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Dead Like Her
How Elisabeth K�bler-Ross went around the bend.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004, at 6:49 AM PT
First off�for those speak-no-ill-about-the-dead
types�let's get this straight: She's not dead.
Yes, sure, the obituaries say Elisabeth
K�bler-Ross died, on Aug. 24, but I have it on
record that she is not dead.
Back in the '80s, I was writing a critical
examination (for Harper's) of K�bler-Ross' "Five
Stages of Dying"�the ones she made famous in her
1969 book On Death and Dying and some 15
follow-up tomes (including Death: The Final Stage
of Growth). The Stages (Denial, Anger,
Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) became the
foundation for an entire "Death 'n' Dying"
Movement, as I dubbed it. And while there is no
doubt K�bler-Ross made an important contribution
to the treatment of dying patients (hospice care,
etc.) in an age of increasingly mechanized
medicine (and medical doctors), she also
contributed to a kind of cultlike reverence for
the allegedly superior truth-telling wisdom of
the dying (and later the dead as well).
It's a sentimentalizing of mortality that's
become incorporated into popular culture and can
be seen as the source of such death-obsessed
dramas as Touched by an Angel and Dead Like
Me�and series like Six Feet Under and the
proliferations of CSIs, in which the dead body is
fetishized as a catalyst for truth telling.
(Perhaps the funniest embodiment and satire upon
the trend is Curb Your Enthusiasm's famous "aunt"
obituary episode.)
In any case, I'll never forget one conversation I
had with K�bler-Ross' official spokeswoman. I was
asking her whether K�bler-Ross' "heavenly car
mechanic" vision (more details anon) was a Near
Death Experience, and the spokeswoman corrected
me: "Elisabeth doesn't like the term 'Near Death
Experience' because she doesn't believe that
death exists. No such thing."
The path to the moment in the early '80s when
K�bler-Ross declared there is "no such thing as
death" (and got into trouble fooling around with
some "afterlife entities") can be traced to the
landscape of postwar Europe. She was a Swiss
resident (born in 1926) who volunteered to help
care for Holocaust survivors and came to America
after getting a medical degree. There in the
early '60s she began specializing in the care of
patients deemed to be dying and the neglect of
their needs, chief among them, she believed,
honesty on the part of doctors and a willingness
to listen.
All of this was quite noble, but there came a
point when caring became codifying as well. She
began identifying herself as a "scientist" and
took her accumulated anecdotal experience and
declared that the dying process (and then the
grieving process, too) had those famous five
stages. Staging death had a remarkable appeal and
gave an illusion of control over the
uncontrollable. She became a saintly icon, the
Queen of Death.
But then, quietly, in the late '70s, the Queen
began to go around the bend, began declaring
there was no death, there were only "transitions"
from one permeable boundary to another. And often
back. So, if one takes her belief seriously, not
only have the reports of her death been
exaggerated but reports of death itself have been
exaggerated. Death for K�bler-Ross became just a
kind of bonus "Sixth Stage," a kind of heavenly
spa where one could freshen up before cruising
around among the living again. That might be her,
looking over your shoulder as you're reading
this.
Whether or not K�bler-Ross is dead, her alleged
"science" of Death 'n' Dying lives on in all its
meretriciousness, rarely challenged any more.
According to K�bler-Ross, there's a right way and
a wrong way to die, a sober responsible Five
Stage Way. Forget "Do not go gentle into that
good night" by that alcoholic Welshman Dylan
Thomas. You better go gentle, buster, you better
die the New Age Way or you'll never appreciate
how beautiful death can be. It's the only way to
go, you might say.
The famous five stages of dying, of grieving, has
gone beyond being a mere meme. It has become a
deeply embedded unexamined ideology of death,
something that doesn't merely describe the dying
process that people go through but
shapes�virtually prescribes�the process. It sets
up the Five Stages as a kind of Moral Progress,
and brands you as inauthentic if you don't grimly
trudge through each. Sort of like a Twelve Step
Program for Death.
Until I looked into it, I admit that I was one of
the ones content to accept on faith that
K�bler-Ross' Five Stages of "Death 'n' Dying" was
founded on something more solid than K�bler-Ross'
anecdotes. She claimed to have investigated the
process like a scientist; she claimed her stages
were based on her observations as a doctor and on
her encounters with the dying (this was before
she claimed she was interacting with actual dead
people). She'd become a revered mainstream
American icon�and was even named a Ladies' Home
Journal "Woman of the Decade" at the end of the
70s, when she was jetting around the country
holding "Death 'n' Dying" workshops to promote
her Five Stages and her many books. (The Five
Stages were the Mars and Venus of death.) By the
'80s she'd helped make death the hot commodity it
is now.
What prompted my examination was a small�but
stunning�news clipping I came across in the early
'80s describing the completely bizarre sexual
scandal at K�bler-Ross' retreat in Escondido,
Calif., the mountaintop center she called Shanti
Nilaya. The scandal concerned the involvement of
K�bler-Ross�and some of the grieving widows
visiting her retreat�with a self-proclaimed
spirit medium who conned them all into believing
he had the ability to channel "afterlife
entities." Not only channel them but facilitate
their having sex with the grieving widows.
It was, if you ask me, not an aberration but a
culmination of K�bler-Ross' love affair with
death; love affairs with the dead. But by then
her growing belief that "death does not exist"
had made her fall prey to a host of spirit
mediums and charlatans who claimed they could
make contact with the beautiful beings on the
Other side.
She herself first encountered the "afterlife
entities" during an "out of body" experience
after one of her "workshops." She wrote that "I
saw myself lifted out of my physical body. ...
[I]t was as if a whole lot of loving beings were
taking all the tired parts out of me, similar to
car mechanics in a car repair shop. ... I had an
incredible sense that once all the parts were
replaced I would be a young and fresh and
energetic as I had been prior to the rather
exhausting, draining workshop."
After several trips to the auto repair shop and a
lot of heart to hearts with the heavenly
mechanics, she began to speak about death as the
fountain of youth: "People after death become
complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can
hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all
their vital signs have ceased to exist." The
emphasis had shifted from a spiritual renewal
while still alive, albeit dying, to the physical
renewal awaiting one after death. It made death
seem all too sweetly attractive (especially at a
time when there were deep-rooted problems in the
medical establishment's handling of dying
patients). Some might say it made suicide
seductive to the physically and mentally
troubled. Death, in her new view, was a kind of
Lourdes-cum-plastic-surgery spa.
But few challenged the escalating nonsense
because�after all�she had "discovered" the five
stages of death and grieving. She got to people
when they were most wounded, scared, and
vulnerable, and gave them a secular religion of
death.
Enter the spirit medium of Escondido�a guy she
had invited to her workshops, who somehow
facilitated intercourse between the grieving
widows and the "afterlife entities." The scandal
erupted when several of the widows came down with
similar vaginal infections, and one turned on the
light during a session with an "afterlife entity"
and discovered the opportunistic spirit medium
himself, naked except for a turban. (He offered
the completely plausible explanation that the
afterlife entities had "cloned" him�and the
turban, too, I guess�to help enable the afterlife
entities to engage in the pleasures of the
flesh.)
I'm not making this up. It's just sort of
conveniently been forgotten that the founder of
the so called "scientific" "five stages"
encouraged and at first defended these practices.
"There are those who might say this has damaged
my credibility," K�bler-Ross said, when she
finally conceded that the spirit medium's
behavior "did not meet the standards" of her
retreat. But it's not important "whether people
believe what I say ... I'm a doctor and a
scientist, who simply reports what she sees,
hears, and experiences."
Right. Science. It's probably too late to
disengage our culture from the unexamined
assumptions in the K�bler-Ross death and dying
ideology/movement, but we can at least examine
them now from a distance. When I first wrote
about it I saw it as a kind of confidence trick:
In the guise of telling people that they were
fearlessly investigating the realm of death,
staring death in the face, etc., etc., it was
offering people a way of distancing themselves
from dread. Turning something scary like death
into a "process" with nothing unpredictable to
fear. Disguising it with a familiarizing
scaffolding of "stages," swathing it in a gauzy
romanticism of self-examination, self-expression.
Death: the highest point of life, the "final
stage of growth."
I also suggested that its popular success was due
in large part to the behavior control function of
the five stages and its appeal to hospital and
hospice caregivers, who all took D 'n' D
workshops. It made the five stages into a kind of
moral progress: Potentially disruptive and
annoying anger would give way to the more quiet
stages of "depression" and "acceptance." Easier
on the night nurses.
But now, looking back I think it can be seen as
part of the Me-Decade ideology that denial is
always bad. We must constantly be staring death
in the face and rubbing everybody's nose in it,
or we're really not living life. (Although if we
spend all our time staring death in the face we
have little time left to live life.)
Part of this ideology was rooted in the
overheated overrated polemic by the Freudian
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, in which he
blamed all of civilization's problems on its
unwillingness to stare death in the face. (One
could argue that all civilization's achievements
were accomplished by those who didn't have time
to dwell on the obvious fact that they were going
to die.)
But is denial always a bad thing? Must death be
regimented so it loses its mystery? These
questions have some contemporary resonances: Are
we in denial if we don't watch every terrorist
beheading video or gaze repeatedly at the descent
of those who jumped from the World Trade Center
towers? Come to think of it, aren't K�bler-Ross'
five stages arbitrary in their order? Wouldn't it
be more fun to go out angry or better,
bargaining, than depressed and accepting? Or
maybe with a different "stage" of our own
devising. Laughter in the dark?
I'm sure K�bler-Ross was well intentioned and
serious-minded before she commodified and
quantified her caring into a D 'n' D industry.
And I understand why people will turn to her
books in time of grief when consolation of any
sort is the first priority. Millions of the dead
and dying have reason to be grateful to her for
raising their standard of care. I just feel we
who are about to die (well, sooner or later)
deserve better than this treacly simulacrum of
pseudo-science to guide us. Her Five Stages of
dying is the Emperor's New Shroud.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of numerous books and
the editor of the recent anthology, Those Who
Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism.
His Harper's article on Elisabeth K�bler-Ross is
reprinted in his collection The Secret Parts of
Fortune.
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