Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504100085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HEAD WATERS LENGTH: Long
For a decade, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross traveled all over the world from her Highland County farm to help people explore attitudes about death and dying. But many of her neighbors never got to know her either as an international lecturer and author or as an energetic senior citizen who loved to bake and do crafts.
Now, they won't get the chance.
Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist who is credited with bringing the hospice concept to the United States, has resettled in Scottsdale, Ariz. She left Highland County as she came in - abruptly and amid controversy.
Kubler-Ross was like the unrecognized prophet, said Frances Leuthy, who worked five years as business manager of the Kubler-Ross Conference Center and who is back overseeing its closing.
The people of Highland County "didn't know what they had," she said.
Leuthy lives in Deerfield, about 30 miles from the center, on a small farm she and her late husband used as a retreat from his medical practice in Newport News. She was familiar with Kubler-Ross' work before she met her.
"As soon as I heard Elisabeth was here, I came over to volunteer," she said.
At one time, the center office had 12 employees and volunteers working daily to handle requests for materials and workshops and donations to the center, she said.
"Many people were so appreciative, they couldn't do enough for her," Leuthy said.
To Ronnie Miller, who operates Miller's Store here, Kubler-Ross was a friend who came to dinner and someone who frequently generated business for him when workshop participants dropped in for snacks and soft drinks.
Kubler-Ross also joined Miller in his mission to have Head Waters written two words as it was in old post office books, instead of as the one word it had become.
"She understood," he said.
In 1983, Kubler-Ross bought land in this county near the West Virginia line as a retreat from her schedule of lectures and workshops that grew out of her 1969 book, "On Death and Dying." She was in her late 50s. Her career had included teaching at the University of Chicago and serving as medical director of the Family Service and Mental Health Center of South Cook County, Ill.
From when she saw the horror of concentration camps as a relief worker in Poland after World War II, Kubler-Ross had tried to ease the pain and sadness of death by encouraging people to talk about it openly and to show unconditional love to those in need of healing. In Highland County, she hoped to develop a center that would provide day care for children and an adult home for the elderly, but it didn't work out.
In 1985, she announced plans for a center for babies with AIDS, but dropped that idea after 70 percent of the county's 2,800 residents signed a petition against the center because they feared the spread of the disease.
Kubler-Ross went ahead anyway with plans for a center, and it was dedicated in 1990. Until last month, when she announced the center was closing for good, she conducted workshops here and continued to lecture internationally.
She actually left Highland last October after her home burned and one of her llamas was shot in a roadside pasture. Kubler-Ross viewed the fire and the killing of the llama as retribution by enemies, although police didn't find evidence of arson and pointed out that other residents have lost livestock in similar shootings.
After the fire, she took up residence in another house on her farm, but she soon suffered a stroke, her second. Kubler-Ross, ill and having lost all of her possessions, decided to relinquish leadership of the nonprofit center and retire to Arizona near her son, Ken Ross, a free-lance photographer. Workshops were to continue, however.
But, a rift began to develop between Kubler-Ross and some of the center's board members.
She was upset, she wrote in the center's January newsletter, that staff had tossed out the homegrown vegetables she froze after each harvest to use in the workshop participants' meals she personally prepared.
"Had I nothing to say anymore, about my center, my work, my mail, or anything else for that matter?" she wrote. She accused the staff of "incomprehensible behavior," and said some of the board members had "started to act as if I were dead already."
The board had replaced her as president and dismissed a vice president without informing her, either, she said.
Kubler-Ross retaliated at a board meeting in Arizona by replacing the board members she felt had acted improperly. She also announced that she would no longer allow use of her "Life, Death and Transition" workshop name.
"She was going to let the center stay open, but they weren't following her guidelines," said Steve Henderson, a Staunton merchant.
Henderson, a friend who had attended her workshops, and Harmon Moats, a West Virginia retiree who went to the same African Methodist Episcopal church as Kubler-Ross, were among her handpicked board.
The disagreement was a "power struggle," Moats said.
"Everyone involved, past and present board members, thinks it's a good idea now to close the center," Henderson said. The closing should be completed in a couple of months, he said.
Kubler-Ross has sold her Healing Waters Farm for $260,000 to followers from Richmond.
The center, which sits on 38 acres, awaits a new owner, still undecided, although a strong possibility is the Monroe Institute, headquartered in Nelson County.
The Monroe Institute was founded by the late Robert Monroe, who wrote "Journeys out of the Body." Kubler-Ross, who also had out-of-body experiences, became friends and a collaborator with Monroe. His institute sells their taped learning series, "Going Home," designed to alleviate the fear of death.
"She's a legend," said Dr. Richard Edlich, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia Medical School.
"She's credited with a whole new conceptualization of how we deal with dying. What a difference it has made in our culture," he said.
Edlich - brother to Ted Edlich, who directs the Total Action Against Poverty program in Roanoke - resigned from the center's board when Kubler-Ross left for Arizona. It didn't make sense to keep the center open after that, he said, because Kubler-Ross was its "leading force."
Many mourn her leaving, though, Edlich said.
"The community was just beginning to see the potential benefits of having an incredible leader in their midst," he said. "They were healing their wounds."
Highland County residents might not even act the same way today about an AIDS babies center, said Kenny Herald of Monterey.
"At that time, there was not quite as much information available. Everybody thought you could shake hands with an AIDS person and the next day you'd die," he said.
Herald had no idea who Kubler-Ross was when she began shopping at the family's H&H Cash Store.
"Then I saw her on some talk shows and at book readings," he said.
It was the same when Kubler-Ross came to Victoria Williams' Headlines hair salon.
The two became friends, "then I found out how famous she was," Williams said. "But I didn't know her on that level."
Kubler-Ross had fine hair and "wasn't into glamour," Williams said. They decorated Easter eggs together and Williams took her children to see the real candles on her friend's Christmas tree.
The last time Williams saw Kubler-Ross was just after the October fire, when she took her some hair products, a curling iron and a dryer.
"She said: 'You know I don't do my hair,' but she uses the curling iron in Arizona," Williams said. "To me, she's just one of my best friends who moved."
Kubler-Ross published photographs of her new home in the center newsletter and wrote that she has "enjoyed the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets" of Arizona.
"I have neither FAX machine nor secretaries," she wrote, but she added that she appreciated notes as long as no one expected an answer and that she liked books if anyone "had any extra."
Kubler-Ross also has gotten her Arizona driver's license, which prompted board member Moats to suggest that she might not really be going to retire.
"The woman is the type of person who has to be into something," he said.
The gift shop is still stocked at the Kubler-Ross Center here. A ceramic angel sits in a front window and the guest book lies open, ready for more signatures of workshop participants.
But upstairs, in the round room set aside for seminars, sunshine coming through a skylight pours on vacant carpeting, instead of on clusters of people hugging, crying and laughing their way toward greater understanding of death.
by CNB