Most of what people believe about the five stages comes from a summary of a summary. This page sets out what she actually wrote. She named more than five On Death and Dying (1969) came out of hundreds of conversations with dying patients. The five terms everyone knows — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — are the ones that survived popular retelling. They are not the whole list. In the back of the book is a chart. It appears on page 251 of current English-language editions, and it shows ten bands, not five: shock · denial · partial denial · anger · bargaining · preparatory grief · depression · acceptance · decathexis · hope Three things about that chart matter more than the count. The bands overlap. Anger runs beneath bargaining; bargaining beneath depression. They coexist rather than hand off. They recur. Several bands reappear as short segments after their main run — including acceptance, which is drawn broken rather than continuous. Acceptance is not a destination. Hope runs nearly the whole width. It begins early and persists almost to the end. Hope does not appear in the popular five-stage model at all. [CHART IMAGE — p. 251, with credit line] She kept revising The framework was not fixed in 1969. It kept moving. 1970. In a clinical paper, Psychotherapy for the Dying Patient, she wrote that her patients went through five stages — and then, in the same seven pages, described nine, including resignation as an outcome distinct from acceptance. She also identified hope as one of two assurances a physician must give, alongside the promise not to leave. 1973. She recorded and sold a five-cassette lecture series, Lessons from the Dying Patient. Two of its titles name states the popular model has never heard of: Stages of Dying: Pseudo-Denial, Anger, and Stages of Dying: Acceptance or Resignation. That last title describes a fork — two possible endings, only one of them good. 1974. In Questions and Answers on Death and Dying she stated plainly what the 1969 chart had already drawn: the responses overlap, recur, and may be skipped entirely. What this means for the criticism The stages have been criticized for fifty years as rigid, linear, and unsupported. Most of that criticism is aimed at a version she did not draw. She was clear about what the book was. In her preface she called it the beginning of an experiment, and explicitly not a complete study of the psychology of the dying. Writing the foreword to the UK edition in 1970, Colin Murray Parkes observed that individual variation was so great that no single conceptual system was likely to fit everyone — and then wrote that the overall picture, and the case material behind it, must stand. Allan Kellehear, introducing the 40th anniversary edition, describes the categories as and notes her own repeated warnings that the stages overlap, occur together, or are missed altogether. The number was never the point. Before her, grief was treated as one undifferentiated thing. What she did was break it into parts you could name, tell apart, and respond to differently. Five was where she drew the lines first. She kept moving them. Learn more The Foundation offers courses on her original work, including The Five Stages of Grief® and The Kübler-Ross Change Curve®. [LINK: course library] Her papers are held in the Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries. The Five Stages of Grief® and The Kübler-Ross Change Curve® are registered trademarks of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Family Limited Partnership, used under license. Chart from Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 50th anniversary edition (Scribner, 2019), p. 251. Copyright © 1969 The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Family Limited Partnership.