A Civil Action

In 1969, Dr. Elisabeth KublerRoss published a book entitled On Death and Dying in which she presented the results of her studies on death. She found people typically go through five distinct stages before accepting death and through the same five stages as part of the grieving process. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. According to KublerRoss, the acceptance stage can be "either rueful and fatalistic or optimistic" (FoosGraber 16). The stages through which the women in A Civil Action pass include all the stages first in terms of grieving for their children and then in terms of coming to grips with the truth about their deaths, for which a decision to take action has to be made.

The women involved come from several families who were r

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n become ill: It was Anne who approached Donna at Trinity Episcopal one Sunday morning, a month after Robbie's diagnosis. Anne offered her sympathy and told Donna that the understood what she was going through. Her son, Jimmy, she said, had almost died not long ago (Harr 31). Such encounters over time brought many of these families together in the realization that too many young people were sick and dying of leukemia, causing them to believe that there had to be a reason for this cluster of cases. The discovery of 184 barrels of industrial waste by the Woburn police in 1979 added to the concern about what might be causing this problem. The quality of the local water had long been a concern for many of the residents, but most were concerned about the taste and smell and about what the water might be doing to their pipes; it was only later that they made the connection with the illness of their children. Many of the children died, and the ensuing grief process would take a somewhat different turn than normal as some of the reasons why these children might be sick emerged. The usual stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance take place in the weeks and months after a death, but this assumes that
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1375
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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