Sometimes I bemoan the publication of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, which is not to say it’s not a great book. In it, she describes different ways of processing death and this has been taken way too far. (You can read more about this in Beware the Five Stages of Grief.)

Her work has been interpreted so that now people believe there is a logical linear procession of grief and that’s fucking ridiculous. Her work was done with terminally ill patients—and it was about grieving their own deaths. This is different from grieving the death of someone else.

The problem with these misinterpretations is that they end up in the hands of lay practitioners who then tell the bereaved that they’re not doing the grief thang right. Wait! Are you in denial still…because at this point, you should be in the anger stage. Wait! You’re back in denial? But you already went through that stage. You should be in acceptance, damnit. Accept it! It happens all the time.

Read Amitai Etzioni’s experience with grief after the sudden death of his wife and later of his son in Good Grief

In my eulogy I divulged that I believe in a God who brings meaning to the world, but that my belief has been severely tested. I missed seeing God in the killing fields of Cambodia, and he seems too busy to show up in Darfur, or to shine his face on either the Sunnis or the Shiites in Iraq. With a rising voice, I asked: how could God allow a son to be taken from his aging, ailing father? A devoted husband to be torn from the arms of his loving wife in the middle of the night? How could he allow a 2-year-old to be left searching for his father in vain, or deny an infant the chance to see the father even once?

After I shared a copy of my eulogy with a philosopher friend in Washington, he took me for a walk in the woods. “You must know,” he lectured, “that God is not a micromanager. He does not dish out specific goods or condone specific evils. He leaves these acts — and the choices involved — to us. If the good and bad were given to us, we would not be choosing, moral creatures.”