Let’s Talk About Our Grief

The American path for what is socially accepted in grief is narrow. There’s the perceived need for a brave face, the getting over it, the worry of becoming a burden. There’s the Sisyphean pursuit of closure. There’s the frequently misinterpreted “five stages”—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—which were neither meant as a prescription for how to grieve nor, originally, even really about grief at all. (In her 1969 bestseller On Dying, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who coined the term...