On Death and Dying helped usher in a revolution by insisting that the dying not only still had their humanity, but also had something to offer to the living. Physicians, Kübler-Ross argues, “learn to prolong life but get little training or discussion on the definition of ‘life.’” By turning over the stage to the patients themselves, and foregrounding their concerns, emotions, and needs, she tried to push back against a trend she saw in postwar America, that, in her words, “dying nowadays” had become “more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized.”
“If this book serves no other purpose,” she writes, “but to sensitize family members of terminally ill patients and hospital personnel to the implicit communications of dying patients, then it has fulfilled its task.” The singular impact that On Death and Dying had was to remind us that when a terminally ill individual is expressing any kind of emotion, what’s at the root of it is always death. If they were angry, they were angry at death; if they were depressed, it was because they were dying. If they suddenly stopped making any kind of rational sense, this, too, had a root cause. America’s denial of death led to frustration among families and health care workers who couldn’t identify where these emotions were coming from. If you wanted to help the terminally ill, you first had to listen to them—and listen bravely, without fear, without shying away from the undeniable fact of death.
Kübler-Ross’s legacy has been mixed; her work has been subject to scathing criticisms through the years, and by the end of her life, her defenders seem to have been reduced to mostly people who knew her in life. The sense one gets is that most of her conclusions—from a clinical, psychiatric, or sociological position—were inaccurate, but she was such a captivating and spellbinding presence that people listened to her. This may explain why her later years were mired in scandal—she involved herself in a cult-like retreat where she advanced the belief that death did not exist, which led to a sex scandal.
Released from clinical work and now a household name, Kübler-Ross became more famous touring the country giving seminars on death and dying. Eventually, she began to shift her message: She broadened out from death to grief, going so far as to copyright the phrase “The Five Stages of Grief.” But soon she began to speak past mortality and mourning altogether. In the early 1970s, she claimed an out-of-body experience helped her overcome a serious illness, and from there moved on to more esoteric philosophies. “There is no death,” she told audiences; only “life after life.” She began to embrace Spiritualism, claiming she had communed with spirits of the dead with names like “Mario,” “Anka,” “Salem,” and “Willie.” She spoke of reincarnation, and told listeners she’d lived during the time of Jesus, when she’d been named Isabel.
