Around 2 a.m. on April 28, 2016, Cathy Semeria made a call no mother should ever have to make.
Her son Nick had been awoken by a friend with troubling news of a fatal crash the night before that involved five University of Georgia students — possibly including his sister Christina. Nick urged his parents to call Athens Regional Medical Center near where she went to school. Hands shaking, Cathy dialed the number.
“I said, ‘You just need to let me know that my daughter is OK,’” she recalls. “There was total silence on the other end.”
She threw the phone at her husband and collapsed in disbelief. In the coming days, as news unfolded about the accident that killed 19-year-old Christina Semeria and three friends and left another critically injured, Cathy waded through waves of shock and daze. At first, she couldn’t cry. “Was that normal?” she asked herself. Six weeks later, she started crying and couldn’t stop.
A year later, she still bristled when well-meaning friends suggested her daughter “would want her to be happy.” And she often replayed the details of the accident in her mind: No drugs. No alcohol. No speeding. Yet their car drifted across the center line. Why?
Today, she has found solace in her community, and through carrying on “Tini’s” legacy via social media. But when a friend of her daughter — the youngest of her four children — gets married or graduates from college, the pain pulls Cathy under again.
“Grief is like being in an ocean and you don’t know when a wave is going to hit you, or how high it is going to be, or how long you are going to get caught in the riptide,” she says.
While Cathy’s journey may sound familiar to some, it is — new research suggests — wholly her own.
Fifty years after psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the now iconic five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — scientists in the growing field of bereavement research say it’s not so simple.
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Men grieve differently than women. Soldiers grieve differently. More than 60% of people, recent research shows, bounce back surprisingly quickly. But about a quarter take a year or two, and 1 in 10 have what is known as “complicated grief” — a persistent, debilitating yearning that can last years.
Grief changes the body in different ways, too: People who grieve longer have different brain activity, different hormone patterns, and a higher risk of bereavement-related health problems.
“There has been this idea in the past that grief proceeds in the same somewhat lockstep sequence for everyone,” says David Feldman, PhD, a professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University in California. “We now know it just doesn’t work that way. People often attack themselves for doing grief wrong when, really, we are all entitled to our own way.”
The Truth About the Five Stages
David Kessler, who co-authored several books with Kubler-Ross, says her work has been “widely misunderstood.”
He notes that when she introduced the stages in the 1969 book On Death and Dying, they were intended to describe the emotional process of a dying person at the end of life.
In 2004, On Grief and Grieving was published. The book, authored by Kessler and Kubler-Ross (who passed away before the book’s publication), formally adapted the stages to the bereaved, and the authors included an often overlooked notice on page one.
“We explained that they are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling, but they are not stops on some linear timeline,” Kessler says.
That said, he still uses the stages in his workshops and on his website,