After the cocoon
Editor’s note: Mike Masterson is taking the day off. The original version of this column was published April 30, 2012.
Isuspect most from the present generation have never heard of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. But many of us baby boomers recall her groundbreaking contributions to understanding the process of death and dying.
Seeing as how leaving this world is a journey each of us faces alone, I find this psychiatrist’s efforts on behalf of the dying remarkable and informative.
I compare them with the humanitarian work performed in India by the late Mother Teresa. I don’t know Kubler-Ross’ religious persuasion (or if she even subscribed to one) except that she was born into a Protestant family in Switzerland in 1926. Her findings and opinions were fascinating regardless.
She continually ignored and refuted ridicule of her research by various scientists and skeptics, and in 1969 penned an international best-seller, “On Death and Dying.” That book described the five stages of a person coping with death or profound personal loss.
I read another of her books, “On Life After Death.” The book, based on years of her research findings and 20,000 cases of near-death experiences, concluded that physical death is nothing to be feared. Is she right? I’m not qualified to say.
She compared the demise of our physical body with a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. “Dying is only a transition to a different form of life,” she writes.
And she described three phases to the dying process. Phase one, in her view, is the failing of the fragile body that temporarily houses our consciousness and spirits. Phase two is the release of one’s spirit from these confines into a far grander place of divinely radiant light, unconditional love and what she calls a psychic energy state where all knowledge is instantly available, while vibrations of this bodily phase remain accessible.
This, she explains, is how the many thousands of people who have near-death experiences could explain in great detail what was transpiring in the operating room or around them. Some have been able to say how many EMTs worked on their body after a car crash and what the rescuers were wearing, or even the license-plate number of the vehicle that hit them.
In this second stage, the dead are whole again. People who were blind can see again. People who couldn’t hear or speak can hear and speak again. Disabled patients who crossed momentarily into phase two would tell Kubler-Ross that they could dance again.
“You understand now that this out-of-body experience is an enjoyable and blessed happening,” she said. “Little girls who had lost their hair from cancer treatment told me after such an event: ‘I had my nice curls again.’ Women whose breasts were removed have their breasts again. They are quite simply … just perfect.”
She said skeptics had no explanation after she’d studied blind people who had not seen a flicker of light for at least 10 years. Such subjects who’d had an out-of-body experience could explain in detail the color and pattern of a sweater or a tie and even jewelry.
“You understand that these statements refer to facts which one cannot invent,” she writes. “You can recheck the facts providing you are not afraid of the answer. However, if you are afraid of them, then you may come to me, like some skeptics, and tell me those out-ofbody experiences are the result of lack of oxygen. … If it were only a matter of lack of oxygen, I would prescribe it for all my blind patients.”
Did I mention Kubler-Ross obviously had a sense of humor?
No one dies alone, she said. A dying person need only think of a loved one thousands of miles distant and they are with them through the natural transference from physical to psychic energy. “What the church tells little children about guardian angels is based on fact,” she adds. “There is proof that every human being from his birth until his death is guided by a spirit entity.”
In the third and final phase of death, one gains knowledge, KublerRoss writes.
“You know in minute detail every thought you had at any time during your life on Earth. You will remember every deed and know every word that you ever spoke. This recapitulation is only a very small part of your knowing because at this moment you know all consequences [to others] resulting from your thoughts and from every one of your words and deeds.”
Any hell that exists, she came to conclude, is of one’s own making.
“We are created for a very simple, beautiful and wonderful life,” she writes. “My greatest wish is that you will start looking at life differently. If you accept your life as something you were created for, then you will no longer question whose lives should be extended and whose should not.”
Agree with her research and views or not, it’s difficult not to admire and respect her assistance to the dying and the exhaustive depth of her research that is still embraced by many.