David Kessler

Introduction

David Kessler is an American writer and educator on grief, dying and bereavement. He is the founder of grief.com, one of the largest public resources on loss, and the co-author, with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, of On Grief and Grieving. In 2019 he published Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, proposing meaning as an addition to the five-stage model he had helped adapt.

Kessler is not an academic psychologist — he has no research programme and no record of peer-reviewed empirical work. His influence has been exerted through hospice and hospital training, through books written for general readers, and through a very large online audience. That combination makes him one of the most widely heard voices on grief in the English-speaking world, and also the most visible defender of a stage model that most grief researchers now reject.

Early Life and Education

Kessler's entry into the subject was personal rather than academic. His mother died when he was thirteen. The circumstances were unusually traumatic: as she was dying in hospital, a fire and a shooting broke out in a hotel across the street, and Kessler witnessed the event alongside his mother's death. He has described the combination as the beginning of the work he has done ever since.

He trained and worked in health care rather than in a psychology department, spending years in hospitals and hospices, and he has taught physicians, nurses, counsellors, police officers and first responders about end-of-life care and trauma. In 1989 he co-founded Project Angel Food, a Los Angeles organisation delivering meals to people too ill to shop or cook for themselves, which began as a response to the AIDS crisis. He founded grief.com; the site now receives several million visits a year from more than 160 countries.

Academic and Professional Career

Kessler's professional identity has always been that of a clinician-educator rather than a scholar. He served in bereavement and end-of-life roles in hospital systems, ran training for clinical and emergency staff, and built a speaking and writing career around the practical question of what helps a person who is grieving.

His association with Kübler-Ross began in the 1990s and became a close working partnership in her final years. Together they produced Life Lessons (2000), a book of reflections, and then On Grief and Grieving (2005), published the year after her death. The second book was the one that mattered: it took the five stages Kübler-Ross had derived from dying patients in the 1960s and explicitly re-aimed them at bereaved people, stating on the first page that the stages are not linear and that there is no single right way to grieve.

After Kübler-Ross's death Kessler became the model's most prominent custodian and interpreter. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he applied the stages publicly to collective experience, describing them not as a map but as "scaffolding for this unknown world" — a formulation he has repeated often, and one that shows how carefully he now handles a framework he knows is routinely misused.

In 2016 his 21-year-old son, David Kessler Jr., died of an accidental overdose. Kessler has said the experience dismantled his confidence in his own expertise, and it produced Finding Meaning three years later.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Adapting the stages for grief

The five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — came from Kübler-Ross's interviews with terminally ill patients, not from bereaved people. On Grief and Grieving extended them to loss and insisted they were observations rather than a sequence. Kessler has spent much of the last two decades repeating that qualification, arguing that the popular version of the model is a media artefact: of the many things Kübler-Ross described, the press took five and made them a ladder.

Meaning as a sixth stage

In Finding Meaning Kessler argued that acceptance is not the end, and that the additional task is to make something of the loss — a changed sense of purpose, a commitment to prevent similar deaths, or simply a different relationship to the person who died. He has said the Kübler-Ross family gave permission for the addition. The idea resonates with a large clinical and research literature on meaning-making in bereavement, but Kessler's framing of it as a stage rather than a process is his own.

Care at the end of life

Kessler's first book, The Needs of the Dying (1997), set out what dying patients ask for — relief from pain, presence, honesty, the chance to say what matters — and was praised by Mother Teresa, whose endorsement did much to launch it. His later Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (2010) examined the reported experiences of people close to death, treating them as phenomena to be taken seriously by clinicians without adjudicating their metaphysical status.

Widening the definition of grief

Kessler's working definition is unusually broad: grief, he says, is any change we did not want. This deliberately brings divorce, job loss, chronic illness and diagnosis into the same frame as bereavement, and it is the reason his audience extends well beyond the newly bereaved.

Major Publications

Kessler, D. (1997). The Needs of the Dying: A Guide for Bringing Hope, Comfort, and Love to Life's End. HarperCollins.
Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2000). Life Lessons: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living. Scribner.
Kessler, D. (2010). Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die. Hay House.
Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2005). On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. Scribner.
Hay, L., & Kessler, D. (2014). You Can Heal Your Heart. Hay House.
Kessler, D. (2019). Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Scribner.

Impact and Legacy

It is hard to overstate how much of the English-speaking public's vocabulary for loss comes from Kessler's hands, whether directly or through the books he wrote with Kübler-Ross. Millions of people have used his language to describe their own experience, and grief.com has given structured guidance to people who had none.

The scientific assessment is considerably more negative, and Kessler himself concedes most of it. Robert Kastenbaum — a founding figure in thanatology — made the standard case against the stages: their existence as stages has never been demonstrated; no evidence shows people moving from one to the next; the method's limitations are unacknowledged; description slides into prescription; and the surrounding environment, which can matter enormously, is ignored. Kessler has also pointed out that the model originated in a particular culture at a particular moment.

The closest thing to a direct test, Maciejewski and colleagues' 2003 Yale study, produced mixed results and was met with critical letters in the same journal. Objectors noted that acceptance — supposedly the final stage — was actually the most frequently endorsed item at the first assessment and at every subsequent one; that the sample was culturally and geographically narrow; and that roughly 40 per cent of the originally recruited participants were excluded from the analysis because they did not fit the stage model. In later work Prigerson and Maciejewski abandoned stages altogether and described their results as "states" of grief.

George Bonanno, whose two decades of longitudinal work on thousands of bereaved people is the most substantial body of evidence in the field, concluded that there are no stages to pass through and that psychological resilience is the principal component of grief. He has also made the point that defeats the model's appeal: he can tell someone they will probably be all right, but "you're probably going to be OK" is far less comforting than a five-step map. The rival framework most researchers now use is Stroebe and Schut's dual process model, in which mourners oscillate between confronting the loss and getting on with life.

Kessler's sixth stage inherits every one of these objections. Adding "meaning" as a terminal step preserves the linear shape that both he and Kübler-Ross denied, and it risks turning meaning into an obligation: people who do not find one may conclude they have grieved badly. Research on meaning-making supports it as a process that some bereaved people find helpful, not as a required endpoint.

There is a further objection specific to Kessler rather than to the model. Unlike Bonanno, Prigerson, Stroebe and the others whose work defines the field, he has no published outcome data. No randomised trial, controlled comparison or longitudinal evaluation has ever tested whether his approach helps anyone grieve faster, function better or avoid prolonged grief. His authority rests on clinical experience and on the testimony of readers, which is not worthless — but it is the kind of evidence that cannot distinguish a genuinely effective method from a consoling one, and it is precisely the kind of evidence his critics spent their careers learning to distrust.

His most defensible position is the one he now takes in interviews — that the stages are a rough vocabulary, not a map, and that there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Critics reply that a stage model which must constantly be disclaimed is a model whose frame is doing damage even as it is explained away.

The two judgements are not as far apart as they sound. Kessler and his critics agree that grief is mostly survivable, highly variable and badly served by a checklist. They differ about whether a vocabulary that works as metaphor should be taught as a model, and about whether the enormous audience he has built is best served by being told at the outset that there is no map.

Learn More

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — originator of the five stages, Kessler's collaborator and the source of his framework
Viktor Frankl — logotherapy and the claim that meaning is the central human motive
John Bowlby — attachment and loss, the empirical tradition against which stage models are judged

References

Kessler, D. (2005). Visions, Trips, and Crowds. Hay House.