The model most people know as the five stages of grief did not begin as five. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first published four stages in a 1968 article, drawn from her interviews with dying patients at the University of Chicago, and expanded them to five in On Death and Dying (1969). Yet even in that book the picture was larger: the chart at the back (page 251) shows ten overlapping bands, not five boxes, with shock, partial denial, preparatory grief, decathexis, and hope alongside the familiar five. The five-stage version is the one the public has held onto, but for Elisabeth it was never a finished formula. Between 1968 and 1974 she kept revising it in her lectures, articles, and later books, and even the word "stages" was never fixed: the German edition, which she reviewed herself, renders it as "phases." She was clear that the stages can overlap, repeat, or be skipped entirely. From the beginning she applied the model not only to the dying but to the families and caregivers who grieve alongside them, and later to loss of every kind. Understood as she wrote it, the model is not a map of how grief should go, but a language for recognizing what is already happening.