The Lovely Bones By Elizabeth Kübler Ross

When you lose someone, it usually hurts. The loss of someone you love is usually associated with grief. In psychology, they classify the grieving process into the five stages of grief. Elizabeth Kübler Ross came up with the theory of the five stages of grief. According to her theory, the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance, in that order. These five stages of grief can be identified in the characters in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, a novel narrated by a girl, Susie Salmon, who was raped and murdered by George Harvey, a serial killer that lived in her neighborhood, and the story of how her family deals with her loss and what Susie sees and goes through in her heaven. The author illustrates different

characters handling grief in different ways, all in some way aligning with Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s five stages of grief model. How Susie Salmon handles grief fits the five stages of grief, except not in the order that the five stages are usually presented in.
The Elizabeth Kübler Ross model identifies denial as the first stage of grief, but the first stage that Susie goes through is bargaining.

Bargaining is “an attempt to persuade God or a higher power to change the reality of loss in exchange for improved behavior or some sacrifice on the part of the bereaved person”(Fundukian). A person in the bargaining stage will beg, or even do things in an attempt to prevent the inevitable. Susie, very briefly, goes through this stage. This stage occurs for Susie when she is being raped. Susie “[knows] he [is] going to kill [her]” (Sebold 14), but she still pleads and begs in an attempt to stop the inevitable. She says “please”, “don’t”, “please don’t”, and “don’t please” (Sebold 13). And when Harvey tells her to do things, she does things she would not normally do. She ‘betters’ her behavior in an attempt to stop the situation, even though it does not work. The author even alludes to the fact that this is the bargaining phase by writing “Franny told me that almost everyone begged ‘please’ before dying” (Sebold 13). The first stage Susie goes through, which occurs during her rape and murder, is therefore the stage of bargaining. It is important to notice that although people usually first go through the stage of denial, and that is not quickly passed, yet right from the get-go, Susie acknowledges that she is going to die. It is also important to note that Susie goes through this stage very

quickly.
The second stage of the Elizabeth Kübler Ross theory and the second stage Susie goes through is anger.

Anger is pretty self explanatory. It is defined as “ a strong feeling of displeasure and usually of antagonism”(Anger). When faced with death, the people going through this stage “can be angry with themselves, and/or with others”(Chapman). Susie, in this case, was angry with others, specifically Mr. Harvey, her murderer. Susie was a young, innocent girl, but once she is in her heaven, a much more angry and borderline animalistic side of Susie peeks through very briefly. Susie says “I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living” (Sebold 20). Susie’s upset and anger is quite obvious. This is one of her most outright expression of the anger stage. Susie is expressing displeasure and antagonism towards her murderer, Mr.

Harvey.
The third stage of the Elizabeth Kübler Ross model is bargaining, but the third stage that Susie goes through is actually a combination of two stages. The third stage that Susie endures is actually a combination of denial, the first stage of the Elizabeth Kübler Ross model, and depression, the fourth stage of the Elizabeth Kübler Ross model. Susie does not want her death to be true. She is refusing to accept the fact because she does not want to leave her life behind. Denial is “a defense mechanism”(Chapman) and “a conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, reality, etc.”(Chapman). Depression is “the dress rehearsal or the practice run for the 'aftermath'”(Chapman) with the aftermath, in this case, being the real Heaven. Her being in her own Heaven that contains her simplest desires is simply her ‘dress rehearsal’ for when she reaches the stage of acceptance and moves on. And while she is in this ‘dress rehearsal’, she is refusing to accept that she is gone forever. In this stage, Susie resides in her own personal heaven. She cannot move on to the larger Heaven because she refuses to let go of her family. She refuses to accept the fact that she cannot grow up with them and that she cannot move on and not constantly watch them. At one point in the novel. Susie literally takes over Ruth’s body so that she can spend time with the living. “Susie...must undergo [‘the healing process’], we learn: she has to be weaned of her desire to linger in the world and ‘change the lives of those I loved on Earth’ in order to progress from ‘her’ heaven to Heaven itself” (Hacht), and from this, Susie begins to transition from this stage to the final stage.
The final stage that Susie goes through is acceptance. This is her fourth stage of grief. Although the fourth stage, according to the Elizabeth Kübler Ross theory, is depression, Susie is going through a warped model of this theory and therefore has already gone through that and has reached the final stage, acceptance, which is usually the fifth stage of the the Elizabeth Kübler Ross model. Acceptance is “an indication that there is some emotional detachment and objectivity”(Chapman). Susie had been to attached to the people she left behind and did not want to let go of them, or for them to let go of her. But in the end, Susie comes to realize that it is okay to let go, and finally makes it to the “wide wide Heaven”(Sebold 325). When the people Susie left behind at the novel all end up together, Susie finally accepts the fact that she can never be with them. They all seem to reach a happy ending together, in her mind, and once she sees that, she leaves with the final thought “[a]nd I was gone”(Sebold 322). Susie has come to terms with the fact that she is not a part of the living, and she is okay with that. “My sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be” (Sebold 327). This is a powerful statement made by Susie. Throughout most the novel, all Susie wished for was to be alive. But here she is telling the reader that she cannot be a part of the living world, that she is but a memory, and that is okay. It is the best illustration of Susie in the stage of acceptance. This quote is her concession statement, and it wraps up her grieving process.
Grief is experienced in many different ways. Yes, a model has been created to outline to help guide people in the understanding of the grieving process, but most things are not ‘one size fits all’, including this grief model. Susie’s character has proved that not all people go through the grieving process in the same way, and not all people experience stages of grief for an equal amount of time. The characters in The Lovely Bones help show that people grieve in different ways, and some people grieve quicker than others. Grief is a tricky thing, but anybody can experience it. Susie proves just that. Grief is a main theme in The Lovely Bones, and it is also a main theme of life on our planet. Susie is just one of many examples of how grief manifests in a person dealing with trauma.