Under the Whispering Door

The Kübler-Ross Model, more commonly known as the Five Stages of Grief, is a psychological model that examines the common processes of grief. The model was created by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, and published in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Kübler-Ross suggests that grief comes in five emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Though Kübler-Ross’s model is not the only model that examines grief in stages nor is it the first, it is likely the most well-known in popular culture. Though commonly referenced, the model has been criticized by many scholars and no empirical evidence exists to prove its accuracy. In 2014, Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing about the five stages the way she did as it suggested the stages progressed linearly and consecutively, a view with which she did not agree as “[n]ot everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order” (Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth & Kessler, David. On Grief & Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. Scribner, 2014, p. 7).

In Under the Whispering Door, Hugo Freeman mentions the Kübler-Ross Model to Wallace Price in order to help him make sense of his feelings about death. Hugo suggests that the five stages of grief do occur but that “it’s not always in that order, and it’s not always every single step” (138), mirroring the common assumptions about the model that Kübler-Ross later dismissed. When Wallace suggests this model is not for the dead but for the living who are left behind, Hugo disagrees, claiming that people grieve for themselves all the time, an idea which is predominant in Kübler-Ross’s book. On Death and Dying and the famous model published within it are not about the grief of those who have lost loved ones but were instead inspired by Kübler-Ross’s work with patients with terminal illnesses and the grief they experienced when conscious of the fact that death was near. Though Kübler-Ross is not directly referenced again in the novel after this conversation, her ideas permeate Under the Whispering Door, with many characters, particularly Wallace and Hugo, undergoing the different stages of grief named in the Kübler-Ross Model at different times, in different orders, and for different reasons.