The 6th stage of grief is “finding meaning.” It was introduced by David Kessler in his 2019 book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, expanding on the original five stages he co-developed with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Where the classic model ends with acceptance, this additional stage describes the process of learning to remember the person you lost with more love than pain, and moving forward in a way that honors them.
How Meaning Differs From Acceptance
Acceptance, the fifth stage in the original model, is about acknowledging that the loss happened. It’s the point where you stop fighting reality. But acceptance alone can feel hollow. You might think, “Okay, they’re gone. Now what?” Finding meaning picks up where acceptance leaves off. It’s not about being “OK with it,” as some people misinterpret acceptance to mean. It’s about what you build from the loss over time.
Meaning doesn’t erase the pain or replace what was lost. It’s the gradual process of integrating the loss into your life story, reshaping your identity, and developing a new sense of direction. Psychologically, this process helps reduce the fear and disorientation that come from a sudden break in the continuity of your life. When someone central to your world dies, everything you assumed about the future collapses. Meaning-making is how you reconstruct a future that still feels worth living.
What Finding Meaning Looks Like in Practice
Finding meaning is deeply personal, and it looks different for everyone. For some people, it takes the form of creative work. One widow, after losing her husband to suicide, spent nearly six years writing a book to help others who experienced similar losses. The act of channeling grief into something useful became her path to meaning. For others, it’s simpler: volunteering, mentoring someone going through a similar loss, or even just being present on the phone for another grieving person who needs to know survival is possible.
Meaning can also be found in small, unexpected moments. A fleeting experience of joy that connects back to a loved one. A commitment to finishing a project they cared about. Starting a tradition in their honor. The common thread is that meaning transforms the relationship with grief itself, turning it from something purely destructive into something that carries forward the value of the person who died.
It’s worth noting what meaning is not. It’s not finding a silver lining or pretending the loss was “meant to be.” It’s not closure, a word Kessler deliberately avoids. Closure implies an ending, as if grief has a finish line. Meaning is more like a shift in gravity: the loss is still there, still heavy, but it pulls you toward something rather than just pulling you down.
Where This Stage Came From
David Kessler worked closely with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross for years. They co-authored two books together, including On Grief and Grieving, which Kessler described as “a sort of bookend” to her landmark 1969 work On Death and Dying. When Kübler-Ross was working on her own book about lessons learned from facing death, she invited Kessler to collaborate, saying his draft was “really missing something: me.” Their partnership shaped much of the modern understanding of grief.
After Kübler-Ross’s death in 2004, Kessler continued developing the grief framework. His addition of the sixth stage drew on both his professional experience as a grief expert and a devastating personal loss: the death of his 21-year-old son. He published Finding Meaning in 2019, arguing that the original five stages, while valuable, left people without a path forward after acceptance.
Grief Doesn’t Follow a Script
One of the most important things to understand about the sixth stage, or any stage of grief, is that it’s not a mandatory checkpoint on a fixed timeline. Kübler-Ross herself said the stages “are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.” Research backs this up. A study on emotional wellbeing after loss found that rather than progressing neatly through stages, people’s emotions oscillate back and forth. You might find moments of meaning early on, then slide back into anger or bargaining weeks later.
A systematic analysis of how grief stages are portrayed online found that about 59% of sources warned about the non-linear nature of grief, and 50% noted that not everyone experiences all five (or six) stages. Roughly a third emphasized that the stages aren’t prescriptive, meaning they describe common patterns rather than dictating how grief should unfold. The danger of any stage model is treating it like a recipe, measuring your progress against it and feeling like you’re “doing grief wrong” if your experience doesn’t match.
Finding meaning may come months or years after a loss. It may come in waves, appearing and receding. Some people never frame their grief in terms of meaning at all, and that doesn’t indicate failure. The sixth stage is better understood as a possibility than a requirement: a recognition that many people, given enough time and support, discover ways to carry their loss that feel purposeful rather than purely painful.
What Shapes Your Ability to Find Meaning
Research in bereavement psychology identifies at least five categories of factors that influence how someone makes meaning from loss: the circumstances of the death itself, the person’s cultural background, their social support network, their individual personality and coping style, and the nature of their relationship with the person who died. Each of these can push meaning-making in a positive or negative direction.
A sudden, violent death is harder to integrate into a coherent life story than a death that followed a long illness where goodbyes were possible. Cultural and religious frameworks can provide ready-made structures for meaning, or they can complicate grief if the death conflicts with deeply held beliefs. Strong social support, collective rituals, and even legal resolutions (in cases of wrongful death, for instance) all play a role. The takeaway is that finding meaning isn’t purely an internal, willpower-driven process. Your environment, community, and circumstances shape what’s possible and how long it takes.
This is part of why grief experts emphasize an integrated approach to support, connecting mental health care, spiritual care, family involvement, and community resources. Meaning rarely emerges in isolation. It tends to grow in the spaces between people, in shared stories, in acts of service, and in the slow work of rebuilding a life that still carries the imprint of someone who mattered.