posted February 05, 2012 07:03 AM
Expert On Death Faces Her Own DeathKubler-Ross now questions her life's work
Scottsdale, Ariz. -- Incapacitated by a series of strokes, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross sits in a cluttered corner of her home in the desert, smoking Dunhill cigarettes, watching TV and waiting to die.
Kubler-Ross revolutionized the way Americans look at death and dying, but decades of work with the terminally ill has done little to ease her own transition into the great beyond.
Two years of medical problems and existential angst have forced the Swiss-born psychiatrist and spiritualist to question her own legacy and to reconsider her ideas about life, death and ``the other side.''
Her mood is feisty, but her German-accented voice is faint and tinged with bitterness.
``For 15 hours a day, I sit in this same chair, totally dependent on someone else coming in here to make me a cup of tea,'' she says. ``It's neither living nor dying. It's stuck in the middle.
``My only regret is that for 40 years I spoke of a good God who helps people, who knows what you need and how all you have to do is ask for it. Well, that's baloney. I want to tell the world that it's a bunch of bull. Don't believe a word of it.''
Kubler-Ross was born in 1926, the smallest of triplets. In her new autobiography, ``The Wheel of Life -- A Memoir of Living and Dying,'' she writes of a difficult childhood under a domineering father and a harsh preacher who smacked her on the head if she yawned at church.
Her life course changed in the aftermath of World War II, when Kubler-Ross volunteered for relief work and visited Maidenek, one of the Nazi death camps in war-ravaged Poland.
It was a hellish scene -- boxcars full of baby shoes taken from murdered Jewish children. But inside the wooden barracks, etched into the walls by Holocaust victims, were numerous carvings of butterflies, a symbol of rebirth that became the central image in Kubler-Ross' life.
After marrying an American doctor, Emanuel Ross, Kubler-Ross moved to the United States and settled in Chicago. Aghast at how the American medical establishment treated terminally ill patients, she began holding seminars where doctors, nurses and medical students listened to the real-life concerns of dying patients.
``When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare,'' Kubler-Ross said in an interview at her home last week.
``You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication. But the doctors were afraid of making their patients drug addicts. It was so stupid.''
In 1969, Kubler-Ross published ``On Death and Dying,'' a trail-blazing book that made her famous and helped launch the hospice movement in the United States.
``She was the first to break the taboo about death -- to get physicians and nurses to realize that death is a part of life,'' said David Kessler, a hospice movement leader and author of the new book ``The Rights of the Dying: A Companion for Life's Final Moments.''
``There is nowhere on Earth now where they don't know Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and the five stages of death and dying,'' Kessler said.
According to the Kubler-Ross model, dying patients often go through five emotional stages -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Just let dying patients express these emotions, she said. Make doctors listen to their patients and give them enough medication to control the pain.
Today, Kubler-Ross is not optimistic about her effect on the American medical establishment.
``Even now, when we have 2,700 hospices in America, 80 percent of our doctors try not to refer patients to hospice,'' she said. ``They see death as their failure.''
But what really makes Kubler- Ross question her legacy is her own encounter with medicine in the 1990s after suffering a major stroke two years ago.
``After teaching doctors and nurses for decades, I was in the hospital after my stroke, and it was like my work was nonexistent,'' she said. ``The nurses never came to see their patients. They would just sit out there in front of their computers.
``I had this frozen arm and incredible pain. If you blew on my left arm, I would scream. The nurse told me I was holding my hand in a funny way -- which is typical of stroke patients -- and she sat on my arm! I slugged her with my good arm and yelled, `That hurts like hell!' She said, `Oh, you're becoming combative,' and brought in two fat nurses who tried to sit on it again. If I had a pistol, I would have shot them.
``When I left the hospital, I was so depressed,'' she said. ``It was like my work for four decades had gone down the drain. Nobody learned anything. I only had one good nurse in six weeks in the hospital. It's a disgrace.''
In her 1969 book, Kubler-Ross calls the belief in life after death ``a form of denial.'' But by the mid- 1970s, the seemingly secular psychiatrist was making headlines with the claim that she had ``hard data'' proving the existence of life after death.
Kubler-Ross' proof was the testimony of ``near death experiences'' by numerous patients, who reported remarkably similar visions after being brought back from the brink of death.
They speak of floating above their own bodies, watching frantic doctors work to resuscitate them. Mysterious guides are there to usher them down a long tunnel, into a luminous white light.
Meanwhile, in the 1970s, Kubler-Ross became involved with a controversial Southern California channeler and began to speak of her conversations with spirit guides from beyond.
Suddenly, the woman who told America to look death squarely in the face was saying, ``Death does not exist.''
Her transformation brought a following of New Age spiritual seekers but cost Kubler-Ross much of her credibility in mainstream medical and academic circles.
In her autobiography, Kubler- Ross says her new interest in channeling and spirits also took a toll at home. On Father's Day, 1976, her husband told her he wanted a divorce. Emanuel Ross remarried, and died in 1992.
Kubler-Ross moved to Virginia, where she bought a 300-acre farm in the Shenandoah Valley. In 1990, she founded the Elisabeth Kubler- Ross Center on the property. But her plans to adopt 20 babies with AIDS and bring them to Virginia was met with violent opposition from local residents.
Her son, Scottsdale photographer Ken Ross, convinced his mother to move to Arizona after a bizarre chain of events on her Virginia farm.
After being vilified as ``the AIDS lady'' in the Shenandoah Valley, there were a series of break- ins at the Kubler-Ross center. One of her pet llamas was shot. Then, one night in 1994, Kubler-Ross lost all her possessions when her home was destroyed in a suspicious fire.
Shortly after moving into her new home in the desert outside Scottsdale, Kubler-Ross suffered a major brain stem stroke.
``It's a lousy retirement,'' she said. ``I can't wait to die.''
While her current spiritual vision contains more gloom and doom, Kubler-Ross continues to believe in the afterlife and spirit guides, whom she affectionately calls ``my spooks.''
``I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears,'' said Kubler-Ross, who reports two near-death experiences of her own.
As for skeptics who claim these visions are mere hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, Kubler-Ross replies, ``Let them wait until they experience it themselves.''
Until recently, Kubler-Ross said her belief in reincarnation inspired her opposition to euthanasia. There are always lessons left to be learned in life, she said.
Today, Kubler-Ross is not so sure. While she still opposes physician-assisted suicide and has nothing but disdain for Dr. Jack Kervorkian, she has come to see suicide as a legitimate option.
``If it were not for Kervorkian, I would have done it a long time ago. I can't stand this Kervorkian,'' she said.
``When I've had enough of this, I'll do it myself. I don't give a hoot about the afterlife, reincarnation or anything. I'm finished, and I'm not coming back.''
Kubler-Ross doesn't miss a beat when asked which of the five stages of death she finds herself in at the moment.
``Anger,'' she yells. ``I'm p!ssed !''
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1997/05/31/MN42913.DTL&ao=all#ixz z1lVZKyw2O
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