DATE: Sunday, July 20, 1997                 TAG: 9707100657

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER 
                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

A MEMORABLE LIFE SEEN THROUGH DEATH

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

A Memoir of Living and Dying

ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS, M.D.

Scribner. 286 pp. $22.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., wrote this memoir while she lies dying. The renowned author of On Death and Dying had suffered several small strokes. But on May 14, 1995 - Mother's Day - she suffered a massive stroke, which rendered her nearly helpless.

Summoning all of her resources, Kubler-Ross spent nearly an hour inching onto the floor from her bed and another hour getting to the door to seek help. Later her son, Kenneth, who had persuaded his aging mother to move from Virginia to Arizona in order to live near him, drove her to the hospital.

So began more than two years of suffering - which continues - from the effects of this stroke and ironically from the circumstances surrounding present-day health care. The health-care bureaucracy - both hospital and home care - taught her much, Kubler-Ross says, ``none of it good.''

Partly to divert her attention from her illness, partly to do what she loves to do (write), partly to lash out at incompetent doctors and nurses, and partly to lecture on the meaning of life (unconditional love) and death (a transition not an ending), Kubler-Ross wrote The Wheel of Life.

The book, which combines remembrances of personal life and professional life, is interesting, except when Kubler-Ross becomes too caught up in lecturing and loses track of her life story. It is also not always believable. Kubler-Ross recounts several experiences she had with other-worldly phenomena, such as ghosts. That Kubler-Ross would believe in such phenomena seems contradictory. That her editors would let her write about such matters in what is probably her swan song seems a pity. But these are small incidents in the history of a larger-than-life woman.

One of a set of triplets, and weighing just two pounds, Elisabeth Kubler was born in Switzerland on July 8, 1926. ``It was a heavy psychological weight to carry around,'' she writes about her birth and childhood. ``Not only was I born a two-pound nothing and given a slim chance at survival; my whole childhood was spent attempting to figure out who I was. I had to work ten times harder than everyone else and do ten times more to prove my self worthy

An excellent student, except for Latin, she loved the mountains and the countryside. When childhood illness took her to the hospital, she befriended a dying girl and realized that death was nothing to fear. This experience, her work with farm animals and her relief work in postwar Europe inspired her to become a physician. Her family wanted her to marry and to work in her father's office, but Kubler-Ross insisted on medical school.

There she met and married a Jewish-American medical student, Emmanuel Ross or ``Manny.'' They moved to America, and Kubler-Ross studied at Manhattan State Hospital. She specialized in psychiatry. In a few years, she bore two children. Soon thereafter, partly by accident - she was substituting for another doctor - she began working with the dying. Later she turned her attention exclusively to dying patients. She attributes her preoccupation with death to being moved while visiting European concentration camps. The butterfly on the cover of The Wheel of Life was inspired by drawings Kubler-Ross saw in the camps.

At Chicago's Billings Hospital, she instituted a teaching seminar in which she presented a ``series of conversations'' with the terminally ill that would make it possible for them to talk about their feelings. These conversations would teach others how to work with the dying and would provide grist for her own writings.

She interviewed over 20,000 people on their near-death experiences. The interviews provided groundbreaking research on death and changed the way doctors and society viewed it. Kubler-Ross also inspired the growth of the hospice movement and wrote 16 books and hundreds of articles on the psychology of dying.

Although this latest book is somewhat disappointing, one need only consider the circumstances under which it was written and the achievements of its author, to appreciate the woman behind it. MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson

State University in Maryland.

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