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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

1926–2004 · 78 years Tier II

Weighed two pounds at birth and built a career studying death

Kübler-Ross was born one of identical triplets in Zurich, weighing barely two pounds, and grew up in a strict Protestant household where her father expected her to become his secretary. She left home at 16 against his wishes, volunteered with international relief teams as Europe cleared its wreckage after the war, and in 1947 toured the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where she found butterflies scratched into the barrack walls by children who did not survive it. She trained as a doctor at the University of Zurich, graduating in 1957, then followed a fellow medical student, Emanuel Ross, to New York, married him in 1958, and began a psychiatric residency the next year at Manhattan State Hospital.

Kübler-Ross found that hospitals routinely lied to dying patients and shut them out of decisions about their own deaths, so she started interviewing terminal patients in front of her medical students at the University of Chicago, letting the patients themselves describe what dying actually felt like. The 1969 book that came out of those seminars, On Death and Dying, named five stages patients often moved through — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and made her internationally famous almost overnight. She spent the 1970s pushing hospice care into American medicine, testified before the Senate on death with dignity in 1972, extended the same work to dying children in a trio of later books, and eventually brought her seminars into AIDS wards when many hospitals still would not treat patients with the disease.

The stages made her famous — what she did with the fame is more complicated. In the late 1970s Kübler-Ross grew absorbed in spiritualism and founded a retreat center, Shanti Nilaya, built partly around a self-described medium named Jay Barham, who claimed to channel spirit entities and encouraged visitors into sexual encounters with them. A friend who investigated found Barham naked in a turban rather than possessed by anything otherworldly. Kübler-Ross defended him for more than a year against the accusations before finally cutting ties in 1981. In 1994 arson destroyed her Virginia home along with decades of case notes, letters and photographs, and she suspected it was retaliation for her AIDS work. She herself later said she regretted how rigidly people applied the stages, since so many mistook a description for a checklist.

A series of strokes beginning in 1987 left her partly disabled, and a major one in 1995 put her in a wheelchair, unable to do the one thing she had spent her career insisting people be allowed to do on their own terms. She told a reporter in 2002 that she was ready to go and called God a damned procrastinator. She died at her son's home in Scottsdale, Arizona, on August 24, 2004, and is buried nearby. Her five stages long ago escaped medicine entirely, repackaged in corporate change-management seminars that would likely have made little sense to the dying patients who first described the experience to her.

Lifespan

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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

On Death and Dying book
Introduced the five stages of grief 1969
The five stages of grief discovery
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance 1969
Shanti Nilaya company
A retreat and workshop center near Escondido, California 1977
On Children and Death book
Extended her framework to dying children 1983
AIDS: The Ultimate Challenge book
Written while running workshops on AIDS wards 1987