Death is a nice experience
I first visited Elisabeth Kübler-Ross six years ago with my television crew in their remote home in the Arizona desert near Phoenix. Here she lived alone. More than 40 years ago, after her medical studies and a protected Swiss childhood, she emigrated to her homeland with her husband, the physician Kenneth Ross. The Swiss flag blew in front of her house.
She was the best-known living Swiss and with 23 honorary doctorates probably the most scientifically awarded woman in the world. Her greatest achievement in her lifetime was that she has been destroying death and dying around the world or, as she says, "getting her out of the bathroom".
Her 22 books on dying are translated into 25 languages. For the past ten years, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had been waiting for her sixth stroke herself to die and said, "I still have a lot to learn before I can go over there - mostly patience."
The woman had held hundreds of dying in her arms. But in what condition would we find her in the face of her own death? Even before we saw the then 72-year-old sitting in her sun lounger in the dark living room of her Pueblo Indian house, I noticed the many fresh bouquets that her devotees from all over the world had sent. Here she lay awake and alone for 18 hours a day; There was only something moving in the TV - she almost always let it run.
Do not ask any indecent questions!
"If you ask indecent questions, you get a karate strike," she threatened in greeting, clenching her fainting fist. The woman was physically ill but mentally fit. She was previously responsible for 2,000 hospice hospitals in the United States. Today, tens of thousands of dying people in hospices around the world can prepare for death. That is their merit.
At that time, the mirror had? reported that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross would refute her thesis at her own death. No, no, that's absolute nonsense, she told me. "Death is a blissful experience, there is no death, so-called death is a transition to another frequency." What is a transition? I wanted to know. And do you really believe in it?
"I do not believe anything, I know." Then she insisted as a scientist again and again. No one dies alone, said and taught Elisabeth Kübler-Ross well over 40 years. For every dying person "over there" the people closest to him in life are waiting. "It can be explored, and many dying people who have been able to glimpse but have been reanimated have told me that regardless of religion or culture, poor or rich, young or old." Can not all of this be a delusion, a hallucination?
She learned from dying children
With deep earnestness, the death researcher told of her work with dying children after a car accident. These children could not have known that their brother and mother, who had also been badly injured, died ten minutes ago in the neighboring hospital. But they would have told her, "Dr. Ross, my brother and my mother are already waiting for me." The death researcher had taken these statements of the children seriously and only later learned that brother and mother were actually already dead. Such experiences shake violently on our everyday certainties.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has recorded her experiences with hundreds of dying people, she has collected thousands of death records. I asked her if, because of these experiences, she could describe the moment of death. "The moment of death is a truly liberating, beautiful experience, you release yourself from your body that may be lying in bed, you can see it from above without fear or pain or homesickness, dying people feel happy, they separate themselves from their bodies like a butterfly out of its cocoon, the state of happiness of transformation from physical to disembodied state is indescribably beautiful. "
He who lives meaningfully does not fear death
The widespread fear of dying brought the mortal scientist back to today's fear of life. There is too little basic trust in life and creation. That is quite different with the old Indians, the old Aborigines in Australia, the old people in Hawaii, but also with the old farmers in Switzerland and Germany. They looked at their land and their work at the end of their lives and knew that they had lived meaningfully. He who has this certainty, is not afraid of death.
But almost all languages know terms such as "fear of death" or "dying of dying". Is not that a sign that there is a natural fear of death and dying? No, no, she insisted. "The fear of death is an artificial fear that has only come with technological progress in the last 200 years.With technology and apparatus medicine, with alienation in families, with the absence of spiritual and religious rituals. "
Waiting for Death: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross at her home in Arizona
If people were not too scared, they could all come to the realization that death is "a unique, beautiful, liberating experience." One releases oneself from his body like a "butterfly from his cocoon". Butterflies! The picture is a keyword for understanding her work. After 1945, young Elisabeth had seen hundreds of butterflies carved into walls in concentration camps in Poland. Before people had to go to the gas chamber, they had engraved butterflies with their fingernails.
Balloons at their funeral
Even then she had wondered, "Why butterflies?" Only decades later did she find the answer. In her work with dying children she came back to the butterfly motif. Many children suffering from cancer draw pictures shortly before their death, on which butterflies are the key motif. Now she realized that butterflies are the original symbols of transformation, the transition from one life to another. Symbols of transformation. Little dying children became great teachers for them.
"Death," said the death researcher, "is a transition to another level, like egg, larva, caterpillar, butterflies." She had made provisions for her own funeral. The film character E.T. was her darling. Spielberg's E.T. movie often looked at her on tape. I saw at least five E.T. figures in her room. On several hundred balloons she left an E.T. Imprinting. Your son should let her fly when she is dead. "It's going to be a party," she says. The film director has not only given her the permission, he also wants to shoot a feature film about the life of the death researcher Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
Contacts with ghosts
Reunion with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
On her 75th birthday in July 2001, I met her again. She was still in a wheelchair, physically better now. She talked a lot about the need for unconditional love, and talked about her contacts with ghosts. "How should I imagine that?", I wanted to know. "I speak with them as we speak now." "An inner conversation?" "Yes, it's an intuitive speech, not over the ears, you hear with the mind and the heart." She laughed loudly, realizing that such sentences in front of a television camera would be very controversial. One-time services to the death research nobody speaks of this woman. But sometimes even friends and relatives think they are esoteric.
Near-death or near-death experiences meanwhile also called research the phenomena of which Mrs. Kübler-Ross so naturally told. But sociologists at the University of Konstanz have already found out in 1999 that three million people in Germany have experiences with a journey to the afterlife. What do we know today about the landscapes of the soul?
Now she is allowed to dance
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has repeatedly described that an authentic life is the best prerequisite for a good dying. What does that mean: an authentic life? "Let me give you an example of authenticity: When asked in Europe what I think of the President of the United States, I say frankly and honestly: He's an asshole, a strong word, but an authentic statement, do you understand?" Yes. Those who listened to the death researcher could experience that their own fear of death becomes weaker and curiosity grows larger.
One year ago she had to move to a retirement home. She did not like the new addiction, she told me over the phone. But she still had to wait for death. And became more and more impatient. Whether she wanted to go back to Earth after her death was the last question I could ask her. ?No no,? she said firmly. "I'll be dancing through the galaxies soon." Now her last wish has come true. Now she is allowed to dance.
