5 Stages of Grief

Lisa Rawlinson

5 Stages of Grief (Revised for Accuracy)

5 Stages of Grief (Revised for Accuracy) 2016 | gouache on paper | 24" x 18"

February 6, 2017

It always starts with a moment in time. It could be a split second or it could be minutes, but in every case that moment in time becomes its own expanded universe where every detail is exaggerated, commanding the attention of all of your senses and yet experienced as if you are outside yourself watching the events transpire, powerless to stop them and fully aware that the moment will change everything, and that there is no going back.

There's a period of shock. Of replaying the moment. Of a detached other-worldly feeling. Of disorientation. And then the fall into the abyss.

A moment in the late night hours of November 7, 2016 was the last time I abruptly found myself in that abyss, along with over half of my country and people all over the world. Memes began to circulate that outlined the five stages of grief (as defined by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross). A clean line graph with a dramatic downward arc that neatly and symetrically curved back upwards. An evenly spaced flowchart with five tidy boxes containing the words: shock and denial, anger, depression and detachment, bargaining, and acceptance. Designing information has been a large part of what I do for 20 years. A good infographic is an art form that has long spoken to me, and those memes were some of the absolute worst infographics I'd ever seen, grossly unrepresentative of what grief actually feels like. Of what each of those five steps feel like as you pinball wildly through them. Of what it feels like when you know you just witnessed the moment when everything changed and that there is no going back. They were laughable. They were actually offensive, their sanitized cleanliness dismissive of the physical anguish of grief.

So I made my own infographic.

I felt it was important to share this one considering this particular source of grief. That the denial, the anger, the depression, the fear, the bargaining, the reflection, the horror, the determination, the empowerment of super hero proportions, the repulsion, the frustration, and the love and goodwill that ultimately fueled all of those things was all a shared experience. Shared by millions. There was some peace in that.

On the night of November 7, 2016 I was with my son. There was a point when it became clear that the world was about to change and not in the way we'd hoped. He turned and looked at me with fear in his eyes, as if hoping for his mother to reassure him, "Everything is going to be okay." But all I could do was look back with my own fear and sadness and wordlessly tell him, "But we are together." Beside us was his friend of 11 years, since they both wore diapers and nothing else except crusted snot and tempera paint and the exhilaration of forming your first friendships in life. I heard his shaken teenage voice ask his moms, "What's going to happen to our family?" It was a valid question that none of the adults could answer. We all hugged a long hug and said, "I love you" before we all went home, each to experience our own personal internal grief infographic, alone, but together. And there was some peace in that too.

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