Broken heart
For most bereaved individuals, the journey through grief will ultimately culminate in an acceptable level of adjustment to a life without their loved one. The Kübler-Ross model postulates that there are five stages of grief after the loss of a loved-one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And while it is recognized that mourners go through initial period of numbness leading to depression and finally to reorganization and recovery, most modern grief specialists recognize the variations and fluidity of grief experiences differ considerably in intensity and length among cultural groups, individually from person to person as well as depending on the amount of investment put into the relationship.
AIDS and Its Metaphors
Like syphilis, AIDS is perceived as having stages. The tertiary stage of syphilis was the most severe, as it is with AIDS, and both have a period of latency before the progression. However, syphilis did not run its full course in every case, and even cases that ended in death could be romanticized. For example, numerous artists suffered from syphilis, and it came to be an accepted view that its effects on the brain could actually inspire original thought. No such compensating factor exists for AIDS, and it was too early in the epidemic at the time of the writing of this book to determine definitively whether AIDS always progresses to death.