DEATH

Rating:
Summary: Author Dies at 78
Review: 'On Death and Dying' Author Dies at 78

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book "On Death and Dying" and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She was 78.

She died Tuesday of natural causes at her Scottsdale home, family members said.

Published in 1969, "On Death and Dying" focused on the needs of the dying and offered her theory that they go through five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

"Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life," she once wrote. In another passage, she wrote: "Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you have lived."

Kubler-Ross wrote 12 books after "On Death and Dying," including how to deal with the death of a child and an early study on the AIDS epidemic.

"She brought the taboo notion of death and dying into the public consciousness," said Stephen Connor, vice president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

In 1979, she received the Ladies' Home Journal Woman of the Decade Award. In 1999, Time magazine named Kubler-Ross as one of the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the past century.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Kubler-Ross graduated from medical school at the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to New York the following year and was appalled by hospital treatment of dying patients.

Whoever has seen the horrifying appearance of the postwar European concentration camps would be similarly preoccupied," she said.

She began her work with the terminally ill at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, and was a clinical professor of behavioral medicine and psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Kubler-Ross began giving lectures featuring terminally ill patients, who talked about what they were going through. That led to her 1969 book.

"Dying becomes lonely and impersonal because the patient is often taken out of his familiar environment and rushed to an emergency room," she wrote.

"He may cry for rest, peace and dignity, but he will get infusions, transfusions, a heart machine, or tracheostomy. ... He will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart rate, pulse, electrocardiogram or pulmonary functions, his secretions or excretions - but not with him as a human being."

The most important thing Kubler-Ross did was bring death out of the dark for the medical community, said Carol Baldwin, a research associate professor of medicine at the University of Arizona and who worked as a nurse in one of the nation's first hospices in 1979.

"She really set the standards for how to communicate with the dying and their loved ones," Baldwin said recently. "Families learned that it's not a scary thing to watch someone die."

Kubler-Ross is survived her two children, Kenneth Ross and Barbara Lee Ross, and two granddaughters.



Rating:
Summary: Everyday one is questioned by life,choose to live the moment
Review: Kubler-Ross shares with us her life's work experiences with death and dying persons and how dealing with our own death parallels with our everyday life choices. Death comes to us in small ways everyday. There are many things in life that we have to die to, inner growth depends on this. Dying to small things prepares us for the moment of bodily death. Our ego for one thing is the hardest to die to, how we love to be right and not give in to someone else's opinion, how we love to be recognized for our work, our successes, our education, our money, our home, cars etc. To let go of our ego takes a lifetime but it is well worth the effort and gives you acceptance and peace of soul. The practice of letting go in small things prepares you for the bigger decisions of life. Your life becomes less petty and more human, less superficial and more realized, less important and more compassionate. It is not an easy lesson but one worth working through the stages of death and dying. Victor Frankl in his book "Man's Search for Meaning" also show how finite is our existence. Anthony DeMello in his book Sadhana: Way to God reveals how important it is to detach ourselves from desire and also the Dalai Lama lives a life full of compassion although he has been exiled from his own country for over 35 years. To be or not to be that is the question.

Rating:
Summary: Everyday one is questioned by life,choose to live the moment
Review: Kubler-Ross shares with us her life's work experiences with death and dying persons and how dealing with our own death parallels with our everyday life choices. Death comes to us in small ways everyday. There are many things in life that we have to die to, inner growth depends on this. Dying to small things prepares us for the moment of bodily death. Our ego for one thing is the hardest to die to, how we love to be right and not give in to someone else's opinion, how we love to be recognized for our work, our successes, our education, our money, our home, cars etc. To let go of our ego takes a lifetime but it is well worth the effort and gives you acceptance and peace of soul. The practice of letting go in small things prepares you for the bigger decisions of life. Your life becomes less petty and more human, less superficial and more realized, less important and more compassionate. It is not an easy lesson but one worth working through the stages of death and dying. Victor Frankl in his book "Man's Search for Meaning" also show how finite is our existence. Anthony DeMello in his book Sadhana: Way to God reveals how important it is to detach ourselves from desire and also the Dalai Lama lives a life full of compassion although he has been exiled from his own country for over 35 years. To be or not to be that is the question.

Rating:
Summary: Sharing our common humanity...
Review: One of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's books, 'On Death and Dying', is a classic work in the field, still used to educate and inform medical, counseling, and pastoral professionals since its original publication in the 1960s. Kubler-Ross did extensive research in the field by actually talking to those in the process of dying, something that had hitherto been considered taboo and an unthinkable, uncaring thing to do. Kubler-Ross asked for volunteers, and never pressured people to do or say anything they didn't want to. One of her unexpected discoveries was that the medical professionals were more reluctant to participate than were the patients, who quite often felt gratitude and relief at being able to be heard.

This book, 'Death: The Final Stage of Growth' continued that research; Kubler-Ross is the editor here rather than an author, and the text is primarily in others' words. This includes other doctors and psychiatrists, patients, and family members. Kubler-Ross in her research spoke to families, and followed people through their ailments, sometimes to recovery, but most often to their death. She let the people guide her in her research; here she lets them speak for themselves for the most part.

This caring approach was often an aggravation for Kubler-Ross and her staff, because they would know what the patient had been told but was not yet ready to face. Kubler-Ross recounts stories of attempts to deal with death in different ways; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- in fact, the various stages of grief were first recognised in Kubler-Ross's research. There are those who dislike the 'stages; theory of grief, but it is important to know (as the quote above indicates) that these are not set-in-stone processes, but rather dialectical and perichoretic in nature, ebbing and flowing like the tide, so that where a person was 'stage-wise' would vary from meeting to meeting.

Kubler-Ross drew together a diverse collection of views for this book, finding meaning both in life and death. This book provides insights for health-care professionals and clergy, as well as the families, friends, and companions of those who are dying. There are insights here to help cope and find meaning and resolution in death.

Death is a difficult subject to comprehend, and even more difficult to deal with. Kubler-Ross includes an anonymous letter from a student nurse who discovered she was dying, and wrote a letter to fellow hospital workers giving a first-person account of what it is like to be on the receiving end of the treatment - something which, like it or not, most of us will eventually face. This is part of our common humanity.

It is important not to approach this subject merely as an intellectual or theoretical subject -- it is not sufficient to subscribe to a 'pie-in-the-sky' kind of theology about afterlife the denies the emotions in this world. Even those with firm belief and faith will still experience the loss in this world.

This book is lovingly written, well-researched and full of insight. While some of Kubler-Ross's ideas have over time become oversimplified, and some research has been superseded, her example of bringing a difficult subject to the area of regular conversation and consideration cannot be underestimated, and this book is part of that legacy.