No Stranger to Death, Kubler-Ross Turns Her Attention to AIDS

Her calling is death and the AIDS epidemic has given new urgency to her mission.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, teaches the living how to help the dying, the dying how to prepare for death. She believes in reincarnation and her message is that death is only a transition, an end only to the body.

A cheerful woman with a weather-beaten face, she was found this day planting magnolias and azaleas and rhododendrons outside the 250-year-old log cabin she transplanted to her 300-acre farm she calls “Healing Waters.”

Death Is Her Subject

Kubler-Ross, now 60, first attracted national attention in 1969 after she published “On Death and Dying,” a book that outlined the five stages of death.

The first stage, as she outlines it, is the denial and isolation. For example, the patient who is sure that there must be a mix-up in the X-rays. Next comes comes anger, the “Why me?” syndrome. Thirdly, there is the bargaining: “If I can beat this, I will be a better. . . . “ Then comes depression and, finally, the fifth stage, an acceptance of death.

The author of 10 books on death and dying, Kubler-Ross is away from this idyllic retreat about 90% of the time, giving lectures and five-day workshops for 99 people at a time in this country and places as diverse as Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

She says about one-third of the participants in her workshops are members of the healing professions who want to learn how to deal with the terminally ill. Another third are people who are dying and another third are “just people.”

Lesson to Be Learned

“I have trained thousands and thousands of ministers and doctors to deal with death and dying and still there are not enough for what we are about to go through,” she says.

The subject of her latest book is the epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“AIDS is here to stay until we learn our lesson from it,” she says. “I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

The lesson, she says, has nothing to do with sin, promiscuity or homosexuality. The lesson is to learn unconditional love for our fellow man, to learn that all men are brothers.

“People complain about Nazi Germany, but what we’re doing here is not one bit different when it comes to the treatment of AIDS patients,” she says. “We have to learn some very basic stuff before it’s too late. It will hit many more people. It will hit families and children and people will really have to do some soul-searching.”

Plenty of Resistance

She is still bitter over the defeat she suffered when the local populace defeated her efforts to establish a hospice for abandoned children with AIDS in this rural mountainous area on the West Virginia-Virginia border, an area called “Little Switzerland.”

The resistance she encountered in discussions at town meetings dissuaded her from pursuing the matter further.

“One man said he was a reborn Christian, but that if there were an ambulance call for one of these children, he would not respond,” she recalls. “Another also said he was a reborn Christian, but if one of these children were to try and go to school, the doors would be locked. These are not Christians!”

She says she has spent the last three years trying to establish the center.

Frustration, Rage

“It’s been three years of frustration and impotent rage,” she says. “We put every nickel we had into it, the royalties of the new book. I depleted all my own resources, but I suppose the people who are supposed to be involved are not yet ready.”

She has succeeded in getting some of the abandoned AIDS babies placed in foster homes, but her frustration is evidenced by the hundreds of handmade dolls she has in her home, sent to her from all over the world for the AIDS victims.

Kubler-Ross describes herself as a skeptical scientist who is positive there is an afterlife. She believes that the soul will never die, that death is simply a transition in which we pass into a tremendous light of love and are greeted by someone who loved us in this life.

When asked if she belongs to any specific religion, she replied, “I’m spiritual, not religious. I’m a strong believer in the power we can get from God. What religions practice and what they preach are often two different things.”

Mysterious Message

But she says she prayed for a way to scientifically research what she saw as she sat with dying patients.

It came through children, to whom she has a special affinity, and through the death of an American Indian woman.

She tells how the death of the Indian woman, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, helped lead her to investigate how loved ones, already dead, greet people as they died. She says a truck driver stopped to help the dying woman and the woman asked him to tell her mother that everything was all right, that her father was already “there.”

The driver was so impressed by the urgency of the message he drove 700 miles out of his way to tell the mother. It was impossible to reach her by telephone. It was only then that he learned that the young woman’s father had died exactly one hour before she did. There was no way she could have known, Kubler-Ross says. He had not been ill and died of a heart attack.

Knowledge in Dying

Thus, according to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the father was on the other side, waiting for his daughter and she saw him just before she died.

The psychiatrist then started searching for other dying people who did not know that a very close loved one had already died. Then, if that dying person reported the loved one was there to greet them, it could not be argued that it was wish fulfillment.

She says she found her answers in the intensive care units of hospitals where entire families had been involved in car accidents or fires.

“I would always go and sit with the youngest child,” she says. “When they were nearing death, they would always say something like ‘Mommy and Peter are waiting for me.’ The children were never wrong. They never said a person who survived the accident or the fire was there. It was always, always, always the people who had died.”

Sharing the Experience

Once, she says, she had a momentary doubt. The young child said her brother was “there” waiting. The brother, Kubler-Ross knew, was in another hospital, but expected to live.

As Dr. Kubler-Ross was leaving the hospital, she was told the brother had died 10 minutes earlier.

“I said, ‘Yes, I know’ and they looked at me like I was kookie,” she says.

Kubler-Ross is passionate as she talks about these children who are at the point of death.

“Something happens,” she says. “They are almost always pain-free and very much at peace. Some come out of a coma right before they die. I look them straight in their eyes and ask ‘Can you share with me what you’re experiencing?’ They look through you, not at you. They know what motivates you to ask these questions. If your motivation is not good, they will turn their back on you.

“They say everything is OK now. Mommy and Peter are waiting for me, like it’s the most normal thing, like my vacation is over and I have to go back home now. There is no excitement or panic or anything like that.”

Being Made Whole

She also prayed to find a way to research the possibility of being made whole just before death. She was intrigued by Vietnam veterans or other amputees whose descriptions of their wholeness were so similar and so sincere.

“I was with a blind woman who was dying and she told me she could see again,” she says. “She had been blind for over 15 years. I asked her what I was wearing and she was able to describe it in great detail.

“My colleagues wanted to give it every psychiatric label in the book and many called it oxygen deprivation. I said, ‘My foot. If this is oxygen deprivation, then we’ve got a cure for blindness. Why don’t we do this for blind people who have never been able to see their children?’ ”

She then set out to find blind people who were dying.

Study of the Blind

“It, of course, wasn’t easy and I had rigid criteria,” she says. “I insisted they must have been blind for at least 10 years and they must not even be able to see light. I demanded complete blindness.”

But, she says, she did find others and witnessed the same thing.

Although she is comfortable explaining such happenings, she has no desire to force her views upon others.

“I have a very strong conviction that our job is not to convince or convert people,” she says. “If you’re ready to hear it, you’re ready to hear it. In 10 or 20 years this will no longer be news. It will be very normal. I used to be quite bothered by the arrogance of people who thought they had all the answers and refused to accept this.”

‘Divine Manipulation’

Kubler-Ross believes that it was “divine manipulation” that brought her to America after she married Dr. Manuel Ross, from whom she is now divorced.

“Switzerland is a very old-fashioned country,” she says. “I would never have been able to start hospices there. Here, they pop up like Chicken Delights.”

It was more “divine manipulation” that led her to become a psychiatrist rather than a pediatrician. Twice she was pregnant as she tried to enroll in the school of pediatrics. Pregnant women were excluded from pediatrics, but accepted in the psychiatry school. She miscarried both times, but later had two children, Kenneth, now 26, and a daughter, Barbara, now 23.

The firstborn of triplets, Elisabeth seems to have already fulfilled the prophecy of the obstetrician, a self-styled clairvoyant.

The doctor, holding up the scrawny, two-pound infant, said: “This one will be an independent spirit. This one will be a pathfinder, just as she was at her birth.”