LIFE AFTER DEATH?

Press, 30 January 1986, Page 21

LIFE AFTER DEATH?

‘Absolute verification’ out of the mouths of dying children

By

KEN COATES

“Believe in life after death?” echoed Dr Elizabeth KublerRoss, the slightly-built, Swissborn physician who startled America’s death-denying society into changing its attitudes to and care of the dying. “I just don’t believe. I absolutely know.” This remarkable 57-year-old woman, at present visiting New Zealand, and known throughout’ the world for her best selling book, "On Death and Dying,” has always challenged complacency, insensitivity, and lack of care for human beings.

She has also unhesitatingly shifted from the language of medical science to that of mysticism, splitting the camp of her enormous following. Controversy often surrounds her.

Matter-of-factly, but with absolute conviction, in her Germanaccented American English, she described in an interview how it has been proved to her there is life after death.

She is a highly skilled laboratory worker, a psychiatrist and Swiss-trained doctor, who studied under world-famous medical authorities.

She told how she and her coworkers collected thousands of cases of “near death experiences.” These included Eskimos, American Indians, Aboroginals, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and people from every religion and cultural background. The aim was to verify, objectively, life beyond death. “In this we never got beyond what they experienced when they left the body because they all come back and tell us,” she says. “We are not really sure if that is good enough.”

But “absolute verification” came in her experience over 13 years with dying children, many of whom were victims of family car accidents involving head-on collisions.

Critically injured children, rushed to a hospital’s intensive care or burns unit, have not been told who died at the scene of the

accident and could not have known of a death there, or in hospital soon after. Yet, shortly before these children have died, they have told Dr Kubler-Ross that they have seen their father, mother, brother, or sister (already dead) waiting for them, and are then unafraid of dying themselves.

"Anyone can verify this. In all those years not one child has made a mistake and said they saw somebody who was still alive,” she adds.

Children, before they die, always leave their bodies, she claims. And at that moment, they see who is waiting for them. For the same reason dying old people, for example, will say a sister is there, or a wife talks to a husband who died 10 years before.

“They have always called this hallucination,” she adds.

Dr Kubler-Ross dismisses the notion that this is a perception we do not understand by saying: “They see them and talk to them . . . by thought transferrance.”

Mostly this happens two or three days before death. She recalls her own father, a man brought up in a strictly dogmatic Protestant religion, talking to his own father as though it was the most natural thing in the world, before he died.

“He saw me in the room and asked for a glass of water,” she says. “He was totally conscious.”

This dynamic woman who travels more than 400,000 kilometers a year, lectures to packed theatres, leads gruelling five-day workshops for the terminally ill, families, and health professionals, and writes books, is very much grounded in reality.

Yet she adds a near death experience of her own, after she

had a cardiac arrest 2i/ ? years ago, to clinch her perception that she knows there is life after death. She speaks simply, directly, without religious jargon or images.

Her experience, she says, was a thousand times more beautiful than any story from her patients. It was simply beyond words.

“Feelings of peace surrounded you ... it does not exist here.” I pressed her to go on, but she replied it was a long story which could not be abbreviated.

But the last image she remembers precisely: “I was like a ski jumper, with arms outstretched. It was important that I stand at the right angle, because if I am doing it right I can skip all the icky in-betweens and go straight to the light. “I tried very hard to do it right and screamed at the peak of my voice, ‘here I come.’

“I was very excited and amazed I am allowed to graduate so early when I thought I had another 20 or 30 years work to do. I went straight into the light, and it is all love.”

When she came back, she looked at people anew. They were worrying about the weather, asking whether shoes fitted the handbag or hat, and all the ridiculous things so totally irrelevant. It changed values and priorities.

"In all my years of research, I have never seen a patient with a near death experience who saw the light and was still afraid of death.”

Elizabth Kubler-Ross was one of triplets born to an affluent, eminently respectable Zurich family. She was an identical twin to one of her sisters, Erika, and struggled to establish her own identity.

Her father offered to take her into his office supplies firm but, fiercely independent, she turned down assured success in business.

She left home at the end of the Second World War to join volunteers helping village people rebuild their homes and lives in France, Belgium, and Poland.

After she travelled behind the Iron Curtain her father slammed

the door on the family home in her face whe she returned. He was intensely anti-Communist. A visit to the Nazi death camp at Maidanek in Poland, with its gas chambers and grim reminders of man’s capacity for hatred and cruelty, made a deep impression on her. She saw thousands of shoes and human hair from victims. Pictures of butterflies scratched by those about to perish she saw as symbols of their hope in freedom after death. Against the wishes of her father, she struggled to pass the stiff examination giving entry to medical school and eventually graduated as a physician.

She married an American medical student who was Jewish and who also studied in Zurich. They went to New York, a “jungle” in the world’s most affluent nation.

She always had a deep concern for the seemingly hopeless and worked as a psychiatrist at Manhattan State Hospital. There, she recorded, "the mentally sick are often treated like animals, freaks, or human guinea pigs.”

Reaching out to them, listening, refusing to give up, and always fighting for the dignity of her patients against the cold indifference and hostility of the institution, she brought many back to health.

Eventually she was drawn to those most abandoned by society — the terminally ill and dying. It was as assistant professor of psychiatry at Billings Hospital on

the campus of the University of Chicago that Dr Kubler-Ross made history. In response to a request from theological students, she began giving lectures on the particular needs of dying patients. Some terminally ill patients agreed to be interviewed by her in the lecture theatre, and her famous seminars on death and dying began. Professors objected, saying she was exploiting vulnerable patients. But requests to conduct more interviews with the terminally ill came not only from students but from chaplains, therapists, social workers, and even orderlies. All wanted to learn how to cope with the dying patient. Then “Life" magazine published a feature article with dramatic pictures of her talking with a cancer patient of exceptional beauty named Eva, who had agreed to being publicised. The university authorities bitterly attacked Dr Kubler-Ross, banning all hospital staff from giving permission for terminal patients to be taken from the wards. Students were prohibited from attending her seminars, even if she had been able to obtain a willing subject. But the “Life” story gave her headlines around the United States and the world. Letters from other cancer sufferers and terminally ill, their families, and those in the caring professions, poured in. Now she devotes her life to meeting the special needs of the dying. In the United States alone there are 125,000 courses taught on death and dying, and thousands of hospices for the terminally ill serve communities around the world.

Typically, her preoccupation at

present are babies with A.I.D.S. abandoned by their drug-taking mothers. They are being left in hospitals, unloved and unwanted. Americans everywhere have a paranoid fear of the disease, she says, and when she put up a proposal for a pildt project providing a centre for these babies in Virginia, she was “almost lynched.

“I had to have police escort as I drove home,” she adds. It is typical of the woman that she wants to make a home for these children who will live, at most, two years. “They need to be loved, smooched, kissed, hugged, and spoiled, and have a lovely environment, not left in a hospital where they know only rubber gloves and masks,” she says. “I happen to have a very wonderful farm with sheep, a Saint Bernard dog, a few cattle, turkeys, and chickens, and I grow my own vegetables. I have a lot of dolls made by people who care. “We have volunteers who are not afraid to hold these babies and love them. If the mothers are able to see them, naturally they would be welcome.

“But the babies need to be wanted, to be held, talked to, and to feel physically secure.” It is this kind of intense, expressed feeling for others that explains something of what it is that drives Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and has made her such a powerful influence on others.

Her personal experience

Drawn to the iH and dying

‘Need to be smooched’