The Five Stages of Grief, as identified by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, is an outstanding model of the process you may go through when notified of a terminal illness and are about to cross over. The stages are:
1. Initial Shock, Denial and Isolation, in which you grasp for straws that your departure is not inevitable. You refuse to accept the truth that you are going to die, and you tend to isolate yourself from friends and family, saying, “This can’t be true. Leave me alone.”
2. Anger, rage and resentment over why you are “chosen” for death while other people are not. You may be angry at God, family and the doctors about the forthcoming loss of your physical plane life. You may go through anxiety and reason with God, promising you’ll behave better in exchange for a deferment of your transition. “Just let me be at my daughter’s wedding next June,” or, “Please let me go to our grandson’s christening in the spring.”
3. Depression, in which you mourn your departure and wonder why you should even bother with anything at all. This may be accompanied by bouts of loneliness, panic and guilt, especially if you feel you could have done more to prevent your passing. You look around at the familiar things and people in your life that you will be leaving behind but don’t know what comes next.
4. Detachment. You resign yourself to your fate, and slump into apathy and isolation.
5. Acceptance. You work through detachment, resignation and apathy, and finally surrender to the inevitable. Depending on your belief system, you hopefully arrive at acceptance, optimism and quiet expectation. (By the time you have finished this book, it will probably be exhilaration.)

The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – are a part of the process of transmuting our departure into gratitude. They are tools to help you understand what you may be feeling, but not steps in some linear timeline. And not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.
Denial, the first stage of grieving, isn’t refuting the fact of your departure, but helps you to survive overwhelm by going numb. It’s a way to get through each day. Denial helps you to manage your grief by metering how much you have to handle at once. It’s a protective mechanism to guard against emotional overwhelm, because to let it all in at this stage would be too much. So one way to handle your crossing is to go through the Five Stages, and grieve the loss of not being around anymore.

Life Celebration

A healthier alternative is to focus on those around you and the love among you all, while you celebrate the life you’ve lived together. It’s vital that everyone stay open to discuss the events taking place and share feelings about those events and the journey ahead, for pretty soon they’ll be following you. It’s particularly important to bring any children into the process, rather than shield them from it. By not ignoring your crossing, others will be able to embrace it, accept it, celebrate it and give thanks for having had you in their lives.