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Kubler-Ross finds final comfort in ‘Dying’
More articles on this topic: Elisabeth Kübler-RossSwiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose provocative books revolutionized how the living talk about death and advocated a belief in the afterlife, died Tuesday in Scottsdale, Ariz., of natural causes.
She was 78 and not afraid.
“I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever,” she told USA TODAY in 1997 after a series of strokes left her bedridden. “I’ve been praying for it for two years.”
Once it came, she said, she’d be “dancing in all the galaxies.”
Her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, helped people understand the emotions surrounding dying and grieving — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and helped launch the hospice-care movement. Kübler-Ross wrote of her experiences at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver with terminally ill patients who “may cry for rest, peace and dignity, but … will get infusions, transfusions, a heart machine, or tracheostomy.”
She was not the first expert to address the science of dying and grief, but there were few before her and none who wrote for the general public, says Therese Rando, clinical director of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Loss in Warwick, R.I.
In 1999, Time named Kübler-Ross among the 100 most important thinkers of the 20th century.
“Before she came along, doctors — and I was one of them — avoided dying patients out of a sense of fear of facing death ourselves and a feeling of helplessness,” said psychiatrist Maurie Pressman, emeritus clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University in Philadelphia. “She was very courageous, because she went in to talk to the dying instead of running away. She found out about their loneliness.”
Elisabeth Kübler was born in Zurich; she graduated from medical school at the University of Zurich in 1957 and began studying in New York in 1958. She was separated from her husband, Emanuel Ross, when he died in 1992.
Kübler-Ross wrote 12 books after On Death and Dying. One of the most controversial was her 1992 book, On Life After Death, based on interviews with more than 20,000 people who gave similar accounts of near-death experiences.
Her 1997 autobiography listed four phases of the afterlife: leaving the physical body; meeting angels or spirit guides; traversing a tunnel or bridge toward a bright light; and becoming pure spiritual energy.
The scientific community initially scoffed, Pressman said. “But there is a great deal of work going on now that brings to our attention unexplainable experiences happening over and over again.”
Kübler-Ross was a clinical professor of behavioral medicine and psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She once planned to open a hospice for AIDS-afflicted children at her farm in the Shenandoah Mountains, but she gave that up after a suspicious fire destroyed her home in 1994.
She then moved to Arizona and continued writing and lecturing. After a series of debilitating strokes, she fought for her health, even turning to natural healers. She kept a totem pole in her front yard, and she said spirits had told her she was a Native American in her past life.
What mattered most in life, she said, she learned from those about to leave it: “Live so you don’t look back and regret that you’ve wasted your life. Live life honestly and full.”
Kübler-Ross is survived by a son, daughter and two granddaughters.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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