The Five Stages Of Grief

2007Image macro / exploitable templateclassic

Also known as: Five Stages of Grief · 5 Stages of Grief · Kübler-Ross Model Meme

The Five Stages of Grief is a 2007 image-macro meme applying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief-model stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to absurd or everyday situations.

The Five Stages of Grief is an image macro and exploitable template series that humorously applies psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) to trivial or absurd situations. The meme format took shape online in 2007 with early DeviantArt parodies and went viral through a series of increasingly creative remixes, from political satire to a wildly popular tweet about imitation butter brands in 2017.

exploitable templatesimage macro memesmulti panel memespsychology memesabsurdist humor memes

Overview

The Five Stages of Grief meme takes the well-known psychological framework of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance and maps it onto situations that are decidedly not life-threatening. The format typically uses five labeled panels or images, each corresponding to a stage, applied to everything from losing a video game to dealing with a bad haircut. The comedy comes from the gap between the original model's gravity and whatever petty situation the meme creator chooses to grieve over.

The Kübler-Ross model was originally developed to describe the emotional process of terminally ill patients, not the bereaved or mildly inconvenienced1. Pop culture flattened the nuance long before the internet got hold of it, treating the five stages as a neat, sequential checklist that applies to all forms of loss4. Meme creators leaned into that oversimplification hard, often cycling through all five stages in a single image or cramming them into a few seconds of comedy.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first outlined the five stages of grief in her 1969 book *On Death and Dying*, drawing on her work with terminally ill patients4. The stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) became deeply embedded in popular culture despite criticism from academics who noted a lack of empirical support5. Later research suggested that bereaved people typically accept a death almost immediately rather than progressing through neat stages1.

The meme version kicked off on July 2, 2007, when DeviantArt user whitegryphon uploaded an MS Paint comic titled "5 Stages of Grief," one of the earliest known images parodying the Kübler-Ross model online5. The comic was rough around the edges, described by the artist as Wacom tablet practice, but it established the basic format of illustrating each stage with exaggerated characters3.

Origin & Background

Platform
DeviantArt (earliest parodies), Twitter / Reddit (viral spread)
Key People
whitegryphon, Jabnormalities, @daisyowl
Date
2007

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first outlined the five stages of grief in her 1969 book *On Death and Dying*, drawing on her work with terminally ill patients. The stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) became deeply embedded in popular culture despite criticism from academics who noted a lack of empirical support. Later research suggested that bereaved people typically accept a death almost immediately rather than progressing through neat stages.

The meme version kicked off on July 2, 2007, when DeviantArt user whitegryphon uploaded an MS Paint comic titled "5 Stages of Grief," one of the earliest known images parodying the Kübler-Ross model online. The comic was rough around the edges, described by the artist as Wacom tablet practice, but it established the basic format of illustrating each stage with exaggerated characters.

How It Spread

The concept picked up traction slowly at first. On August 24, 2010, a dedicated page for "Five Stages of Grief" was created on TV Tropes, cataloging its appearances across anime, film, and television. The page documented how pop culture typically plays the stages for laughs, with characters speed-running through all five "within ten seconds of each other".

On March 28, 2012, DeviantArt user Jabnormalities posted an exploitable comic template titled "5 Stages of Grief Meme". The template broke down each stage with clear instructions: denial ("still in shock"), anger ("reality starts to sink in"), bargaining ("trying to find a way out"), depression ("all hope is lost"), and acceptance ("they will learn to live with what has happened"). This template spawned numerous fan iterations on DeviantArt over the following years, with artists applying the format to their own characters.

The format jumped to political humor on February 4, 2016, when Redditor FutureFormerRedditor posted a Trump-themed version titled "5 Stages of Trump" to r/The_Donald. In December 2016, a Tumblr user assembled an image showing *The Daily Show* host Trevor Noah appearing to cycle through the five stages during an interview with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren.

The meme's biggest single viral moment came on August 20, 2017, when Twitter user @daisyowl posted a version featuring five different brands of imitation butter, each matched to a grief stage. The tweet picked up over 52,300 likes and 25,300 retweets within 24 hours. That same evening, Redditor phasma11 reposted the image to r/me_irl, where it pulled in more than 20,800 points, and the next day it hit r/MemeEconomy via Redditor Ryanite with over 7,200 points.

How to Use This Meme

The Five Stages of Grief meme is flexible enough to fit almost any template. The most common approach involves picking a frustrating or absurd situation and mapping five reactions onto the stages:

1

Pick your "loss" — anything from a dropped ice cream cone to a canceled TV show to a software update.

2

Find or create five images that represent denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance in the context of your chosen situation.

3

Label each image with the corresponding stage name. The humor often comes from the images being wildly disproportionate to real grief.

4

Optional: use a single subject progressing through the stages, like the Trevor Noah interview format, or use five separate objects that coincidentally match the emotional arc, like the butter brands.

Cultural Impact

The Five Stages of Grief meme tapped into something deeper than just internet humor. The Michigan Daily published an essay applying the framework to social media behavior during real tragedies, mapping how online communities cycle through misinformation (denial), activist anger, conscious consumption (bargaining), doomscrolling (depression), and eventually moving on (acceptance). The essay noted that social media algorithms exploit the anger stage specifically, prioritizing rage-fueled content because it drives engagement.

The framework's pop culture presence extends well beyond memes. TV Tropes' extensive catalog documents its use across dozens of anime, TV series, and films. Horror films like *The Babadook* (2014) built entire narratives around grief's stages, with director Jennifer Kent exploring parenting and "the fear of going mad" through the lens of unresolved loss. The Kübler-Ross model's simplicity makes it irresistible to storytellers and meme creators alike, even as psychologists repeatedly point out its limitations.

Fun Facts

Kübler-Ross developed the model by working with dying patients, not bereaved family members. The extension to all forms of grief happened in pop culture, not in her original research.

The TV Tropes page notes that when played for laughs in fiction, characters typically blow through all five stages "within ten seconds".

Research suggests that most stable people accept a death within seconds and rarely engage in denial at all, making the meme's exaggerated progression even funnier by contrast.

The @daisyowl butter tweet crossed platforms three times in 24 hours: Twitter to r/me_irl to r/MemeEconomy, picking up over 80,000 combined engagement points.

Derivatives & Variations

DeviantArt OC Versions

— Following Jabnormalities' 2012 template, artists across DeviantArt created hundreds of character-specific grief memes featuring original characters processing everything from breakups to losing glasses[2].

Political Five Stages

— The "5 Stages of Trump" format on Reddit and the Trevor Noah/Tomi Lahren version on Tumblr applied the template to political frustration and partisan debate[5].

Product Label Versions

— The @daisyowl butter brands tweet (featuring "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" as denial and generic "Butter" as acceptance) spawned a sub-genre of mapping consumer products onto emotional arcs[5].

Social Media Grief Cycle

— Commentary pieces reframed the five stages as a model for how online communities process tragedy through misinformation, anger, bargaining via boycotts, doomscrolling, and acceptance as the news cycle moves on[4].

Frequently Asked Questions

The Five Stages Of Grief

2007Image macro / exploitable templateclassic

Also known as: Five Stages of Grief · 5 Stages of Grief · Kübler-Ross Model Meme

The Five Stages of Grief is a 2007 image-macro meme applying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief-model stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—to absurd or everyday situations.

The Five Stages of Grief is an image macro and exploitable template series that humorously applies psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) to trivial or absurd situations. The meme format took shape online in 2007 with early DeviantArt parodies and went viral through a series of increasingly creative remixes, from political satire to a wildly popular tweet about imitation butter brands in 2017.

exploitable templates image macro memes multi panel memes psychology memes absurdist humor memes

Overview

The Five Stages of Grief meme takes the well-known psychological framework of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance and maps it onto situations that are decidedly not life-threatening. The format typically uses five labeled panels or images, each corresponding to a stage, applied to everything from losing a video game to dealing with a bad haircut. The comedy comes from the gap between the original model's gravity and whatever petty situation the meme creator chooses to grieve over.

The Kübler-Ross model was originally developed to describe the emotional process of terminally ill patients, not the bereaved or mildly inconvenienced. Pop culture flattened the nuance long before the internet got hold of it, treating the five stages as a neat, sequential checklist that applies to all forms of loss. Meme creators leaned into that oversimplification hard, often cycling through all five stages in a single image or cramming them into a few seconds of comedy.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first outlined the five stages of grief in her 1969 book *On Death and Dying*, drawing on her work with terminally ill patients. The stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) became deeply embedded in popular culture despite criticism from academics who noted a lack of empirical support. Later research suggested that bereaved people typically accept a death almost immediately rather than progressing through neat stages.

The meme version kicked off on July 2, 2007, when DeviantArt user whitegryphon uploaded an MS Paint comic titled "5 Stages of Grief," one of the earliest known images parodying the Kübler-Ross model online. The comic was rough around the edges, described by the artist as Wacom tablet practice, but it established the basic format of illustrating each stage with exaggerated characters.

Origin & Background

Platform
DeviantArt (earliest parodies), Twitter / Reddit (viral spread)
Key People
whitegryphon, Jabnormalities, @daisyowl
Date
2007

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first outlined the five stages of grief in her 1969 book *On Death and Dying*, drawing on her work with terminally ill patients. The stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) became deeply embedded in popular culture despite criticism from academics who noted a lack of empirical support. Later research suggested that bereaved people typically accept a death almost immediately rather than progressing through neat stages.

The meme version kicked off on July 2, 2007, when DeviantArt user whitegryphon uploaded an MS Paint comic titled "5 Stages of Grief," one of the earliest known images parodying the Kübler-Ross model online. The comic was rough around the edges, described by the artist as Wacom tablet practice, but it established the basic format of illustrating each stage with exaggerated characters.

How It Spread

The concept picked up traction slowly at first. On August 24, 2010, a dedicated page for "Five Stages of Grief" was created on TV Tropes, cataloging its appearances across anime, film, and television. The page documented how pop culture typically plays the stages for laughs, with characters speed-running through all five "within ten seconds of each other".

On March 28, 2012, DeviantArt user Jabnormalities posted an exploitable comic template titled "5 Stages of Grief Meme". The template broke down each stage with clear instructions: denial ("still in shock"), anger ("reality starts to sink in"), bargaining ("trying to find a way out"), depression ("all hope is lost"), and acceptance ("they will learn to live with what has happened"). This template spawned numerous fan iterations on DeviantArt over the following years, with artists applying the format to their own characters.

The format jumped to political humor on February 4, 2016, when Redditor FutureFormerRedditor posted a Trump-themed version titled "5 Stages of Trump" to r/The_Donald. In December 2016, a Tumblr user assembled an image showing *The Daily Show* host Trevor Noah appearing to cycle through the five stages during an interview with conservative commentator Tomi Lahren.

The meme's biggest single viral moment came on August 20, 2017, when Twitter user @daisyowl posted a version featuring five different brands of imitation butter, each matched to a grief stage. The tweet picked up over 52,300 likes and 25,300 retweets within 24 hours. That same evening, Redditor phasma11 reposted the image to r/me_irl, where it pulled in more than 20,800 points, and the next day it hit r/MemeEconomy via Redditor Ryanite with over 7,200 points.

How to Use This Meme

The Five Stages of Grief meme is flexible enough to fit almost any template. The most common approach involves picking a frustrating or absurd situation and mapping five reactions onto the stages:

1

Pick your "loss" — anything from a dropped ice cream cone to a canceled TV show to a software update.

2

Find or create five images that represent denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance in the context of your chosen situation.

3

Label each image with the corresponding stage name. The humor often comes from the images being wildly disproportionate to real grief.

4

Optional: use a single subject progressing through the stages, like the Trevor Noah interview format, or use five separate objects that coincidentally match the emotional arc, like the butter brands.

Cultural Impact

The Five Stages of Grief meme tapped into something deeper than just internet humor. The Michigan Daily published an essay applying the framework to social media behavior during real tragedies, mapping how online communities cycle through misinformation (denial), activist anger, conscious consumption (bargaining), doomscrolling (depression), and eventually moving on (acceptance). The essay noted that social media algorithms exploit the anger stage specifically, prioritizing rage-fueled content because it drives engagement.

The framework's pop culture presence extends well beyond memes. TV Tropes' extensive catalog documents its use across dozens of anime, TV series, and films. Horror films like *The Babadook* (2014) built entire narratives around grief's stages, with director Jennifer Kent exploring parenting and "the fear of going mad" through the lens of unresolved loss. The Kübler-Ross model's simplicity makes it irresistible to storytellers and meme creators alike, even as psychologists repeatedly point out its limitations.

Fun Facts

Kübler-Ross developed the model by working with dying patients, not bereaved family members. The extension to all forms of grief happened in pop culture, not in her original research.

The TV Tropes page notes that when played for laughs in fiction, characters typically blow through all five stages "within ten seconds".

Research suggests that most stable people accept a death within seconds and rarely engage in denial at all, making the meme's exaggerated progression even funnier by contrast.

The @daisyowl butter tweet crossed platforms three times in 24 hours: Twitter to r/me_irl to r/MemeEconomy, picking up over 80,000 combined engagement points.

Derivatives & Variations

DeviantArt OC Versions

— Following Jabnormalities' 2012 template, artists across DeviantArt created hundreds of character-specific grief memes featuring original characters processing everything from breakups to losing glasses[2].

Political Five Stages

— The "5 Stages of Trump" format on Reddit and the Trevor Noah/Tomi Lahren version on Tumblr applied the template to political frustration and partisan debate[5].

Product Label Versions

— The @daisyowl butter brands tweet (featuring "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" as denial and generic "Butter" as acceptance) spawned a sub-genre of mapping consumer products onto emotional arcs[5].

Social Media Grief Cycle

— Commentary pieces reframed the five stages as a model for how online communities process tragedy through misinformation, anger, bargaining via boycotts, doomscrolling, and acceptance as the news cycle moves on[4].

Frequently Asked Questions