After my mom shuffled off her mortal coil and joined the choir invisible somewhere in the ethers between here, there, and tomorrow, the dance teacher at the school where I worked at the time offered consolation in the form of a book, one that had given her comfort when her own mother died – Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ “On Life After Death”. The book continues to console me when I think of my mom, especially now that the second anniversary of her death approaches on March 9th.
Kübler-Ross was born in Switzerland. Immediately I trust her more than an airy-fairy new age guru from California because she was brought up in a pragmatic culture, was a doctor and, ultimately, a scientist/researcher in the area of death. Sounds like a strange profession, but it’s something as a doctor she had to deal with daily, and in the ensuing years of her work, she collected a vast body of research into dying taken from sitting by the bedsides of her patients as they made their great transformations.
She took this research and dedicated herself to enlightening the world about the inevitable transition we all make. She also became the founder of the hospice movement to alleviate families’ suffering while watching a loved one die, to be there for them and to make sure that the necessary care was given to the infirmed so that they could die with peace, dignity, comfort, and love in their own homes. My mother and I are deeply indebted to this woman, as many other millions of people are, too.
Kübler-Ross found a common denominator in near-death cases that she witnessed. She culled research from over 20,000 incidences in which people were declared clinically dead, but returned to life – people who shared their experiences with her and her colleagues. These were people from all cultures, ages, male and female, children. She then elucidated this work into speeches, essays, and books that are still with us today.
She writes that “dying is a human process in the same way that being born is a normal and all-human process.” She goes on to say that the dying experience is almost identical to the experience at birth – it’s just a birth into a different existence. She states with beautiful symbolism: “Dying is only moving from one house into a more beautiful one.”
Most people at some point have heard of the tunnel, the “light”, or seeing loved ones when we die, and it would be easy to dismiss these as end-of-life mind-induced hallucinations. But her study of children with near-death experiences who would have never heard of such concepts provided evidence of a common thread in the experience of death. For example, a girl who was in an accident saw her mother and brother greet her in her near-death experience, but not her father. She didn’t know it, but her father had survived, her mother and brother had died.
I can’t go into all the cases she shares because it’s easier to simply read the short, beautiful book, which everyone should do. I’ll simply embark from a point in which you know that everything she says comes from those who have died, but come back. Using the analogy of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, she writes of three stages of death and dying:
1. When the cocoon is irreparable, it will release the soul, and physical energy will be gone. The cocoon (brain, body) simply doesn’t function anymore.
2. You now perceive everything happening at the place of your dying – hospital room, home, site of an accident. (Blind people who came back were able to describe everything in detail, even the color of the doctors’ shoes!)You register everything with a new awareness outside of the body. You know everything everyone around your body says, thinks, how they act. You then enter into the light. The people you loved the most and have died are there to greet you. Time does not exist in this stage of dying.
3. In the last stage you will pass over and be embraced by light – a light “whiter than white”. You are held close by the “greatest indescribable, unconditional love you could ever imagine.” And then you reflect on your entire life – you are now in possession of knowledge. You know every thought you ever had and must process these thoughts and your life experiences, but you are not judged; you discover that everything that happened was for you “to grow in understanding, to grow in love, to grow in all those things which we still have to learn.”
After the third stage, Kübler-Ross writes about the climax of that moment of death: you don’t want to return. She writes that in this light you experience unconditional love beyond the boundaries of physicality and human consciousness. People who see the light and return only get a glimpse of it, but it is what everyone of all ages and cultures saw and felt – something that was beyond words.
All these thoughts and the rereading of Kübler-Ross’ book were engendered by F. bringing up Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. I had never thought about it as Shakespeare’s question of life and death – whether to live or not to live. In the soliloquy, Hamlet questions the mystery of death and dying. And then F. proposed the idea that if what Kübler-Ross says is true, if death is merely this transcendent transition into another state of being of experiencing the unconditional love of the light of the Source of our being, wouldn’t everyone want to be released from struggle and “shuffle off this mortal coil”? If so, there’d probably be twenty brave souls left on earth that decided to stay.
And perhaps that’s why death remains a mystery. Even with all of Kübler-Ross’ research that convinces me she is correct, that we will all experience what those 20,000 people experienced, if it wasn’t a mystery, perhaps we all would want to shuffle off as soon as possible.
But most of us do stay and hold on as long as we can rather than open our wrists. We stay because, even with Kübler-Ross’ comforting words, death is still a mystery. And that’s okay. The eternal question mark stands high in the sky, blinking like a neon light over Broadway, and we perceive it and honor it with our lives because in the end (is there truly an end?), it’s all we have.
Again, I don’t want to go into all the particular cases that Kübler-Ross witnessed in her research as a doctor, but her realization through these experiences is one that resonates, and even if you don’t believe all she says, I think we can hopefully be drawn closer together as humans by her conclusion: “we are created for a very simple, beautiful, and wonderful life.” We can’t wait to realize this. We have the opportunity to live right now.
