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This attempt to have it both ways may explain why some critics struggled to combat the book’s influence in the wake of its success, accusing not Kübler-Ross but the pop consensus of a willful misreading. In a critique from 1979, medical ethics professor Larry R. Churchill argued that the fault “lies not so much with Kubler-Ross herself as it does with those of us who have taken her metaphors literally and ossified her ‘stages’ into lock-step movements.”

But for all her caveats, this impression of orderliness was Kübler-Ross’s intention and design, and it’s the framework that she gave us. And it’s one that reduces the messiness of death and dying to a stable, life-affirming narrative. As Churchill accurately notes, the stages “have, in fact, tended to professionalize the process of dying, to put dying, like other critical life-junctures, in the hands of an expert or professional who, using scientific tools, studies, describes, and inevitably prescribes for us.” This, he argues, benefits primarily those left behind: “It is the living who need control and manageability, and who are prone to categorize the experience of dying by applying Kubler-Ross’ stages rigidly and dogmatically.” Acceptance, after all, is easiest and most comforting for those left behind—the goal of getting patients through these five stages seems to be at least in part to make it easier for families and caregivers, to minimize their guilt or confusion. We love Kübler-Ross’s five stages because they make things simpler for us, and if the dying don’t make it to acceptance, that’s ultimately not the fault of their caregivers or a failing health care system; it’s theirs alone. As Neumann told me, “I think the cookie-cutter five stages can admonish people for not grieving properly, and that’s just not acceptable. That’s not the way end of life care tools should be used.”

The Good Death movement, for all its good intentions, remains a kind of idealized version of death where we have the time and space to confront the reality of mortality and the emotions that ensue. But the pandemic that began in 2020 and is still ongoing is just one of the many obvious reminders that most of us do not have the time or luxury of working through five stages. For the past four years, people have died suddenly, they have died on Zoom, they have died alone. They have died angry, depressed, and in denial. They are not dying neatly, with the kind of acceptance that makes those left behind feel good and reassured. We have come a long way since the 1960s, getting better at helping the terminally ill get what they actually need and want, and not just what we think is good for them. But death is still a brutal, messy business.