"The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a Swiss-born American psychiatrist and author who helped pioneer modern hospice and end-of-life studies. She is widely associated with the five stages model of grief presented in On Death and Dying.