Finding Meaning: Grief's Sixth Stage

David Kessler is an author closely associated with the five stages of grief, having written On Grief and Grieving with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In 2019 he published a book adding a sixth.

He did not add it as a theorist. He added it after his twenty-one-year-old son died.

That fact matters for how the book reads. Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief is written by someone who had spent decades helping other people with loss and then found that more information was needed to expand on existing grief frameworks. The sixth stage is what he found on the other side of that, and it is offered carefully, with warnings and openness and everything else in between.

Why acceptance was not enough

The fifth stage, in the grief model outlined by Kübler-Ross, is acceptance. You come to terms with it. That is the end of the model.

Kessler’s argument is that acceptance is real but insufficient. Plenty of people accept, fully and without denial, that the person is dead, and are still not able to live meaningfully. Acceptance settles the past. It says nothing about what you are supposed to do with the decades you may have left.

Meaning is his answer to that gap. It is the part of grief that faces forward.

I find this useful in the room for a practical reason. Acceptance doesn’t say much about where to go. Meaning is something a person can actually do on a Tuesday.

What Kessler says meaning is not

The best part of his framework is the fencing around it, and I want to put that before anything else, because this idea gets stolen and misused constantly by people who want a grieving person to cheer up.

Meaning is not found in the death. Most deaths are senseless. A drunk driver, a cell that divided wrong, a heart at fifty-one. There is no meaning in the event. Meaning is what you build afterward.

It does not require understanding. You do not have to figure out why. Most people never do.

It is relative and personal. Nobody assigns it to you. Your family cannot tell you what your loss meant.

It takes time. Often years.

Even when you find it, you will not feel the loss was worth it. Kessler says this plainly and it is why the framework resonates with grieving people. Nobody trades a child for growth.

Your loss is not a test, a lesson, a gift, or a punishment. It did not happen for a reason. It happened.

If someone hands you the sixth stage without those six fences, they are handing you something else, and you are allowed to refuse it.

What it actually looks like

Given all that, what is left?

In practice, meaning tends to show up in three places.

In what you carry forward from them. People find that the relationship left them something tangible. A way of treating waiters. A refusal to leave arguments unfinished. A recipe, a trade, a faith, a sense of humor. Naming what you inherited and deciding to keep it is one of the most reliable meaning-making moves I see, and it overlaps heavily with continuing bonds.

In what you do because of what you now know. Bereaved people know something most people are working hard not to know, which is that this ends and the timing is not up to us. That knowledge is expensive and it is also usable. It shows up as leaving jobs, mending things with siblings, calling parents weekly, taking the trip you’ve been putting off, being unwilling to spend Saturdays on obligations that do not matter.

In turning toward other people in it. A large number of the people who end up doing this work, running groups, volunteering with hospice, sitting with the newly bereaved, got there through their own loss. Not everyone wants that and nobody should be pushed toward it. But being useful to someone in the same position is, for many people, the single thing that made their loss feel like it was not only something that was taken away. It also becomes, when the time is right, something one can give.

Kessler’s own version of this is the most direct example available. He lost his son and then wrote the book he needed and could not find. That is what meaning looks like when it is real. It did not bring his son back and he says so.

The research alongside it

There is an empirical literature that runs parallel to this. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term post-traumatic growth in the 1990s to describe positive psychological change some people report after severe adversity, typically in five domains: relationships with others, new possibilities, personal strength, spiritual change, and appreciation of life.

Two caveats I always discuss.

Growth is not the opposite of distress and it does not replace it. People report both at once, sometimes for years. Someone can be visibly changed for the better by a loss and still be in enormous pain about it, and neither cancels the other.

And it is a description, not a target. Post-traumatic growth is something that, in time, happens to some people. It is not an outcome you can fail at, and telling a grieving person about it in month two is usually a way of asking them to be less sad in your presence.

Where meaning fits with everything else

Kessler carefully states that meaning is not a replacement for the rest of grief.

The pain does not become unnecessary once you have found something to do with it. It stays. The growing around grief pattern still applies: the grief remains its size and the life gets bigger. Meaning is one of the main things the bigger life is built from.

It also does not arrive on schedule and it cannot be rushed. If you are eight weeks out and reading this with irritation, that is the right response. The sixth stage is not a first-year idea. Kessler puts it last for a reason.

What you can do early is protect the conditions it grows in. Say the grief out loud to someone who can hear it. Stop grading yourself against a schedule that does not exist. Let the body be as tired as it is. Meaning tends to appear on its own once there is room for it, and it rarely appears when a person is still spending all their energy on being fine.

The short version

You do not get to choose that this happened. You do get to choose, eventually and in your own time, what you do with the fact that you are the one still here.

That is not consolation and it is not a bright side. It is the only piece of this that belongs to you, and for a lot of people it is enough to build on.

If you want to work on this

I see adults for grief and bereavement at our Carlsbad Village office and online across California, in English, Spanish, and French, and I lead a small grief process group there on Thursday evenings, where a lot of this work happens between members rather than through me. You can read more about how I work.

A free 15-minute call is the way to start. Fees, insurance, and superbill details are on our Cost and Insurance page.

If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, free.