|
"When we have done all the work we were sent to Earth to do, we are allowed to shed our body, which imprisons our soul like a cocoon encloses the future butterfly. And when the time is right, we can let go of it and we will be free of pain, free of fears and worries-free as a very beautiful butterfly, returning home to God."
 |
 |
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D is a psychiatrist and the author of the groundbreaking On Death and Dying. She has earned a place as the best-loved and most-respected authority on the subject. Now in her seventies, she has spent most of her life working with the dying. She was born in Zurich Switzerland, one of triplets. She graduated Medical School at the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to the United States in 1958. At the Hospital where she worked in New York, she was appalled by the standard treatment of dying patients. "They were shunned and abused, nobody was honest with them", she says. Unlike her colleagues, she made it a point to sit with terminal patients, listening as they poured out their hearts to her. She began giving lectures featuring dying patients who talked about what they were going through. Her first book On Death and Dying in 1969 made Kübler-Ross an internationally renowned author. "My goal was to break through the layer of professional denial that prohibited patients from airing their inner-most concerns," she wrote. She has spent many years speaking to standing room only audiences and writing over twenty books on the subject, including: To Live Until We Say Good-Bye, On Children and Death, AIDS the Ultimate Challenge and her autobiography, The Wheel of Life. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She is also the recipient of more than twenty honorary doctorates. In 1995 she suffered a series of major strokes, which left her paralyzed and facing her own death. While her health has stabilized, she has not completely recovered from her strokes. Now she says, "I am like a plane that has left the gate and not taken off. I would rather go back to the gate or fly away." She lives in Arizona and enjoys the daily company of the birds and coyotes. She has just completed her newest book, Life Lessons, two experts on death and dying teach us about the mysteries of life and living. She says "I wanted to finally write a book on life and living".
| |
|
