OP, I see people saying that the stages can be done in various orders, and I want to quibble a bit with that. I think that it's like human development: first a child is a newborn, then a baby who crawls, then a toddler, then a preschooler, etc. After the child learns to walk, she may get scared and choose to crawl again for a while, or the preschooler may suddenly display more infantile habits, like not being toilet-trained any more when a new sibling is born. The fact that they're in a particular stage doesn't mean that they can't exhibit traits from another stage in answer to various developmental challenges.
In the same way, I think that the MLCer goes through Conway's 6 stages in that order. There are often regressions to a previous stage (or even glimpses of the next one), but, looking back on my H's MLC, the first 6 or so months after his mother's death were a sort of numb denial, then he spent about 9 months being angry about EVERYTHING, then he moved to a replay of his teenaged years. Sure, he might have been both angry and in denial (and even withdrawn) while in Depression at times, but he was actually in the stage of Depression, finishing off with those other behaviours). After he reached Acceptance he still had Replay instincts in his head, but he didn't actually go through replay again.
Anyhow, that's how it appeared to me. But then, my H was that rarest-of-rare creatures, the exception who makes the rule: a man whose MLC timelines fit perfectly into HB's description!
