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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Facing Death

P.O. Box 202 10 Scrimshaw Street Truro, MA 02666 csklass{at}earthlink.net

Facing Death. Film/2002/two versions (98 min and 57 min). A film by Stefan Haupt. A production of Fontana Film in coproduction with SF DRS/SRG SSft Idée Suisse. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201. 718-488-8900 or 800-876-1710. Online: www.frif.com. E-mail: dylan{at}frif.com. Video rental $100 (98-min version) $75 (57-min version). Video purchase $298 (98-min version) $248 (57-min version). The 57-min version is available on DVD.

When the history of 20^th century popular culture's narratives of death, dying, and grieving is written, the life and teachings of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross will have a central place. For three decades, hers was the name most recognizable to the lay public. Her five stages of dying—denial, anger, bargaining, despair, acceptance—were taken, for a few years, as the definitive word by large numbers of professionals and are still regarded that way by many lay people. The stages were so well known that Bob Fosse choreographed them into a ballet in his dance film All that Jazz. At the lectern this small woman speaking in a soft Swiss German accent could have an audience of a thousand in the palm of her hand in a few moments. People left saying that she had touched their deepest selves.

It is fair to ask, however, what has Kübler-Ross left behind? Her five-stage theory of dying has been largely discarded by scholars and practitioners. The theory could neither be empirically validated nor did it prove useful in making care plans for hospice patients. Her later writings were largely restatements of her first book or were claims about spiritual realities, especially life after death, that rested on faith, not science. She founded no institutions or movements that continue her work. Still she was an important figure. Her book On Death and Dying opened many people to better ways of caring for family members and friends who were dying and provided the inspiration for countless others to make their own last months and days meaningful. Her later reports of mystical experiences that she claimed were proof of life after death were part of the reemergence of Spiritualism in contemporary popular culture.

From the publication of On Death and Dying in 1969 to 1995, when she was incapacitated by strokes, Kübler-Ross relentlessly traveled the world teaching people that we can learn from those who are dying, that death is acceptable because it is a transition to another life, and that in learning not to fear death we really learn not to fear life. When it came her time, then, how did Kübler-Ross die? Facing Death, the Swiss film by Stefan Haupt, seems an attempt to answer that question, even though the film was completed and released in 2002 while she did not die until August 24, 2004. In interviews, Kübler-Ross is clearly severely incapacitated. She speaks as if her death is imminent, and the filmmaker seems to believe that to be the case. Kübler-Ross seems impatient to get on with it. Her sister says she is too impatient. So the film tells a story that has, in fact, yet to happen. The end of the film is, for that reason, intentionally vague, although the audience is not privy to the reason.

Kübler-Ross always connected her life story to what she taught. The film moves back and forth between interviews shot around 1999 and archival footage of her lecturing and being interviewed on television at various times in her life. There is some footage from a workshop in which a young man in front of a seated Kübler-Ross beats a phone book with a rubber hose and bellows his rage and a bit of a film in which Kübler-Ross tells a dying woman she needs to accept dependence while the woman's daughter sits nearby. Kübler-Ross and those who love her talk about her and events in her life. The film presents Kübler-Ross's biography, and at the same time, it tells what she taught, especially about the life that comes after death. At the end of the film, the viewer has been introduced in a full, personal way to her life and work, and the two come together as Kübler-Ross tells us that she has learned her lessons, that she is ready for the transition where she hopes to meet Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a renowned 19^th century Swiss educator.

The film is probably the last telling of an oft-told story. Quest, a biography by Derik Gill (1980), is listed as bibliography in the film credits. The storyline up to the late 1970s follows Gill's. This reviewer was assigned to review Quest when it came out. It seemed that Kübler-Ross was almost Gill's only source. In a phone call he confirmed that the book was as Kübler-Ross wanted it written. He said that she received a share of the royalties. This film has the same sense as Gill's book. A showing of the film was advertised on Kübler-Ross's web site. The majority of the story is told by Kübler-Ross herself, both as an apparently dying woman and in the footage from when she was in her prime. The most interesting voices that have not been heard much before are her sisters'. They were triplets, a fact that played large in Kübler-Ross's understanding of her childhood as preparation for the public role she saw herself as destined to play. Other voices include Mwalimu Imara, a chaplain from her University of Chicago days, who she says will speak at her funeral. The postmistress of a small Virginia town tells how her workload increased when Kübler-Ross moved there. Audrey Gordon, who was Kübler-Ross' psychiatric research assistant from 1968 to 1970 at the University of Chicago, provides one of the few voices at variance with the film's dominant narrative. She notes that Kübler-Ross's lack of research at a university that required research of its faculty was the reason she was not given a further contract. It was not, as Kübler-Ross maintained, because physicians or administrators objected to her talking to dying patients.

Other people might have offered a more rounded picture. The explanation for her divorce is that her husband, Manny, did not want her to be gone for such long periods. It seems that Kübler-Ross interpreted his request as him asking her to give up the work that she believed was a cosmic calling. Of course she could not do that. Manny remarried and died 10 years after the divorce, but their son and daughter survive. How did they feel about their absent mother, beloved by so many strangers, but gone so much of the time? The film shows home movies of idyllic times on visits to Switzerland when the children were young. After she becomes famous, the children are absent from the narrative until her son insists she come home with him after her house in Virginia burned, possibly from arson by locals who objected to her planning to open a hospice for children with AIDS.

The film is admirably honest about the strange relationship Kübler-Ross developed with a spiritualist charlatan that led to the closing of Shanti Nilaya, the center she founded in California. It is common knowledge in the "death and dying" community that in a dark room the charlatan embodied the spirits of dead husbands and suggested he have sex with their widows. Kübler-Ross's sister tells how she tried to dissuade Kübler-Ross. She calls channeling spirits "hocus pocus" and "hogwash." Chaplain Imara says that what happened in those séances was transparently fake. But why does the film not offer interviews of people who participated, or better yet someone who can offer a fuller explanation than that she wanted to believe so badly that she let herself be taken in? At that time, she was so connected with her inner reality that she seemed not to comprehend outer reality. When she was asked in a Playboy interview (Seligson, 1981) why she smoked when there was a danger of cancer, she replied, "Cigarettes cannot touch you if you're not afraid of them. You can only be damaged by those things you fear." In this film, as she has done for most of her public career, Kübler-Ross claims that she knows truths beyond the realm of mortal minds. She knows that there is life after death and that near-death experiences and postdeath contact are a means to ontological reality. She believes she talks to a God who is the God of all religions. As it has been for her public career, her sense of inner truth is surer to her than external information.

The filmmaker does not ask how Kübler-Ross could be wrong about channeling spirits and yet be right when in the film she says, such things are "real, but not reality." Indeed, the impression the film leaves is that it is her very willingness to explore such esoteric realms that puts Kübler-Ross in the pantheon of 20^th century spiritual giants. The film allows Kübler-Ross' amazing personal charisma to come across with the same power that made her a media personality beginning in 1969. It invites viewers to become believers.

The film presents Kübler-Ross as she understood herself. Its narrative is the one she told again and again in her lectures and interviews. She was uniquely prepared to understand people without identity because, as a triplet and an unwanted child, she had no identity. From her childhood she had a sense of being connected to cosmic reality, of being special, destined for a mission. When fame found her, it seemed that her childhood dreams were fulfilled, so she left her husband and family to tell the world how to die and thus how to really live. She was accorded the status of prophet by her followers. The film's opening shows Kübler-Ross' photograph at the end of a series of portraits that includes, among others, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, Fredrick Douglas, and Winston Churchill. The landscape shots and mood music between sections of the film reinforce the idea that the film is a pilgrimage to visit and learn from a person whose life is lived on a transcendent stage. The film is, then, a wonderful vehicle to pass on who and what she was. It might help the next generation to understand the impact she had on 20^th century culture and might even invite a few to believe in the mystical truths she taught.

The film as reviewed has some limitations. The original version is in German. In the version released in North America, the voice-over and readings from her writings are in English, but the interviews with Kübler-Ross and her sisters that make up so much of the film are in German, although the infirm Kübler-Ross often lapses into English. Footage of earlier interviews and lectures by Kübler-Ross are in German. The translation in the subtitles is good, but the lack of voice-over simultaneous translation will limit the usefulness of this film for educational use.

References

• Gill, D., (1980). Quest: The life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
• Seligson, M., (1981). Playboy interview: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Playboy, 28, 69–70, 74–76, 78, 82, 84, 86, 90, 92–96, 98, 101–104, 106.

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