Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9408050056
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HEAD WATERS LENGTH: Long
The letters keep coming.
Something compels Elisabeth to read them all.
It pushes her - just as it has for 68 years - to give help to "the neediest of the needy." Concentration camp survivors. Cancer patients. Abandoned babies with AIDS.
And almost anyone else who asks.
She has become a magnet for the bereaved. From the 1969 publication of her book "On Death and Dying" - still used in classrooms and hospice organizations around the world - to her much-criticized move into mysticism and research on the afterlife, she has forged a career in death from which she cannot escape.
Each day, the mail brings dozens of new problems to her 250-acre retreat in the mountains of Highland County. She piles the letters in boxes next to a green leather couch in her living room, which is decorated with exotic bric-a-brac.
Every night, the tiny Swiss-born psychiatrist climbs the hill from her garden to her three-story log cabin, sinks into the couch and reads.
My mother is dying, Elisabeth ...
My son was killed, Elisabeth ...
Help me, Elisabeth ... .
Take care of me, Elisabeth ...
She tries to sort out the ones who need her the most. It is a wearisome task, one which grew heavier as the years passed and the pile refused to grow thinner.
Elisabeth never gets to the bottom. She continues to try, though she no longer really wants to.
She wants to be left alone. She wants to stop taking care of the world.
After 25 years of tending to the terminally ill, Elisabeth wants to die.
She almost never lived. Elisabeth weighed only 2 pounds when she entered the world as the first of a set of triplets in a Zurich hospital in 1926. Doctors gave her parents little hope.
To hear Elisabeth tell it, the Kblers didn't want three daughters, anyway.
"They would have liked to give two of them back," she once said. She considered herself an unwanted child and a "2-pound nothing" who had to justify her existence.
People had a tough time telling the Kbler girls apart. Elisabeth resented it. She set herself off by rebelling - usually with righteous indignation - and by fashioning herself into a champion for the underdog.
When the village pastor unjustly punished her sister, Elisabeth hurled a prayer book at him.
No monster was too big for her to tackle. When, as a 13-year-old girl, she heard on the radio that Hitler invaded Poland, she made a solemn oath to herself that she would help the Polish people some day.
She dreamed of helping people in another way, too. When she grew up, she told herself, she would become a doctor.
But Swiss families in the 1940s didn't spend money educating daughters beyond their teen-age years. Not unless they had to.
One night, her father sat the girls down at the dining room table. Eva, he announced, would go to finishing school. Erika, who was frail and unlikely to find work, would go to college. Elisabeth would follow him into the office supply business.
Elisabeth's heart sank. And her anger rose.
She didn't want to make money. She wanted to do something meaningful. She wanted to help people.
Nobody would tell her what to do with her life, she screamed at her father. She would rather become a domestic servant!
He threw her out of the house and told her to do just that.
Elisabeth spent several months as a housekeeper in the French-speaking section of Switzerland. When she returned, her father allowed her to live at home. She had two weeks to get a job - or follow him into the family business.
She was saved by a series of laboratory apprenticeships.
While working in the dermatology department of a Zurich hospital, Elisabeth got her first taste of being desperately needed.
Just days after the Allies invaded Normandy, refugees began swarming over the Swiss border and filing into the hospital to be deloused.
She stripped off their clothing, bathed their children and covered them with ointment. While she worked, they poured out their stories of horror and death ... and grief. Elisabeth listened. She took pride in giving them comfort.
When the war was over, Elisabeth took a leave of absence to join a volunteer relief agency. They didn't need anyone in Poland so they sent her to help rebuild the ravaged villages across the border in France.
She didn't forget her promise to the Polish people. During a second assignment, in Belgium, she met a man en route to a Polish relief camp and convinced him to send for her several weeks later.
Elisabeth mixed concrete, hauled timber and cooked for volunteers who were helping rebuild a school. After a while, she joined a make-shift medical clinic as one of three "lady doctors."
One night she awoke to the sounds of a crying child. A Polish woman sat by her side, cradling her 3-year-old son, Janek. She had carried the boy, who had typhoid, for three days and two nights as she walked from a distant village to find help. Elisabeth made her a cup of tea and then told her she had no medicine and could do nothing to save the boy.
Doctor, the woman insisted, you will save the life of my son because he is the last of my 13 children. Janek is the only one to survive the gas chambers of Maidanek.
"She just said she had this incredible faith that he's going to get well if she gets to me," Elisabeth remembered. "She said she'd walk anywhere."
She walked with the woman another 20 miles to a hospital she knew was already full. When a doctor tried to turn them away, Elisabeth chastised him.
"I told him I was a doctor from Switzerland," she said. If he didn't take the boy, she warned him, she would tell the whole world that "Polish doctors are cold-hearted people."
He told them to leave the boy and return in three weeks. By that time, he said, the child would be well enough to leave, or he would be dead. Janek survived.
After the child recovered, the woman took him home, then walked back to the camp where Elisabeth was working. While Elisabeth slept, the woman placed next to her a clump of soil from her village that had been blessed by the local priest. It was all she had.
Touched by the woman's courage, Elisabeth decided to visit Maidanek. She wanted to understand the suffering of those who died in the gas chambers.
She wanted to understand how man could be so cruel.
Inside the concentration camp, Elisabeth found a railroad car full of fungus-covered shoes. Another car held tangled human hair. In the barracks, where the barefoot, shaven Poles had awaited death, Elisabeth found carvings - of butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies.
As they faced death, she imagined, the victims of the gas chambers turned not to despair, but to hope and freedom.
Elisabeth felt somebody standing behind her. It was a Jewish woman, a woman whose entire family had been murdered at Maidanek.
The woman told Elisabeth that she was working at a children's hospital in Germany. She thought that by helping German children, she could learn to let go of her bitterness and anger.
Where did this woman - and women like Janek's mother - find their courage? Elisabeth asked herself.
How, she wondered, could the world produce people capable of such love and forgiveness and at the same time produce a man as full of hate and cruelty as Hitler?
What could one person do to prevent the creation of more Hitlers? she asked herself. What could she do?
Elisabeth didn't have a lot of answers. But she knew one thing for certain. She was going to make a positive contribution to the world, not a negative one. Somehow, she was going to help people.
She was going to start by becoming a doctor.
It wasn't going to be easy. Elisabeth had no way to pay for medical school or for the courses she would need to prepare herself for the entrance exam. In 1949, she made the problem worse by ensuring she'd get no help from home.
Communism was beginning to spread across Eastern Europe. Elisabeth's father forbade her from venturing behind the Iron Curtain to do her relief work. But when an assignment in Italy finished earlier than expected and the agency asked her to deliver two children to their mother in Warsaw, Elisabeth couldn't say no.
Since nobody was home at her parents' house, Elisabeth scribbled a note, packed her knapsack and left. When she returned several days later, she found the front door locked and the key missing. She could hear her family inside, celebrating a visit from her older brother.
Elisabeth knocked. Her father opened the door, then slammed it in her face.
Stunned, she waited for him to reappear. How could he be so unforgiving?
But Elisabeth had gone against her father's wishes. As she stood outside waiting for him, she could hear him return to the family and raise a toast.
To her brother.
"He kicked me out, for good," she said. "I'm proud of that. Because nobody else ever went against his word. I'm glad I did."
Her defiance meant she would have to work a night shift at the clinic to support herself - and pay for her classes at the University of Zurich. The schedule left little time for much else.
Elisabeth studied into the early hours of the morning and survived on just a few hours of sleep.
During an anatomy lab, she met Manny Ross, a New Yorker. As they dissected cadavers together, they formed a friendship, then fell in love.
In 1958 they married, and he persuaded her to go to New York. She moved reluctantly to the United States, a country she hated for its blatant materialism. Elisabeth had hoped to practice in Africa.
Manny became a neuropathologist. Elisabeth, a psychiatrist. After a few years, she followed her husband to the University of Colorado, where she became attached to Dr. Sydney Margolin, an unconventional Austrian psychiatrist who was researching psychosomatic medicine.
One day he asked her to fill in for him in the lecture hall. Nervous at having to replace Margolin, Elisabeth searched for a topic he didn't normally cover, one that would hold students' interest.
"I had to think of something that affects all physicians," she said. "The only thing I could come up with was death and dying. Every physician, whether he likes it or not, has to come to grips with it."
She found nothing in the library that dealt with the process of dying. So Elisabeth took the unusual step of bringing a terminally ill patient to class for students to interview.
The students expected a frail, elderly man or woman. When the dying patient turned out to be an attractive l6-year-old girl in a wheelchair, they sat in stunned silence.
Nobody came forward to ask questions.
Elisabeth pulled a few unwilling students from the audience. They asked clinical questions: How high was her fever? What were her symptoms?
The girl dismissed them. She wanted to talk about what it was like to die.
She resented people who pretended nothing was wrong with her.
She hated the phony-looking get-well cards. She hated God for making her sick. And she wanted desperately to graduate from high school.
When she left, the students dropped their clinical attitudes and choked up. Elisabeth warned them that there was more to treating the terminally ill than tending to physical needs. If they wanted to succeed as doctors, she said, they needed to face their own fear of death.
She didn't resume her lectures on death and dying until 1965, when she took a job at the University of Chicago Medical School. Shortly after she arrived, four students from the Chicago Theological Seminary approached her.
One student said his brother, a medical student in Denver, had sent him a transcript of her seminar with the 16-year-old girl. He wanted to know if they could listen to her next interview with a dying patient.
Finding one wasn't easy.
When Elisabeth asked doctors to suggest a patient, none would help. Some said they had no dying patients. Others changed the subject. A few said they'd think about it, while others mumbled their patients were too tired or weak.
Elisabeth eventually persuaded a few doctors to help and the seminars turned into weekly events. From her original group of four theology students, the audience grew to 50 medical and seminary students.
Soon, others began to attend - nurses, visiting doctors, social workers, ministers. Two years after she started it, the university made her seminar an accredited course.
Elisabeth began to notice trends in the stories she heard from dying patients. They all seemed to experience the same feelings, though not necessarily in the same order. She broke those feelings down into five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - which would come to define the way people around the world understand grief.
In 1969, a short article she wrote describing her seminars for a theology journal made it to an editor in New York. He asked Elisabeth to write a book about her work with the terminally ill.
She agreed, but before "On Death and Dying" hit the book stores, she received another request. A writer and photographer from Life magazine wanted to attend one of her seminars. Her interview with a 22-year-old woman dying from leukemia propelled her to instant celebrity status.
The mail poured in. People wrote to say thank you. They wrote for advice. And they wrote to ask her to speak -at churches, at medical schools, to professional associations.
After her book came out - and hit the best-seller list - the pile of letters grew even bigger.
Elisabeth accepted dozens of lecture and television talk show invitations. She described to thousands of people each week - frequently to nursing and medical students - the anxieties of the dying and how the medical community's own fears often prevented them from helping their patients.
Eventually, she decided her work would be more effective if she brought small groups of people together over a period of several days. She wanted to help them uncover the fear and negativity that blocked the bereaved from healing and the so-called healers from helping.
She offered the workshops, called "Life, Death and Transition," to the terminally ill, their families, health professionals and anyone else involved with death or dying. Eventually, the workshops expanded to include anyone dealing with loss, whether it was the loss of a loved one or the loss of a marriage.
For five days, groups of 60 patients came together to share their grief, anger and fears. She encouraged them to accept, to forgive and to move on with their lives.
"She was very much grounded in trying to help people realize they have negative stuff that's holding them back," said Gregg Furth, a longtime friend and associate who met Elisabeth during a 1969 lecture at Kent State.
Furth, now a Jungian analyst, studied drawing interpretation at Elisabeth's urging. She told him that people, especially children, have difficulty talking about their feelings but will reveal them through pictures.
Today, Furth teaches the skill to Elisabeth's workshop staff.
As the workshops grew in popularity - and Elisabeth's reputation along with them - the offers poured in from farther and farther away. By 1975, she found herself traveling more than 200,000 miles in one year to satisfy speaking engagements in Europe, Canada and the United States.
She began to feel torn between her time with her family - which dwindled to weekends only - and her work.
"I will stop the traveling at the end of this year," she wrote in 1975.
But she couldn't stop. There was always one more person who needed her, one last lecture to give. Her family, she hoped, would understand.
She tried to take care of them in her absence. She would cook a week's worth of meals and freeze them. She left instructions for when they should eat each meal.
"She labeled them," her son, Kenneth, remembered. "Monday - roast. Tuesday - fish."
The traveling didn't bother him, he said, because he often went with his mother. Kenneth, now a 33-year-old photographer who continues to travel the globe, said his mother spoke little about her work when they were together.
His father, he said, supported his mother's career initially, then grew tired of her frequent absences.
Even when she was home, Elisabeth couldn't put her work completely aside.
Furth remembers spending a weekend at the Ross home in Chicago in the mid-1970s. When they arrived at her house, Elisabeth immediately set to work cooking dinner for the family. As soon as everyone went to sleep, she settled down at the dining room table - which was covered in mail - to answer her letters.
"I got up at 8 a.m. and she was up three hours answering mail already," Furth said.
Elisabeth then joined the family for a day of berry picking. They returned exhausted, but she stayed up to can the berries that night.
"The next morning she's there answering mail again," he said. "She has an incredible amount of energy."
Even so, by 1976, Elisabeth knew that she needed help to keep up with the workshops and with the growing pile of mail.
"I was forever thousands of letters behind," she wrote.
But there was so much else to do.
People were finally beginning to talk about death. Elisabeth joined with others to create the American hospice movement, a push to allow patients to die at home, surrounded by loved ones, with comfort and dignity.
She pushed for better pain management for the terminally ill.
Once adults became more comfortable with death and dying, Elisabeth turned her attention to children. She hated the "No children allowed" signs that hospitals posted, signs that prevented children from sharing their parents' final moments and left them with frightening images of ambulances whisking mommy or daddy away into the unknown.
"It took me five years to get those signs down from the hospitals," she said.
The more Elisabeth got involved in, the more people wanted to hear her speak. When somebody started a hospice - there are more than 1,800 of them in the United States today - they called Elisabeth.
The hospice workers bought copies of "On Death and Dying." When they wanted advice, they wrote to her. They gave the book to their patients.
The patients wrote, too.
Her publisher and her patients demanded more books. First a companion to "On Death and Dying" - answers to the most frequently asked questions about death. Later she wrote about children and dying, about the hospice movement, about her workshops.
Each book brought more mail.
And more requests for lectures. The workshops grew waiting lists.
Elisabeth's schedule forced her to live out of a suitcase as she flew around the globe.
If she spent little time with her family, Elisabeth spent even less time alone.
Once, she recalled, after she left a lecture and a book signing in New York City, she hoped for a few moments of peace in an airport restroom. As she sat in the stall, a hand appeared under the door holding one of her books.
"Dr. Ross," a woman's voice asked, "do you mind?"
As famous as she had become, Elisabeth was about to attract even more attention.
She was beginning to hear stories from patients about "near-death" experiences, things that occurred after they went into cardiac arrest or slipped into a coma.
Doctors rushed into the room and the patients felt themselves leave their bodies and hover over the scene below, they told her.
They spoke of walking toward a being of light, a being that wrapped them in unconditional love. Some said they were greeted by others who had died, usually family members.
Elisabeth began to research the topic of life after death, interviewing hundreds of people who spoke of similar experiences. Their stories convinced her to dismiss arguments that oxygen deprivation near the moment of death caused people to hallucinate.
Blind patients told her they could see again. They described in vivid detail the clothing worn by family members or doctors who came to their hospital rooms. When they "returned to life," they told her, they resumed breathing but lost their eyesight again.
And then Elisabeth thought she found the most compelling evidence of all.
She read a book on out-of-body experiences called "Journeys Out of the Body." The author, Robert Monroe, wrote that he was opening a center to do further research.
Elisabeth looked him up. She told him she was a skeptic. She brought several scientists with her as witnesses. She asked him to make her leave her body.
Monroe told her to lie down on a waterbed and gave her a set of earphones. As his soothing voice asked her to relax, she listened to the sound of waves. Suddenly, she felt herself leave her body, she said.
"I lifted up, I went to the ceiling. My idea was I'm going to check all the layers of the ceiling, and then I'm going to make a hole in that ceiling, to verify it. I brought the tools with me and everything and I didn't tell anybody, to see if I can verify what I saw.
"And just as I was at the ceiling, his voice came through the earphones, I'm going too fast. And he sends me back. And I came on back into my body. And I was madder than hell because I wanted to prove that this is not phoney baloney, that this is actually happening."
She decided to try again. This time, she convinced herself, she would go "faster than the speed of light and farther than any human being has ever gone ... so he can't catch up with me."
Elisabeth doesn't remember what happened the second time, but claims she was "totally changed" by the experience. What followed, she said, made an even greater impact on her.
"All I said on the way home is I have gone too far. I had no idea what that meant. I had gone over some critical point, like where there was no return or something," she said.
"And I walked into that house where I was supposed to sleep that night, and I can't say scared because I don't know fear, but it was very eerie. It was like the house was crowded ... [like] the whole house was full of beings, for lack of a name, that I didn't want to take a shower because I didn't want them to see me in the shower naked. I mean that's how real it was."
Elisabeth couldn't sleep. Just as she thought she was dozing off, she said, the pain started.
"I went through every death of every single one of my thousand patients. Terribly real. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, in every way. And it was, I mean, a night of nightmares beyond any description.
"I remember during the night, I think I asked for a man's left shoulder to lean on. And the moment I said I need a man's left shoulder to lean on ... this big voice came out of nowhere. 'You shall not be given.' And I did not have time to say, 'I've been a shoulder to so many people, all I need is one shoulder to lean on.'
"The second chance I have to breathe, to take a breath like you are in labor pain, is to ask for a hand to hold ... I didn't care if a man's hand or a woman's hand, just a hand to hold onto and the same voice came. 'You shall not be given.'
"And the third and last breath I was able to take, was a question whether I should ask for a fingertip. And then typically in character for me, if I can't get a single hand to hold, then I don't want a fingertip either!"
With that, Elisabeth stuck out her tongue and gave a loud Bronx cheer.
"Then it became a very strange issue of faith," she continued. "It would mean, you know on some deep level, that God never gives you more than you can bear . ... I said, give me everything, everything at once. Let me have it now. After a thousand deaths, you don't care if you get 2,000 more.
"And the second I said yes to it, the agony stopped. The physical pain stopped. The whole nightmare, everything stopped."
What followed she called a "rebirth experience." She said her body started to vibrate at high speed. So did everything she looked at. She described seeing a flower and moving through it "into the light."
It felt, she said, just like the light described by her patients. It bathed her in peace and love. It wrapped her in warmth and washed away all of her pain.
When she awoke the next morning, a feeling of bliss enfolded her. She carried it with her for days, she said. She also carried the memory of a name: Shanti Nilaya. She had no idea what it meant.
Later, when she told her story to a group of monks in California, they told her it was Sanskrit and meant "Home of Peace. " They told her it was where people went when they died.
The monks also told Elisabeth that what she experienced that night was called "cosmic consciousness." Elisabeth looked it up in the library, where she found a turn-of-the-century book by the same name.
According to the book, what Elisabeth experienced was a glance into eternal life - an instance of "illumination" that others had been describing for more than a thousand years.
She grew convinced that what she experienced was real - that she had seen the other side.
And that it offered something far more wonderful than she had ever imagined.
In the years that followed, Elisabeth moved deeper into the world of mysticism, collecting stories wherever she went from people who had "proof" of an afterlife.
She shared her new beliefs with her husband. He told her that she was wrong.
Kenneth Ross said he remembers his parents getting into lengthy debates at the dinner table.
"Mom would say, 'There's absolutely life after death. But if not, I'll never know.' Dad would say, 'There's absolutely not. But if there is, I'll be pleasantly surprised.'"
Then Elisabeth met Jay and Marti Barham - and crossed a line that would cause her enormous pain.
Five years after her out-of-body experience, Jay Barham, a California healer, invited Elisabeth to a "darkroom session" in which he promised she would meet "spirits" from the afterlife. Elisabeth described the experience for Playboy magazine.
The room was dark. Elisabeth sat in the front row of a group of about 75 people. Suddenly, a figure nearly 8 feet tall walked in and began to speak.
She said she recognized the voice as the one that spoke to her in Monroe's guest house. The "spirit guide" called himself Anka, and introduced her to another guide, Salem, who stroked her hair and held her hand.
Anka told her that her work in death and dying had been a test, that her real work was to tell people about life after death.
She dutifully followed his directions.
"Death does not exist," she announced at a lecture in San Diego in 1977. That same year, she opened a center for her workshops in the mountains of Southern California. She called the place Shanti Nilaya.
The medical community scoffed.
Dr. Arthur Kaplan, a nationally known medical ethicist, said Elisabeth's talk of an afterlife cast a shadow over the rest of her work. Her colleagues continued to use "On Death and Dying," but placed no credence in her research on the afterlife.
Then, with her credibility already deteriorating, something happened that made even some of Elisabeth's supporters turn away.
In 1979, allegations surfaced that Barham, who had joined Elisabeth's workshop staff, was sexually abusing women while he posed as a "spirit" that returned from the dead. One of his alleged victims was a 10-year-old girl. The attorney general's office investigated, but never charged him.
Elisabeth fiercely defended Barham as innocent, despite warnings from her friends that she was being duped.
Her professional credibility plummeted. Her marriage, already wearing thin, fell completely apart.
"I think that in her marriage, she had to make a decision," Furth said. Was she going to stay with her husband, "or was she going to continue down the path that she was following?"
Elisabeth refused to back down. Her husband of 21 years divorced her.
She moved to California and built a house near Shanti Nilaya, continuing to defend the Barhams for at least two years. At some point, her faith in them was broken - she fired them from her workshop staff - but she won't discuss the matter today.
"They're mean people," she says slowly. "They work with dark forces. Very negative. And I will not give him any energy, mentioning that name."
She insists that her work in the spirit world remains valid, even so.
"I photographed spooks long before I met him," she says. She won't produce the pictures as evidence.
"No proof, no proof," she says, her Swiss-German accent still thick after 36 years in America. "That's what everybody wants. They can get their own proof."
Not everybody needed it. If Elisabeth became scandalous in some circles, hospice workers took little note.
"In our foundation, that issue has never come up," said Jack Gordon, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Hospice Foundation. "People who do or don't believe in an afterlife would have their beliefs respected."
And though the Barham scandal initially caused a slew of cancellations at the workshops, Elisabeth simply filled the vacancies with names from the waiting lists.
The letters never stopped coming.
In the early 1980s, Elisabeth decided to leave California and re-establish her center on the East Coast. At the urging of Dr. Raymond Moody, a friend and author of a book on life after death, she purchased his farm in Highland County.
"I was led to here," she says today, by Jesus.
Two years after she arrived, Elisabeth found herself fending off a new round of blows.
She wanted to build a hospice for babies with AIDS who had been abandoned by their parents, often because the parents themselves were dying.
But she announced her plans to the media before she told her neighbors in the rural community of Head Waters. The uproar astounded her.
Two thousand of 2,800 county residents signed a petition to prevent her from building the hospice. Many seemed convinced that she was trying to import the fatal disease into their quiet, mountainside community.
Elisabeth called a public meeting to allay their fears, but neighbors remained adamant. She became known as "the AIDS lady."
The anger persisted for years, even after she promised to drop the idea and recruited families from other parts of the country to adopt the children.
When she would drive down the road, she said, people would spit at her. Somebody allegedly fired bullets into her bedroom window. She received threatening notes signed by people who identified themselves as members of the Ku Klux Klan.
"I asked [Jesus] one day after about five years here, I said, 'Why did you pick this place for me? It's a gorgeous place, but the people are bleh.'
"And he waited about 15 minutes before I got an answer, and he said, with extreme love and compassion, 'Can you tell me a place where you are more needed?'
"I said, 'Thank you, I've done enough for needy people. I think somebody should look after me.' And he said, 'That's your job. You have to learn to be good to yourself and begin to learn to look after yourself.'"
"That's the hardest thing to learn," she says.
A stroke in 1988 didn't teach her.
It left her temporarily paralyzed and stopped her - for a short time - from speaking. Elisabeth checked herself out of the hospital to recover at home, where she crawled up the side of the mountain behind her log cabin as a form of physical therapy.
When her voice and mobility returned, she went right back on the lecture circuit.
During her free time, she worked in her garden and canned food, filling a small building behind her house with apple sauce, beets and ratatouille. She says she has 3,000 cans of food
Keywords:
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