Expert On Death Faces Her Own Death
Kubler-Ross now questions her life's work
May 31, 1997|By Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
http://articles.sfgate.com/1997-05-31/news/17749844_1_elisabeth-kubler-ross-terminally-dying
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."
"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."
・・・
"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
"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."
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 pissed!"
