereaved people eventually reach acceptance, and later research by Bisconti and colleagues found that emotional wellbeing after a loss tends to oscillate rather than progress through fixed steps. Scientific American has run a piece explicitly titled around "five fallacies of grief," debunking the idea that these are discrete psychological stages at all.
What complicates a simple critic-versus-book framing is that Kubler-Ross and Kessler make almost the same argument themselves, inside this very book, cautioning that the stages aren't a linear timeline. So the fairest version of the pushback is less "this book got it wrong" and more "the popular, checklist version of the five stages that spread through culture is not what this book, read carefully, actually argues" -- a distinction that gets lost whenever the stages get flattened into a meme or a five-step chart.
How the Five Stages Have Been Misapplied Since 1969
Because the five stages originated in a different book about dying patients, one thing this book has to do is retrofit them onto a different experience -- other people's grief -- while fighting off decades of pop-culture flattening. By 2005, "the five stages of grief" had already become shorthand in movies, workplace HR guidance, and casual conversation for a tidy, linear process: you go through denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, and you land on acceptance, done. Kubler-Ross and Kessler spend real space in this book trying to undo that flattening, insisting stages can repeat, skip, or overlap, and that grief has no fixed timeline or endpoint. Whether that corrective actually reaches readers who come in already expecting a checklist is an open question, and it's part of why the scientific criticism above persists even against a book that technically agrees with much of it.
The Sixth Stage Kessler Added Later
In 2019, fifteen years after Kubler-Ross's death, Kessler published Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief on his own, proposing meaning as something beyond acceptance -- a stage the two of them hadn't included in the original five. Kessler has said the idea grew out of his own life, including the sudden death of his adult son, and that meaning-making felt like the missing piece that let grief become something closer to peace rather than just endurance. That later book doesn't replace On Grief and Grieving, but it's worth knowing about if you read this one and find yourself wanting a next step past acceptance -- Kessler evidently felt the same way, enough to write an entire additional book about it.
Key Takeaways
- This was genuinely Kubler-Ross's last book, completed with David Kessler about a month before her death in 2004
- It's a distinct, later book from 1969's On Death and Dying -- this one applies the five stages to grievers, not to dying patients
- The book itself explicitly cautions that the stages aren't a fixed, linear sequence, even though pop culture has often treated them that way
- Real, published grief research has challenged the five-stage model's scientific standing, including work by Wortman and Silver and by Bisconti and colleagues
- David Kessler later proposed a sixth stage, meaning, in his own 2019 follow-up book, Finding Meaning
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers in the middle of a recent loss who want a gentle, structured way to name what they're feeling, plus anyone in hospice work, chaplaincy, or grief counseling who wants the original source material behind a framework their clients have probably already heard of.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want a book built entirely on current grief research rather than a framework with acknowledged scientific limitations, this isn't that book -- and if you've already read the five stages breakdown a dozen times through pop psychology and want something newer, Kessler's own Finding Meaning picks up where this one leaves off.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Written directly by the person most responsible for the five-stage framework, alongside her closest collaborator, as her final book
- Real jacket praise from The New Yorker and Good Housekeeping that's held up for two decades
- Strong 4.32 out of 5 Goodreads rating with a consistent, steady readership since 2005
- The book itself explicitly warns against treating the stages as a rigid checklist, which is more nuanced than its popular reputation suggests
- Practical later chapters on isolation, physical symptoms, and healing go beyond the stages framework alone
Cons:
- The central five-stage model lacks strong empirical support, according to multiple grief researchers and published studies
- Readers expecting a scientifically current grief resource may find the framework dated relative to newer research on oscillating, non-stage grief
- Some readers report the book feels repetitive if they've already absorbed the five stages through other pop-culture sources
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Elisabeth Kubler-Ross actually finish writing this book?
Yes, mostly. Kubler-Ross and David Kessler completed the manuscript together roughly a month before her death in August 2004. It was her final book, and Kessler has continued expanding on its ideas in the years since, including a later solo book proposing a sixth stage.
Is On Grief and Grieving the same book as On Death and Dying?
No. On Death and Dying, published in 1969, introduced the five stages as a framework for dying patients themselves. On Grief and Grieving, published in 2005 and co-written with David Kessler, applies that same five-stage framework to the people left behind after a loss -- a distinct, later book with a different focus.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
4.32 out of 5 from roughly 4,900 ratings as of this writing, per Goodreads -- a smaller rating count than some grief books, but a consistently high average among people who bought it.
Do psychologists actually believe in the five stages of grief?
Not as a strict sequence. Grief researchers, including studies by Wortman and Silver and by Bisconti and colleagues, have found no evidence that people move through the stages in order or that everyone reaches acceptance. Kubler-Ross and Kessler acknowledged this themselves in this very book, writing that the stages are not stops on a linear timeline.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — On Grief and Grieving (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New Yorker (publisher jacket quote)
- Good Housekeeping (publisher jacket quote)
- ABC News Australia — "Why psychologists want us to stop talking about the 'five stages' of grief"
- Psychology Today — "Why the Five Stages of Grief Are Wrong"
- Grief.com — David Kessler biography and Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
On Grief and Grieving earns its lasting place on grief and hospice reading lists honestly -- it's the framework's originator explaining, in her own final book, what the five stages were actually meant to do, with real caveats that get lost every time the model gets reduced to a diagram. The scientific pushback against treating grief as five sequential steps is legitimate and worth knowing before you lean on this book as a diagnostic tool rather than a companion. Read as what it is -- one influential, humane attempt to put language around an experience that resists tidy structure -- it still holds up.
Buy Day rating: 8.5/10