David Kessler is a grief expert you never know of what he speaks. His mother died as he was a teen, and his grief was a springboard for a deeper interest in the experience of loss. As an adult he worked side by side with the legendary death-and-dying expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, coauthoring a magazine with her on the five stages of grief in 2004.

Then, after decades of writing, speaking, and counseling people in grief, Kessler lost his 21-year-old son, David. The profound loss propelled him to seek something beyond his previous understanding of the grieving process. This led him to identify a sixth stage of grief — meaning — which he writes about in his new book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.

“Meaning doesn’t require understanding,” he explains. “It’s not essential to understand why someone died in order to find meaning.” Yet finding something meaningful in a loss can help us learn how to make sense of it, and to move on. Kessler believes that “meaning is the stage where healing resides.”

The book profiles a variety of people who have made meaning from their grief. Some went on to start national organizations, like the founding father of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Another woman simply bought a set of postage stamps reminding her of her dead father, which allowed her to think of him each time she paid the electric bill.

In general, Kessler explains, the meaning we create from loss is entirely personal and specific. “For all of us, meaning is a reflection of the romance we have for those we have lost.”

You can find out more about making meaning from grief in Kessler’s new book, which comes with a free companion class. (Find those details at www.grief.com or www.sixthstage.com.) Below he answers some questions regarding grief and meaning for EL.

Experience Life | How have you start working with people in grief?

David Kessler | I was raised having a normal childhood until I was 13, when my mother became ill and had to go to the hospital in the big city, where she passed away. Then, at the same time we were at that hospital, one of the first mass shootings in the usa happened right across the street. The shooting was devastating.

I didn’t know it then, but there was no one that could’ve helped me with my grief and shock. There have been no resources. So, in a strange way, I often say I’ve end up being the person who could’ve helped me.

EL | Often serious trauma in childhood causes people to dissociate and numb out, but you’ve made a life’s work from grief. How have you manage that?

DK | When buffaloes sense bad weather is coming, they run into the storm, minimizing their amount of time in it. So perhaps which was my instinct. But I’ve also become that person that could’ve helped me, which is how I found meaning after those tragedies.

The shocking thing is the fact that despite the fact that this is my career, those traumatic moments haven’t defined my life.

EL | That seems critical.

DK | I've got a neighbor who said to me once, “I’d enjoy being friends, but I can’t discuss death all the time.” I said, “Surprisingly, in my friendships, I actually don’t talk about death unless something pops up.”

EL | Your neighbor’s comments appear to reflect a fear many of us share: When we talk about death at all, we'll talk about nothing else. There’s no in-between. But it seems like your work is about that in-between.

DK | Right. It’s about grief, but it’s also about life.

EL | You worked closely with death-and-dying expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who taught that grief occurs in five stages. What is important for individuals to understand about those stages?

DK | Elisabeth and I adapted her stages from dying to grief within our early book On Grief and Grieving, and literally on-page one, we said they’re not linear. They’re not a map for grief.

Since that book, in 2004, they’ve become five simple steps to grief, which would appall Elisabeth. Since I’m the main one still alive here, I felt the necessity to speak up and revisit them in this new book. And also to talk about how the stage of acceptance took on the finality that Elisabeth and I never meant. There’s no finality to grief.

EL | In your new book you suggest an additional stage to grief: finding meaning. Is this part of the grieving process, or a bonus stage?

DK | Again, the stages are not linear or mutually exclusive. You may be wrestling with acceptance simultaneously that you’re trying to find meaning. Actually, I often do that myself.

EL | So it’s nothing like you arrive at meaning after which — ta-da! — you’re done.

DK | Right. Grief is messy.

EL | Are we able to create meaning out of any type of loss, not just losing someone through death?

DK | Yes. I additionally do retreats on breakups and divorce and betrayal; they’re all deaths. A breakup is the death of that relationship. A divorce is the death of a marriage. Employment loss is the death of this work relationship. I think we look at those things and go, “Oh, my loss isn’t a physical death, so it doesn’t count,” therefore we begin to minimize our own grief. We’re not organically feeling the grief. We’re judging the emotions. And then it’s hard to find this is in it.

EL | What happens when we treat losses and grief as meaningless or random?

DK | The issue is, when we feel like a loss has no larger value, the loss itself can become the purpose of our life. We can become dedicated to the loss, and it becomes our soul’s focus. Instead of being a feeling we have, the loss becomes who we are.

The word that people use is they feel “stuck.” They can’t have relationships anymore. “Stuck” isn't a clinical term, but it is the word that people seem to use the most.

People could possibly get angry when I mention meaning. I get it. I mean, I’m not to imply that your loved one, who was murdered, has great meaning within their death. But meaning is what comes after their death. Meaning is what we do.

EL | And so let’s talk about that. Say my friend died . . .

DK | Is this a hypothetical, or is this real?

EL | Actually it’s both. I lost a friend to cancer at the end of September.

DK | The first thing to know is meaning might take months or years to develop. To me, September is the day before yesterday. Could you imagine saying to me three months after my mother had died . . . so, what’s the meaning? This is came decades later for me.

EL | She had young kids. Is it possible to help them find the meaning in their grief?

DK | Meaning is one thing you cannot discover for them. They're going to have to grow up and find their very own meaning, and it may be uncomfortable that you should watch because you wanted them to have an amazing life with their mother, and that is not going to happen, and so it is going to be hard.

But I understand that freedom is only present in reality. Death and loss just are what goes on in the world. You know, we have the illusion that everyone’s likely to have parents until they’re 80. I ended up not to have a TV-sitcom life. I turned out to have a real life, and in actual life, mothers die, fathers die, divorces happen.

For those kids, you won’t have the answers, but your presence is exactly what will make the difference.

EL | Can you talk about being a witness for grief?

DK | Most people are so stressed about what to say. But literally, if you witness someone’s grief, you’re doing more than most. You don’t need to give that person 10 easy steps. You can just be with them.

Witnessing is all about being a presence without an agenda. We would like our grief seen. We want a life that has just ended to be witnessed. We want our own loss to be witnessed. If I had just provided three easy steps to feel better about your friend’s death and three easy things for her kids to do, you might have felt instructed, however, you wouldn’t have felt witnessed.

It’s when you get a sense of my presence which you may feel some relief. That I am there witnessing it without trying to change it or show you the silver lining. We often try to show people the silver lining or provide them with the three easy tips. But then we’re treating grief like someone is broken, and they’re not broken. They’re in grief.

EL | How come end-of-life rituals important?

DK | It’s a strange byproduct of our productive world that we multitask everything, and then death occurs, and people go, Oh, it wasn’t easy to have a funeral. But every death that’s ever happened continues to be inconvenient. In fact, it’s made to do that. Death and grief are there to make us stop.

We come from a long line of dead people. We know how to do this. So when are you currently supposed to do a ritual? Once the death occurs. That is the archetype of how it’s supposed to work, and there’s an expense to us trying to manage it.

A ritual doesn’t need to be a formal funeral, either. It may be dinner out in their honor. It’s about marking their life as well as their death.

EL | What is complicated grief?

DK | All of the feelings you experience in grief are common feelings, but they shouldn’t stay. When feelings stay and we get stuck, that’s what we call complicated grief.

I consider grief as a river. Complicated grief is really a branch in the river that slows the river down. We have to examine it and obtain it moving again.

EL | And witnesses, rituals, finding meaning . . . these allow us to to keep that grief moving?

DK | Yes. The grief needs to keep moving, and grief will take us to our healing.