4
Unfinished Business and How You Know That You Know
ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
We are here to talk about death and dying, and the first thing I want to share with you is that if you need something all you really need to do is ask and it will be given to you. It will not always be what you think you want, but it will always be given.
In the last twelve years my whole life has been like this. If we would listen to dying patients and all the things they begin to open to, we’d find that they are very willing to share the things they learn with those who have a longer time to live, even though it is usually too late for them in their own lives. Dying patients are the best teachers in the whole wide world, and they teach you not only about the process of dying, which is very easy to understand, but also about the process of living. To live fully means not being afraid of living and not being afraid of dying.
I was born an unwanted child to parents who very much wanted a baby. They were expecting a very chubby and rosy nine-pound beauty. What they got was a very ugly two-pound shrimp. After fifteen minutes another two-pounder came, and that was the answer to my ugly two pounds. A half hour later, a third baby girl was born.
I don’t know whether any of you have been raised as a triplet, but I wouldn’t wish it on my enemy. Fifty-five years ago it was very rare to have triplets; today it is far more common. Our parents dressed all of us alike. We had the same bedclothes, the same bedspreads, the same teachers, the same grade cards. No matter how miserable or how excellent I was in school, it never really mattered because the teacher didn’t know who anyone was anyway. They just gave each of us a “C.”
You think it’s funny, but for children it was really tragic because no matter what we did it was like no one really cared. We each wanted to be outstanding or terrible at something just to have an identity. My sister’s earliest memory was when my father gave her a bath twice and skipped me. Nobody knew who was who.
My one sister was always on my mother’s lap, and my other sister was always on my father’s lap. There was no third lap, and I was too arrogant and defiant to ask, “When is it my turn? I need a lap, too.” So I got close to bunnies, to animals, to nature. I became interconnected with nature but isolated from interpersonal relationships, short of the superficial family meals and trips together. I never shared how lonely and isolated I was.
We were very well to do — an upper-middle-class family, a gorgeous house, beautiful gardens, and beautiful dresses. And I hated all of it because no one knew I existed, really; no one knew whether I was me or my sister or my other sister. And this upbringing was the biggest, biggest, biggest blessing in my life. I learned at a very young age that regardless of all the material things and goodies you may have, if you don’t have people who know who you are as a human being, you have nothing.
When I came to the United States and began my work with dying patients, I began to realize that not only dying patients teach us about the stages of grief — so does every human being who faces a loss. A little child who loses his security blanket because the mother decides it’s too dirty and throws it away. Or maybe you plant a tree, and in the winter it freezes. Or your house burns down, or you lose somebody through separation or divorce or through suicide or murder. Or maybe you lose your ability to walk, your vision, your hearing, or sometimes even just a contact lens — you go through the stages of dying. You understand, this process has nothing specifically to do with dying.
People who think they’re doing their children a service by protecting them need to look more closely. Should you shield the canyon from the wind storm? If you did, you would never see the beauty of its carvings. If you see your children making a mistake or on the verge of making a mistake, let them. Let them fall. Let them cry. Let them share their pain. But also, let them share their incredible pride when no one comes and picks them up the moment they fall. Because that develops incredible self-worth — that feeling of “By golly, I can make it on my own two feet.” Their lives may be full of storms, but they will also be full of the beautiful carvings that you only get if you are exposed to all the winds of life.
If someone is raised in a greenhouse where everything is nice and smooth, they become very dull and boring, and they will never, ever be able to say, “My life was beautiful.” Instead they will say what 90 percent of my adult patients have said: “I made a living, but I never really lived.” Your life is your free choice. You must see this.
When you work with dying patients, do not come with emotional support and your ideas about the stages of dying, being spiritual and all that stuff. First and foremost you have to take care of a patient’s physical needs. A patient who is climbing the walls in pain cannot hear a pastor. A patient who is itching and being driven crazy has no use for spiritual guidance. A patient who gets pain shots that make him dopey cannot communicate or work on unfinished business. So what you need to do for terminal patients is to keep them dry and totally hydrated and pain free. First take care of all the physical needs, then take care of all the emotional needs — the unfinished business.
What fears do you have? You can name a million. But there are only two natural fears — God-given to help us survive. One is fear of high places; if you put a child on a high cliff, he will never jump off. The other is fear of loud noises. Right now, if a loud noise — a gun — were to go off behind me, I would run for my life. Those fears are natural gifts to help preserve life. All other fears keep you from living. They all result from unfinished business.
Everything natural gives us energy and helps us to fulfill our lives. Grief is a natural emotion, a gift to help you come to grips with the reality of loss. When children hurt themselves, they cry. If they are told, especially boys, not to cry, they end up with unshed tears. Just go to a movie theater and see the tears; it is the only socially acceptable place to cry. Even there, just before the lights go on, everyone takes a tissue and wipes up their tears. Why are we so ashamed to cry? It is a God-given gift to cry. If you force yourself not to cry, natural grief will turn to unnatural self-pity. It is one of the biggest tragedies of our lives. You have no idea.
Anger is a beautiful gift, and it is over in fifteen seconds if it is allowed to be natural. You are allowed to say “No thank you” if your mother wants to tie your shoes and you are twelve years old. Do you understand? You can say, “No. Thank you.” That is natural, beautiful anger that makes you healthy and strong. If people are punished for acting naturally and honestly they become full of the unnatural anger and hate that fills our prisons.
Jealousy is a beautiful trait — to be jealous of someone who can read better than you is a beautiful thing. This kind of challenge develops the intellectual part of us, inspiring children to learn to emulate one another and keep working toward excellence.
Love is actually the biggest problem. We need love, of course, but there is also confused love: for instance, the mother and the shoelace. Love must be able to say no.
Nine-year-old Jeffrey spent most of his life in the hospital. He had every treatment that you can imagine. Then a young physician came to the hospital and said, “We are going to start another experimental chemotherapy.” The mother and father were so depleted; no one spoke up. I happened to be visiting that day, and I said, “Has anyone asked Jeffrey what he wants?” And everyone said no. And I said, “You have to ask Jeffrey because if Jeffrey fights against another round of chemotherapy, he will die getting the therapy. But if he really wants another year or another few months of life, he will fight along with you and will have a good chance.”
They asked Jeffrey, and he looked up at all of us in disgust. “I don’t know why you have to make us kids so sick in order to make us well.” It was a very clear “no thank you.” And his parents were able to hear this because they loved him enough. They were able to say, “Would you like us to take you home?” And Jeffrey said, “Yes.” I was ready to say goodbye then, but he said, “No, you will come with me.” I looked at my watch because I have a lot of Jeffreys, but he said, “It won’t take long.” So I said to him, “Do we have some unfinished business?” And he said, “Yes!”
We drove to suburbia, into the driveway, and into the garage. Jeffrey said, “I want Dad to take my bicycle down from the wall.” It was three years old but brand new. It was Jeffrey’s biggest dream to ride his bike around the block, but he was too sick to ever do it. “Dad,” he said. “I want you to put the training wheels on.” I don’t know whether you know how painful it is for a nine-year-old to have training wheels put on. I can’t tell you just how sick this child was — pale, weak. He looked at me and said, while holding the bike up, “And you, all you need to do is hold my mom back.”
His mother had never learned to hold herself back, to not prop him up, and she’d cheated him of his greatest victories. So I’m holding on to the mom, and the father is holding on to me, all while this very sick child climbs onto the bicycle and takes off. He rides around the block and comes back with a huge, beaming grin across his face, and with the same authoritarian voice says, “Dad, you can take the training wheels off, shine up the bike, and carry it up to my room. When Dougie comes home from first grade send him up.” Two weeks later Dougie, the next youngest, told us what had happened upstairs. Jeffrey had told him he wanted him to have his bicycle as a gift for his birthday, which was two weeks later. “I won’t be around at your birthday,” Jeffrey had said. But it wasn’t an unconditional gift. It was given with one condition: “Never ever ever use those damn training wheels.”
This work is not intrinsically depressing. It’s only depressing when we impose our own needs, our own patterns, and we don’t know when to call it quits. If we had given this child the experimental chemotherapy — and that was a real possibility — those parents would never have gotten to see Jeffrey ride around the block on that bicycle.
Unconditional love means that I hear you and I respect your own free choice. When you spend time with dying children, you see that very young children cannot verbalize requests, but they can communicate through spontaneous drawings. All human beings — if they speak a foreign language, if they are on a machine and they can’t speak anymore, if they’ve had a stroke and they can’t speak anymore — all you need to give them is a piece of paper and a box of crayons and ask them to spontaneously draw a picture. Grown-ups take ten minutes because they think they have to impress you. Children are honest; they take five minutes. Children — five years old — will tell you their inner understanding of their impending death. They will, through their drawings, show you what unfinished business they have. You can hear them. You can read their pictures and learn exactly the nature of the help they need and from whom it should come.
A physician came to my workshop, and we challenged him about the treatment of his cancer patients. We told him about the drawings. He said that he wanted to learn more, so we told him, “When you have a patient with a diagnosis of cancer, simply ask them to draw a picture. If you have a patient for whom you might consider chemotherapy, or radial therapy, or surgery, ask them to draw a picture, and you will know within ten minutes which of these treatments will make them well.” After a year, his surgeries had been reduced by 50 percent and his patients were getting amazingly well.
He had a middle-aged man diagnosed with cancer. The doctor asked the man to conceive of his cancer. The man drew a man with a big, fat belly full of red concentric circles. That is how he visualized his cancer. Then we asked him to conceive of the chemotherapy, which from our perspective was absolutely the treatment of choice. The patient drew black arrows hitting every cancer cell, but getting deflected away rather than penetrating them.
Now, would you want to put this man on chemotherapy? And, as it turned out, not one of the chemotherapies effectively touched the cancer. From a purely intellectual point of view, this made absolutely no sense.
We asked him, “What did the doctor tell you about the chemotherapy?” And the man said, “The doctor says the chemotherapy kills the cancer cells.” I was ready to say, “Yes, what are you waiting for?” He very apologetically looked at me and said, “‘Thou shalt not kill.’” He went on to say that he was a Quaker. Now, I’m not a Quaker and so I said, “Not even your own cancer cells?” “No,” he said. “I truly believe that ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
Unconditional love practiced in everyday life means loving my neighbor and respecting my neighbor from where he is coming from, not where I want him to be. So I said to him, “This world would be a better place if people truly did believe in ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and live that way.” Now that he was not feeling criticized, I said to him, “You understand I have needs, too. I want you to get well, so do me a favor. Go home and conceive of how you can get well. That is my need.”
A week later, same man, same treating physician, everything the same. I said, “Did you conceive how you could get rid of your cancer?” He drew the most gorgeous picture I have ever seen. In his picture every cancer cell is full of gnomes — those little guys with hoods. The whole belly was full of them, carrying every cancer cell away. This man was put on chemotherapy and is well today.
Do you understand the beauty in holistic medicine? Holistic medicine does not mean to throw the baby out with the bath water, to throw everything good out that we have created, but instead to take the best of traditional medicine and the best of the healing arts and simply acknowledge that every human being consists of a physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual quadrant. We must accept that reality and take care of all of it, not by telling the patient that he must do something and get mad at him if he doesn’t, but to let him teach me and I teach him. Then we can both benefit.
I lecture all over the world, and sometimes it gets very boring. I speak to about fifteen thousand people a week from Egypt to Jerusalem to Alaska to Maui, and I say the same thing over and over. But something keeps me going.
Some years ago, I was in North Carolina. I always go through the audience before I speak, looking at everyone. My eyes landed on a couple in the first row, and I had this urge to go over and ask them, “Where is your child?” You understand, intelligent people with “M.D.” after their name don’t behave this way. That is why I have a terrible reputation; people think I have slipped. This is a bad problem and I know that, but if I listened to my intellectual quadrant all the time I could never do this work.
During the first break, I went to them and said, “This may be strange to ask, but where is your child?” They answered, “We debated whether or not to bring him, but he had chemotherapy this morning.” I said, “I really think he should be here.” The father left and got him. The child listened a while, and then he took the paper and crayons and drew a picture. During the lunch break I sat on the steps, and he came to me and said, “Dr. Ross, here is the picture.” The mother, on the verge of tears, said, “Our biggest fear was just confirmed. We were told that Dougie has maybe three months to live.” I looked at the picture, and I said, “Oh no, that is totally out of the question. Maybe three years, but not three months.”
After the lecture was over, I went to Dougie and told him that I couldn’t make house calls in North Carolina. I said, “It’s too far and costs a lot of money, but if you ever, ever need me just write and be sure to address the envelope yourself. I get thousands of letters, but the letters from children are my top priority, and if you address it I’ll know it’s from you.” I waited and waited and the silly intellectual quadrant took over, and I started worrying that I had given the parents false hope. Then I thought, “Isn’t that stupid? Whenever you let the intellectual quadrant get in the way, you are proven wrong.” So I let go of the anxiety, and two days later I got a letter.
Dear Dr. Ross,
I have just two more questions.
What is life and what is death?
And why do little children have to die?
Love, Dougie
I was so touched by the beauty of its simplicity and straightforwardness. I took paper and folded it like a book. I took my daughter’s felt-tipped markers, and I printed so he could read it and choose to share it or not share it with his parents. I wrote in rainbow colors because it was for a child, and then I began to illustrate it. When it was written and illustrated, I liked it, and I didn’t want to give it away. I thought to myself, “It’s okay. You can keep it,” rationalizing that I work with many dying children. The minute you start rationalizing, you know that it’s not okay. At the end of life, as you survey your life, it is not just your deeds, but also your words and your thoughts that make up the totality of your life. If you strive to always make the highest choice, you will never go wrong. I already knew that the best choice was not to keep it. So I gave myself a big kick in the pants, walked to the post office, and mailed this letter off.
Months later, I got a phone call from Dougie. “It’s my birthday, and you were the only one who thought I would have another birthday. I wanted to give you something for my birthday, and I couldn’t think what to give you. So I decided to send the letter back. I mailed it today.”
This gift was not without conditions. There was an unspoken expectation that the card be published to help other dying children. Because I picked the higher choice at the time, this letter has now reached ten thousand dying children. This is what I tried to tell you at the beginning: If you give something of yourself without claim, it comes back ten thousand times. I mean that literally — it comes back ten thousand times. Not always through the same source, but it does come back. You may ask and not get what you think you want, but you do get what you need.
The best example I have of this is some years back when I was in San Francisco. I was really tired, and I just wanted to get home to my garden. I just needed to take care of me. Just as my plane was about to start boarding, this woman came and grabbed my blouse and said, “Dr. Ross?” And I so badly wanted to say, “No, I am Mary Smith.” I’ve signed three hundred books. I’ve lectured to three thousand people. One time I was at Kennedy airport, and I went to the toilet, and the moment I sat down a hand came under the door with a book, and a voice said, “Dr. Ross, would you mind?” That’s no joke. That is how I live. I literally cannot pee in peace anymore. Do you understand when you live such a life that you really do just want to be Mary Smith, and you don’t know why Mary Smith doesn’t want to be Mary Smith? That’s how I felt at that moment. I looked at this woman, and I knew that she knew that I didn’t want to be me. And she said very quickly, “Dr. Ross, we just lost our nine-year-old son to cancer. Two weeks ago, after we buried him, we found out that our eleven-year-old daughter is full of cancer. We can’t go through it anymore. We can’t even go into her bedroom and look at her. We can’t talk to her. We resent her. We can’t take anymore. We need help.” All I could think was “Oh God, if only I could have one hour with this couple.” The second I had that thought, over the loud speaker came the announcement that Flight 83 would be delayed by one hour.
That is how your life is when you get in harmony with the four quadrants of your self. You don’t have to go to church — excuse me, pastors! You don’t have to be religious. We are all the same. It doesn’t matter what religion, creed, what color, what income. We are all the same. We all have to go back to the same source and learn the same lessons. If you live your life this way, it will be absolutely beautiful, and you will find the strength and the energy. I am not exaggerating. You will have the strength to work seventeen-, eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and you will never, ever get burned out. My schedule is totally inhuman, but whenever I need the strength and the energy I get absolutely and completely just what I need.
We all have repressed Hitlers inside. The greatest repressed Hitler in me was identified when I was in Maui. As much as I hate the man who showed it to me, I am forever grateful to him. Without giving you the details, somebody in Maui pushed my buttons. I was shocked because I go around teaching about unconditional love, but after a few days I was ready to put this man through the meat grinder. All week I wouldn’t look at him out of fear that I would literally kill him. By the time the week ended, I was drained — totally depleted.
My next stop was Chicago where I would be spending Easter with my children, but one of my friends was meeting me in California where I changed planes. And my friend and I share a vow: We have to do our work free of charge and help when we can. And anytime you get in touch with your own unfinished business, you go home and do something about it because you can’t go around preaching about it and not practice it.
So I knew she was going to ask me, and I just wanted everything to be sweet and nice with my grandchildren. And she said, “Elisabeth, how was the workshop?” And I said, “Fine.” And she said, “How was the workshop?” And I said, “FINE.” And she said, “How was the workshop?” And I said, “God damn it, it was fine!” And she said, “Would you like to tell me about it?” And I said, “No!” Because I wanted to get home and have things nice. Then she did the absolute worst thing that can be done to a human being when the human is feeling ugly: she was sweet. She put her hand on my head in that sweet way and said, “Tell me all about Easter bunnies.” And I totally exploded. I made this big speech. “I am a psychiatrist. I am fifty years old. Don’t you talk to me about Easter bunnies. I don’t believe in Easter bunnies anymore. If you want to talk to your clients about Easter bunnies go ahead, but don’t talk to me, a physician, about them.”
Then I broke down. I emptied an ocean of tears, like I have never cried. I cried for eight hours. I regressed to a five-and-a-half-year-old child. The floodgates opened, and all of my repressed memories came up. I told her how my one sister was forever on my mother’s lap and my other sister was forever on my father’s lap. How if my parents really loved me they would have noticed. How I rejected them and decided to get my own hugs, stand on my own two feet. So I started to raise bunnies. And if I needed a hug, I would hold them tight. I would cry on their fur. I would tell them about the pain, the anguish, and the unfairness of the world. They would listen to me because I was the one who fed them.
My father, however, was a thrifty Swiss. Every six months or so he would get the taste for a rabbit roast and say, “Elisabeth, bring one of your rabbits to the butcher.”
In those days, you did not talk back to your father. No, you picked up a rabbit and you walked the half mile down the road and you delivered it to the butcher. I was heartbroken, but I never shed a tear. Part of my arrogance was that they didn’t deserve to know my pain. They didn’t deserve to know how much they hurt me because it would have made me more vulnerable. The butcher always came out with a paper bag with the raw meat inside, and I would walk the half mile up the mountain and deliver it to my mother’s kitchen. Then I would have to sit at the table and watch my family eat my beloved rabbit. Never shed a tear. Every time it was repeated I grew more repressed and less able to share my emotions.
When I was six and a half, I only had Blackie left. Blackie was my most beloved, so chubby and gorgeous, with such shiny fur. He was my whole love. Then the day came when my father said that I had to bring Blackie. I tried to let Blackie run away, but he loved me so much he wouldn’t leave. So I took Blackie to the butcher — this brutish three-hundred-pound man with red hair and a red face. When he brought the paper bag back he said, “It is a darn shame you had to bring this rabbit. In a day or two she would have had little bunnies.” You understand, I didn’t even know it was a “she” bunny. But I was totally, totally devastated. I walked home like a zombie. I delivered the bag to my mother’s kitchen. I sat at the dining room table like a stone. Never shed a tear. I didn’t understand it then, but I can understand it now. Every time I see thrifty men, I put that lid on tighter and tighter and tighter, and it took that man in Maui to finally pop the lid. Do you understand? As much as I hate that man, I bless him.
I hope you understand what I am trying to tell you. We all have a black bunny locked up inside — you, me, all those people locked up in jail. It is my greatest hope that we can begin to help not only those in prison, but those who care for those in prison, and those of you who have compassion and understanding, to help prevent at least our next generation from going through such nightmares.
I often get asked about how to deal with children who are acting out because they have a black bunny or a repressed Hitler inside. Start a screaming room: a safe, preferably soundproof place. Give the child a three-dollar piece of vulcanized rubber hose and a mattress, and let them externalize the unfairness and rage they have bottled up. Then they will never become Hitlers in real life.
You have to help children externalize their hate and their rage without hurting living things. It’s as simple as that. In the old days women would beat their carpets. Now we have vacuum cleaners. Men used to chop wood and curse. We don’t do those things anymore, so we have to create places where it is okay to externalize these emotions.
I also recommend these rooms for parents who have lost children, especially directly after hearing the news. Once the physician has informed the family, they can be taken to a screaming room. We have done this in several hospitals and have staffed the screaming room with members of Compassionate Friends, people who have not been trained by books and theories, but by life. They were in the parents’ place themselves two years ago, three years ago, five years ago. They come back and say, “I have recuperated and I want to do something for other people.” Those people come in and they are the only people (with very few exceptions) that practice unconditional love to the grieving parents, because they remember that it was what they needed.
Some parents are numb and have to be allowed to be so. Some become very businesslike and want to call everyone. Some need to scream and curse everything and everyone, including God. No one should tell them not to do that; God is strong enough to take it. Who are you to come to God’s defense? They must be allowed to externalize their feelings without being judged. If they are allowed to get it out, you will never have the tragedies that we hear about in our workshops.
A month later, the people who staff the screaming room call the families and ask, “Do you feel like talking?” Because when you are just informed of a murder or a suicide or an accidental death or a coronary or whatever, you are sometimes in a state of shock or numbness. You don’t really think. After all of the relatives have gone home and the funeral is over and the neighbors have stopped cooking and the pastor has stopped visiting, it’s like a defrosting. It’s like it suddenly begins to hit you. “Oh my God, it really is true. He is never going to come home again.” That is when all the questions come up. So they call, and they always ask the same questions: Was he alive when he was found? Was somebody with him? Did somebody hold his hand? You answer their questions, and they thank you. Done this way, grief resolution is much, much faster.
Our research in life after death shows that no human being can die alone. So do not sit on your guilt that you were not with your loved ones at the moment of death, because all of that is irrelevant. The moment you die, you leave your physical body. Anybody you need to be with, you can be with even if they are ten thousand miles away. If I were to die here and think of my sister in Switzerland, I would be there in the split second it takes to think of my sister. No one can die alone.
Say you are in an accident and you shed your physical body. You look down at the scene. You are aware of the accident. You are aware of the blowtorch they are using to extricate your body. You have no pain, no panic, no fear, no anxiety, no grief, and no negative feelings. All you have is a sense of “Wow! A lot of people are working on my body.” Then you realize that you are aware of the resuscitation team, but the resuscitation team is not aware of you.
You begin to become aware not only that you are whole again, but also that you can be anywhere you want to be. That is why dying children send their mommies and daddies home before they die. Because mommies and daddies often lean over the side rail and implicitly or explicitly say, “Honey, don’t die on me. I can’t live without you.” They make the child feel guilty for dying, which makes it very hard to let go. Since the children already know that they can be with Mommy and Daddy anyway, they return to their bodies and say, “Why don’t you go home? Take a shower and rest. I am really all right.” And they are all right. Not the way we want them to be all right, but they are all right. Then the phone call comes. “I’m sorry. Suzy died.” The parents pull their hair out, “Why didn’t we stay another half hour?” Little do they know that Suzy did this in order to let go, knowing that she is going to be with them forever anyway.
You are met by those who preceded you in death — mother, father, grandmother, grandfather. You see first those who you loved the most. A man once said to me, “I have a big problem. My God! I had eight wives.” I hope you understand that problems like this are earthly problems. On the “other side” such problems don’t exist. The only thing that counts is love. My youngest patient was a two-year-old boy from a Catholic family who shared with his mother that he had been in the most beautiful place. He did not want to come back because he was with Jesus and Mary. Mary kept telling him that the time was not right, that he had to go back. He tried to ignore her, which is very typical of any two-year-old. When Mary realized that he would not listen to her, she took him gently by the wrist and said, “Peter, you must go back. You have to save your mommy.” Peter later said, “You know, Mommy, when she told me that, I ran all the way home.” You understand, a Protestant child would not see Mary, and a non-Christian would not see Jesus. You always see first whoever you loved the most.
A woman was hit by a drunk driver. A man stopped and asked if he could help, and she said, “No, there is nothing you can do for me.” Then she said, “On second thought, maybe one day you will go to the reservation. If you do, do me a favor. Find my mother and give her a message. Tell her that I was okay. That I was not only okay but very happy because I am already with my dad.” She died in the arms of this total stranger. The man was so moved that he drove seven hundred miles out of his way to the Native American reservation. He found the mother who told him that her husband had died of an unexpected coronary an hour before the car accident in which the daughter was killed. This case gave me the idea to begin this research.
From then on, I spent a lot of time in hospital intensive care units. I always picked the youngest children who had not been told who else was killed at the scene of the accident, how many parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, or sisters had been killed. Just before these children died, they had a glimpse and were no longer afraid. When you work with people in this condition, you can tell when this takes place. There is a peace and serenity about them.
All I ever say to them is “Is there anything that you can share with me?” A young boy once said, “Everything is okay now. My mommy and Peter are waiting for me.” I knew that his mother had died in the accident, but his brother Peter had not. Peter was badly burned and sent to another hospital. In all the years I have done research in death and dying and life after death, I have never seen a child in this situation make a mistake, so I simply accept that reality. As I was walking out past the nurses’ station, the telephone call came. “Dr. Ross, I just wanted to tell you that Peter died ten minutes ago from his burns.” I naturally say, “Yes, I know,” and they think I’m a kook. Do you understand what I am trying to say to you? Dying is not a nightmare — what we make for one another right here in this life is the nightmare.
There’s a beautiful poem by a woman whose fiancé went to Vietnam, which I will paraphrase for you — “Honey, do you remember when I wanted to go to the beach, and you said, ‘No, it’s going to rain all day’? And I insisted, ‘We are going to the beach.’ And you finally came along and it rained all day. And I thought you were really going to let me have it, but you didn’t. Do you remember when I insisted that we go to that dance but you really didn’t want to go? And I said, ‘We are going to that dance.’ And you came, but I forgot to tell you that it was formal and you came in blue jeans. And I thought you were going to kill me. But you didn’t. Do you remember when I desperately tried to make you jealous by going out with this other guy that you couldn’t stand? And I thought you were going to leave me, but you didn’t. I wanted to tell you all this when you came back from Vietnam, but you didn’t.”
Richard Allen had the same insight after the death of his father with whom he never really communicated. The last few lines of his poem:
When you love, give it everything you’ve got.
And when you have reached your limit, give it more,
and forget the pain of it.
Because as you face your death
it is only the love that you have given and received
which will count,
and all the rest:
the accomplishments, the struggle, the fights
will be forgotten in your reflection.
And if you have loved well
then it will all have been worth it.
And the joy of it will last you until the end.
But if you have not,
death will always come too soon
and be too terrible to face.