In the book A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr tells the true story of a major court case involving the deaths of a number of children by leukemia, perhaps caused by the poisoning of city wells with industrial chemicals. The case developed as the mothers of the town began to investigate why there was a leukemia cluster in their small town in Massachusetts and continued as they determined that there was a need to confront the companies that may have done this to them and their families and to stop those companies from hurting anyone else in the same manner. In coming to this conclusion, the women went through the series of stages that have been identified in the literature as the stages of grief.
In 1969, Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross 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 Kubler Ross, the acceptance stage can be "either rueful and fatalistic or optimistic" (Foos Graber 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 residents of Woburn, Massachusetts, and who finally alleged that two local companies contaminated their drinking water with an industrial solvent and caused their deadly illnesses. The issue actually began in 1964 when the municipal water supply of the town opened a new well called Well G, followed by Well H in 1967. These were production wells which intermittently pumped water into the Woburn drinking water supply until sometime in 1979, and this was continued...