Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance, obituary
(Blogger's note: For more CNN on the waterfront, scroll on down past this breaking-news obit.)
"Dr. Kubler-Ross. This chick, man, without benefit of dying herself, has broken the process of death down into five stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. "
That's a line from a 1979 movie: All that Jazz, spoken by a character based on comic Lenny Bruce. It was the first I ever heard of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who spent much of her life helping people deal with death. It wasn't the last. A few years later, I heard her name again and again from friends who were cycling through those stages as they fought what was then a new disease: AIDS. I ran into a woman on a train in Eastern Bohemia about 10 years ago who was reading one of Dr. Kubler-Ross's books: she was a hospice nurse from Atlanta, visiting the Czech Republic to help set up a hospice program there to replace the old Communist way of dealing with death, which doctors there told me was to insist to the very end that the patient was going to recover fully.
As we pause to note the passing of Dr. Kubler-Ross, we hope that her work was as much a comfort to her and her family as it was to so many others during her lifetime, as much as it will be for many future generations.
posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @4:38 PM
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