The Provocative Beginning of Near-Death-Experience Research
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.
—Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
I can hear my mother wailing, and a whole lot of scraping of chairs. I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely something going on upstairs.
—Nick Cave, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!”
She sipped tea with the rhythm of an addict and ate chocolates the same way. Swiss chocolates, from her homeland, her fingers steadily working, her face going momentarily serene whenever cocoa met tastebud. These small pleasures were essentially all that was left her. The great lady’s world had shrunk along with her tiny frame. She was one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century, shaking hands with dignitaries the world over, accepting not their congratulations but their thanks.
All that was over now. The great lady had diminished with age, like a paper going yellow in the tick of time. She was seventy-eight years old but seemed even older, her skin wrinkled in deep folds, her voice and body weak from a series of strokes that did her in over a period of years.
She knew.
She had seen all this before.
Up close.
But this time, the looming presence in the corner of the room was there for her. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was dying, in an Arizona nursing home, and still, complete strangers came to her. They had been coming for years, people who had been touched by her work in some way and wanted, sometimes with feverish intensity, to meet her. Once, as her friend Fern Welch made her way inside her tiny private room, she found Kübler-Ross beset by two young women, who she remembers literally kneeling on the floor and bowing before Kübler-Ross. Welch made her way around the two prostrate girls to give Kübler-Ross a customary hello kiss. But when she leaned in, the old woman whispered to her, “Please, get them out of here!”
Welch had seen all manner of Kübler-Ross’s fans show up over the years, and shooed the girls away. But this particular episode stayed with her. The irony was so great. Two young girls, venerating an old woman and stealing a portion of the little time and energy she had left. Kübler-Ross died not so long after this in August 2004, culminating a long, public descent.
Most people know Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as the writer and psychologist who wrote On Death and Dying, which remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Published in 1969, her tome’s message was brutally simple: We, as a society, treat our sick and dying loved ones as something less than human. Hospitals relegate terminally ill patients to back rooms, where the specter of illness can be kept out of sight. They enforce short, strict visiting hours, as if to make sure the dying suffer alone. And they strip the sick of their dignity, failing in most cases even to acknowledge the patient’s terminal diagnosis. This description, written in the present tense, appears jarring and somewhat inaccurate today, some forty years later. But at that time Kübler-Ross merely described the world as it stood. She had gone into a hospital to help the sick and found that everyone was ill—that seemingly healthy family members, doctors, and nurses were all victims of the human condition.
Doctors saw the death of their patients as a professional failure, so the terminal diagnosis went unspoken; the nurses felt trapped by this, darting in and out of the room and avoiding eye contact, the better not to give away the truth; and loved ones struggled with what to say. Our symptoms may differ, but the underlying distress is universal. Because, Kübler-Ross wrote, every last person coming into contact with the terminally ill patient is reminded of his or her own mortality. What this means is that we love the dying, pity them, mourn for them, wish to heal them—and hate them, too, for reminding us that one day we also will lie there helpless, flat on our backs till the end. This cocktail of emotions is so potent that Westernized societies, deceived by the seeming omnipotence of modern medicine, tucked the dying out of sight, hiding them behind closed doors, beeping machines, and IV stands—a veil of technology that soothed everyone but the terminally ill.
Kübler-Ross became most famous for outlining five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—stages that subsequent academics have since criticized and amended in various ways. But her real accomplishment was in getting cultures all over the world to openly discuss death—the reality we’d all been busy hiding from. She accomplished this feat in a slim 276 pages. And in so doing, she became the public face of a then-new hospice movement.
It is impossible to quantify the impact Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying had on the world at large, but by any account it was massive. The emotional maelstrom unleashed in the wake of her book literally remade end-of-life care. And today, laypeople still turn the pages of On Death and Dying when there seems nowhere left to go. Medical programs still list her as required reading. And in brief newspaper and magazine summations of Kübler-Ross’s life, her story often seems to end there, in about 1974, on the heels of her greatest professional achievement. But she lived for roughly thirty more years. And for our purposes, the real entry point into her life story is the subsequent turn she took into the paranormal. In 1975, in fact, she put her then impeccable reputation on the line by penning the forward to Raymond Moody’s Life After Life—literally the first book ever written about near-death experiences (NDEs).
By now, the lore of the near-death experience is well known: The tunnel, the light, the life review, the reunion with loved ones. But in 1975 the term NDE had never previously been used, so the press and academia both were shocked at Kübler-Ross’s involvement. The story was clear enough for every reporter to see: the brave lady who asked us not to shrink from the reality of death suddenly suggesting death may not exist at all. There is much to be learned from this twist in the life story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Perhaps most important, venturing into these realms is dangerous—to our reputations and relationships, to our filter for what’s real and what’s fiction.
By 1980, in fact, the same woman who cried “Bullshit” about Western medicine had succumbed to bullshit of another flavor: she was consulting mediums who claimed to channel spirits of deceased loved ones and “higher entities.” She hosted New Age–themed spiritual retreats for widows. Her husband left her and became the main caretaker to their children. Her most prized medium proved fraudulent. Kübler-Ross’s fall from grace became a running gag in the media, her life story ballooning into something too vast and complicated to be captured by any single narrative. Her son, Ken Ross, minds her legacy now—the foundation formed in her name. And he knows, up close, how hard it is to pull together a coherent story about his mother. He says HBO has spent years trying to develop a movie based on his mother’s life. Numerous screenwriters have come and gone, none delivering a workable biography. “My mother’s life was complicated,” says Ross. “They told me they couldn’t figure out which story to write.”
But the Kübler-Ross story isn’t only hard for screenwriters to encapsulate. It’s hard for all human beings—or at least those of us with normal, functioning brains. We are, as a species, neurologically uncomfortable with ambiguity. Imaging studies of the human brain in action demonstrate that the fussy little onboard computers in our skulls send out anxiety messages when confronted by conflicting or confusing information. As a consequence, we have a natural, internal impetus to settle on an interpretation that removes any perceived conflict.
If we’re not cognizant of our own biases, this probably means choosing an interpretation that preserves our current worldview and disregards contrary evidence, replacing the accuracy of I don’t know with the false certainty that we do. So, how do we reconcile the brave, passionate, hardnosed pragmatist who taught us about death with the New Age queen who lost so much over her commitment to a psychic? Well, according to the people closest to Kübler-Ross, and just as modern neuroscience would predict, we don’t. We see her as the great lady. Or we see her as a crank. We bow to her memory. Or we smirk at the mention of her name.
“People tend to see Elisabeth as they want to see her,” says Rose Winters, a friend of Kübler-Ross. “It’s hard for those of us who knew her. Because people don’t acknowledge all of her. They don’t see her as she really was.”
We see her, it appears, in much the same way we see the paranormal (or the political), as if we only have two choices: to passionately embrace or hotly reject. But there is a messier, truer view, one we need to draw closer to if we are to understand her, or even ourselves, let alone the paranormal.
ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS WAS BORN in Zurich, Switzerland, on July 8, 1926, the first to emerge among triplets. She weighed just two pounds and was not expected to survive. As a child, perhaps mindful of her own early frailty, the young Elisabeth Kübler nursed any injured animal she found, including a crow she fed and protected till it was strong enough to fly away. She defended weaker kids from schoolyard bullies. And she even bounced a book of psalms off the head of a preacher who had unfairly punished one of her sisters. Though she was later typified as a New Age faerie queen, the truth is she was a bit more like Keith Richards—a rebel by any accounting.
She first rebelled against her father, an assistant director of Zurich’s biggest office supply company. “He had dark brown eyes that saw only two possibilities in life,” his daughter would later write. “His way and the wrong way.”
In the chauvinistic Switzerland of the early 1940s, her dream of being a doctor was considered just that. And one night her father sat her down to talk about her future. She was so responsible, he said, so capable, he thought she would make a fine . . . secretary.
“You will work in my office,” he told her. But the thought of being stuck in his boring office, following his boring orders, and furthering the aims of the boring office supply industry, rather than doctoring, made Elisabeth Kübler half-nuts. “No, thank you!” she told him.
His counteroffer? “Then find work,” he said, “as a maid.”
Having no other means to support herself, she did just that. And in the ensuing years, she made her own way in the world. She left home, attended medical school, and met her husband—an American med student named Manny Ross. Her gender shaped her path. After she moved with Manny to America and became pregnant, the only residency program that would have her was the one she didn’t want: psychiatry.
Still, they needed the money. So she took a position at the Manhattan State Mental Hospital, working in a small unit with schizophrenic women. The head nurse allowed her cats to freely roam the ward, pissing and defecating among the patients. The entire asylum carried the ammonia stink of cat urine. And patients were punished for showing signs of their mental illness—beaten with sticks, subjected to electroshock treatments, and experimented upon with drugs like LSD and mescaline. “What did I know about psychiatry?” Kübler-Ross later wrote. “Nothing. But I knew about life and I opened myself up to the misery, loneliness and fear these patients felt. If they talked to me, I talked back. If they shared their feelings, I listened and replied.”
She was already opening herself up to the role she would play to the dying: the woman who shared their burdens and received their woes. But psychiatry never felt right to her until she and Manny moved to Denver for hospital positions. There, a colleague asked her to fill in and deliver a two-hour lecture he couldn’t make. She cast around for a subject. She hunkered down in the library. She walked the hospital halls, wondering what topic would be suitable for a general audience of medical students and residents in various specialties. The answer came to her at home, as she stared into a pile of dying leaves, rake in hand. At the time, in 1964, death was not really a hot topic in medicine. In fact, when Kübler-Ross went back to the library to see what was available on the psychology of dying she found precious little: a single, dense, academic psychoanalytic treatise; some sociological studies on death rituals across cultures. She realized she would need to do her own research. But for her talk, she spoke only for the first hour. Then, during the break, she retrieved a patient she met in the hospital’s wards: a sixteen-year-old girl who was dying of leukemia. When the students returned, Kübler-Ross explained the girl’s terminal condition and opened the floor to questions. No one raised a hand. So she called on students, requiring them to come to the stage and think of a question.
These were med students. They asked about the girl’s blood count, the size of her liver, her chemotherapy trials. The girl grew furious and began talking, unbidden, about what it was like to be sixteen and given only a few weeks to live; what it was like to never go on a date or have a husband; and how she was coping with it all. When she was finally wheeled from the room, the audience sat in heavy, dumbfounded silence. And gently, in her soft, Swiss accent, Kübler-Ross diagnosed what troubled them. Your reaction is a product of your own mortality, she told them, which the girl forced you to confront.
In this sense, they had not been looking at a sixteen-year-old girl at all. They had been looking into a mirror. The experience was so powerful that Kübler-Ross stopped questioning her own commitment to psychiatry. And when she and Manny subsequently moved to Chicago, she took a position at Billings Hospital, which was affiliated with the University of Chicago, and began her mission: to reconcile the world of the dying with that of the living. She grew famous for her efforts. But what is less well known is that during her years in Chicago many strange things happened to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And she also found an unlikely professional companion.
The Reverend Mwalimu Imara (then named Renford Gaines) was assigned to Kübler-Ross by the hospital’s administration, almost as a kind of bodyguard. No one thought she would be the victim of actual violence. But the academic seminars she began on the topic of death and dying caused great controversy in the hospital’s halls, so Imara, one of the hospital’s chaplains, walked alongside Kübler-Ross as a sign she was not alone. She had the administration’s support. The truth is, Imara wasn’t that experienced himself yet, certainly not in the duties he’d be attending to beside Kübler-Ross. And he watched as her colleagues lied to her, again and again. “I am here,” she would say, “to meet with your dying patients.”
“No one here,” she was told, “is dying.”
No doubt, they thought they were doing the right thing. They thought it better for the patient not to discuss what was happening. No matter. She could read a patient’s chart like any other doctor and found the terminal for herself. Imara still remembers watching Kübler-Ross attend the first patient they ever visited together. The woman sat alone in the dark, perched on the edge of her bed. Uneaten food rotted on a stack of trays left on a nearby table. Kübler-Ross pulled up a chair and sat down across from the woman. “And how are things going for you?” she asked.
The patient, her head down the entire time, finally looked up at Kübler-Ross. “I’m hungry,” she said.
Kübler-Ross stood, opened the blinds, and called the nursing staff down the hall. “Get this woman fed,” she said. “Help her eat.”
The next day, Kübler-Ross returned to the woman’s room. The blinds were still open. The uneaten food had been thrown away. The woman looked fitter. Kübler-Ross sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, and the woman smiled. The two ladies sat like that for a long time, grinning at each other. “Now,” Imara told me, “just multiply that moment by hundreds or thousands of other moments just like it.”
For Imara, bearing witness to scenes like these transformed his position alongside Kübler-Ross from assigned functionary to more than willing collaborator.
The terminally ill were being neglected. They sat alone in their rooms waiting for the culmination of a death sentence that had never been formally pronounced. And as Imara puts it, “hurricane Elisabeth Kübler-Ross” helped them to go on living as best they could manage until they did die. This meant reconciling relationships, acknowledging their feelings, and finding what joys they could. Most of the hospital’s professional staff allied themselves against these efforts. Some doctors and nurses accused Kübler-Ross of ghoulishness. One nurse asked the psychologist if she enjoyed telling a twenty-year-old man he was dying. The signs advertising her seminars were torn down. But Kübler-Ross seemed to gain strength from the opposition. She recognized the resistance she faced as a symptom of the illness she treated.
And together, she and Imara didn’t just challenge the medical establishment. They sat by the bedsides of people who described incredible happenings: I left my body, I floated up to the ceiling, I saw the doctors resuscitate me. While their bodies lay below, in distress, they rose above them and felt an overwhelming sensation of peace. There was more, much more, and these patients wanted someone to tell them they weren’t crazy. But at this point in her life, Kübler-Ross not only disbelieved in organized religion, she viewed death like most Western doctors. Death meant the end—the terminus of termini, the obliteration of all possible beginnings. Even Imara, the reverend, was unprepared for these near-death tales. Many if not most sects of Christianity accept the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus but disavow paranormal happenings in our time. And here they were, what Imara calls the “Mutt and Jeff team,” hearing classic near-death experiences years before anyone had coined the phrase, years before the phenomenon was widely known. These stories suggested death was merely a gateway from one existence to another, from one incarnation to a newer, more profound one.
The stories told by children were often the most incredible—and consistent. “So many kids would start telling these stories, in the days before they died, about spirits visiting them,” said Imara. “Some drew pictures recording the date and time of their deaths.”
One girl told Kübler-Ross she had withheld an NDE from her mother because “I don’t want to tell mommy there is a nicer home than ours.”
Kübler-Ross sat by the bedside of one boy who was dying in the aftermath of an accident. “Everything is all right now,” the boy told her. “Peter and my mother are already waiting for me.”
Kübler-Ross knew the boy’s mother was dead, but thought his brother, Peter, was still alive. Peter had suffered serious burns in the accident and been taken to another hospital. She left the room about ten minutes later and was stopped on her way past the nurses’ station. There was a phone call for her, from a nurse at the hospital where Peter had been taken. “Dr. Ross,” the nurse said, “we just wanted to tell you that Peter died ten minutes ago.”
To the skeptically minded, this is all meaningless—an anecdote captured under noncontrolled conditions and interpreted according to the belief that such a thing as life after death is even remotely possible. But Kübler-Ross was no pie-eyed believer. Her only real concern, like that of most people, was with what she saw in front of her—not the dead, but the dying. “We weren’t looking for this,” says Imara. “It was just happening, again and again, to us.”
Once, Imara looked in, by himself, on a little girl dying of leukemia. She had been visited, she said, by a man she didn’t recognize. He wasn’t a doctor. He had been dressed in civilian clothes. Imara did his best not to upset the girl. But inside he felt anxious. Somehow, hospital security had lapsed. Somehow, a stranger had spent time alone with an exceedingly vulnerable little girl. Imara stayed near the girl’s room until her parents arrived, then intercepted them before they could go inside. “Your daughter is fine,” he told them. “But there is something I’d like to talk to you about.”
With Kübler-Ross accompanying him, he led the parents into a large conference room. “The hospital will make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said, “but someone came in to see your daughter. A man. He didn’t hurt her. He was apparently very kind. Hospital staff will be on the lookout.”
Her parents looked understandably upset, until Imara relayed the girl’s description of her visitor. Then, the girl’s mother got . . . interested. The description matched that of her own brother, the girl’s uncle, who had died before the girl was born. Even the description of his clothing matched what her uncle had been wearing at the time of his death. The scene quickly shifted to the little girl’s room, where her mother had her repeat her story. Imara says that, after multiple strange happenings like these, he and Kübler-Ross agreed to start taking notes not just on the psychological impact of death and dying but the weird stuff, too. “In her office,” he said, “she filled a couple of deep filing cabinet drawers just with stories like these. And when we could, we corroborated them.”
One of the most intriguing stories was that of Mrs. Schwartz, who appears and reappears rather dramatically in the tale of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A middle-aged mother with Hodgkin’s disease, Schwartz went into cardiac arrest in the hospital as she was being wheeled off an elevator. Imara was among the people who witnessed the scene. Her clothes were stripped off to give doctors access to her body. A med student stood by and took notes, a dispassionate act Imara says was designed so early med students could have something to do when real doctoring was necessary.
Doctors successfully revived Schwartz. And she later told Kübler-Ross and Imara how the scene had looked to her, from the position she assumed after her heart stopped—out of her body, up near the ceiling. She accurately described the resuscitation efforts and comments made by the people at the scene. She claimed she floated behind the med student and even looked at his notes. He had drawn doodles at the top of the page, she said, and she described those, too.
Skeptical, Imara retrieved the student’s notebook and looked for himself. Mrs. Schwartz’s description matched—right down to the doodles.
Imara says Kübler-Ross was “knocked from her moorings” by these strange events. And all the ordinary explanations they could dream up couldn’t account for all of the weirdness.
As time passed, word had spread about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s death and dying seminars. Life magazine printed an extensive profile of her. Book publishers came calling. And Kübler-Ross began work on the book that would become On Death and Dying. By this time, Kübler-Ross had accumulated enough stories about NDEs and deathbed visitations that she was giving serious consideration to publishing them along with her famous psychological stages.
In fact, according to Imara, in its original incarnation, Kübler-Ross wrote a concluding chapter to On Death and Dying in which she detailed numerous near-death experiences. She wrote that her research had suggested something extraordinary, comforting—and beautiful: at the very end, after the tremendous emotional and physical pain associated with death, there may be another life to live, another plane of existence to visit.
As might be expected, given the closeness of their professional relationship, she asked Imara to give the manuscript one last look. Manny and the children were asleep, so it was just the two of them up late at night in her house, going over manuscript pages, patching in quotes, and tweaking sentences. But the most important conversation of the evening was about the last chapter.
The room was filled with smoke from Kübler-Ross’s cigarette addiction, Imara remembers. And they had long since moved on from tea to whiskey sours. “Do I put this chapter in?” asked Kübler-Ross.
“Not if you want it published,” replied Imara. “You don’t tell them about the kid on the second floor who spoke to his dead sister. You don’t talk about getting into someone’s house, after they died, and finding a picture he drew with a map and a clock, of the exact time and place of his death. You don’t do it. That shit will not fly.”
Kübler-Ross was already taking on an incredibly taboo topic: death. The idea that she might end a book that already challenged the biases of the powerful medical profession with an oh by the way chapter, suggesting the possibility of an afterlife, would have been way, way too much. Her entire life’s work would have been dismissed. And in her last chapter she would have given people the means with which to attack her. So fraught is our relationship to the paranormal that Kübler-Ross was forced to consider self-censorship.
The house was quiet, and so were they. This was a pivotal discussion, and both of them knew it. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was not someone who routinely cared what cultural or political forces were at play. She only cared about what she took to be the truth. But in this case, the stakes were so high, the suffering she had seen among her patients so great, she agreed. She would hang on to this chapter. She would put these tales of the dying on a shelf.
That night was perhaps the most crucial of Kübler-Ross’s professional life, and in the lives of millions of people with terminally ill family members all over the world whose lives would be changed for the better by her book. Because that night Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did what was, in this instance, the right thing. She consigned the paranormal to the dark.
THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE IS a phenomenon associated with the paranormal, but it is the product, in its modern incarnation, of science. It is no coincidence that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross started hearing these remarkable stories so often in the mid-1960s. It was in 1963 that CPR was first widely publicized and adopted, allowing doctors to save more critical patients than ever. The unexpected result was a boom in reports of an experience that had been rare but nonetheless described for millennia.
The Greco-Roman historian Plutarch related the story of Aridaeus of Soli, who “died” after a fall and came back with a story to tell. He reported traveling to other realms and meeting with a younger relative who had already died. His personality changed so much after his NDE, and so much for the better, that his name was changed to Thespesius, which meant “divine” or “wonderful.” This is a particularly interesting detail, given that modern day NDErs, as they’re known, routinely change their lifestyles for the better.
Thomas De Quincey included the following account in Confessions of an English Opium Eater: “I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.”
In the 1887 book Euthanasia or Medical treatment in the Aid of Easy Dying, Dr. William Munk quotes an Admiral Beaufort of the British Navy: “The whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.”
There are several reasons these accounts, and the NDE, have gained a kind of traction among scientists. Number one, the number of people reporting the phenomena is impressive. Studies show that roughly 6 to 12 percent of cardiac arrest victims report NDEs, and though particulars vary wildly, the general character of the NDE—the arc of the narrative—remains the same across accounts. Radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long gathered more than 1,600 NDEs, which he analyzed in a bestselling book. He identifies twelve recurring elements of the NDE, including the sensation of leaving the body, heightened sensory ability, intense and generally positive emotions, encountering a brilliant light, mystical beings and/or deceased loved ones, passing through a tunnel and visiting other realms, and undergoing a life review. These are commonly discussed in media accounts, but perhaps most intriguing, many NDErs also report feeling that time and space as we know them have ceased to exist. Thus, their life review seems to take place in an instant, yet they are aware of each event as it flashes before their eyes.
Long’s breakdown of the NDE seems most relevant, for our purposes, because it is the newest and arguably the most comprehensive and because his results don’t differ markedly from most other surveys. The relative consistency across accounts is usually regarded, among believers, as indicative that one central phenomenon is at work here. Skeptics, of course, focus on the differences among people’s stories. But there are two things I find compelling: in our culture, the NDE itself is an orphan—entirely unwanted by those at the extreme poles of belief and unbelief. Skeptics are inclined against the NDE representing any objective reality. Fundamentalist Christians often deny it any veracity on the grounds that it presents the possibility of an afterlife steeped in a nondogmatic, irreligious spirituality.
The problem, for those of us in the middle, is that these polarized views tend to obscure what might be most important about the NDE: its impact. In sum, whatever happens in an NDE, experiencers tend to react to it in much the same way. The vast majority take the experience to be real, and they change. They more greatly value their families and friends. They become less materialistic. Most remarkably, they no longer fear death.
In other words, NDE research confirms what Kübler-Ross experienced in her own journey through the halls at the Chicago hospital: people who undergo some kind of near-death experience feel a sense of contentment. For them, death looms as a kind of spiritual eject button, separating them from their living friends and families yet popping them out into an infinitely more expansive existence.
This last fact lends the NDE real heft. If this is an illusion, it is one that is irrefutably important to nearly everyone who experiences it. This also gives psychologists something real and measurable to work with. The historical accounts provide further verification, corroborating the NDE across centuries and millennia as an experience endemic to humans—and not borne from the power of suggestion.
I reached out to a former military nurse, a retired colonel named Diane Corcoran. She first encountered the NDE phenomenon in the late 1960s and early ’70s, in Vietnam soldiers, well before Raymond Moody’s bestseller. Corcoran is career Army, and in our conversation she spoke with the matter-of-fact authority of a lifelong member of the military. In 1969, while serving in Vietnam, she tried, like Kübler-Ross, to make herself a receptive ear to all the wounded soldiers on her ward. But one day, a soldier told her about the accident that left his body wrecked. He had been knocked unconscious, yet he remembered it all. Because after he was struck by a moving vehicle, he left his body and looked down on himself. He saw other soldiers come running to help him, or his body, anyway, which lay still far beneath him. Then he saw a tunnel nearby, floated toward it, and peered down its length. He hovered there, seemingly between two worlds, certain that whatever happened to the husk of him below, he was going to be all right. Corcoran listened to the soldier and blinked dumbly. “At first I said nothing,” she remembers. “It seemed like the smartest thing to do. I mean, I just didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.”
But then she understood something else: the soldier was at once convinced of the reality of what he had undergone and worried that other people would think he was crazy. He needed her validation. He needed her to honor the importance of what he had gone through. And so she said, with supreme understatement, “That must have been an incredible experience.”
The skepticism these early experiencers encountered suppressed any widespread public knowledge of the phenomenon for quite a while—at least six years that we know of, by my count, given that Kübler-Ross herself wrote a chapter on the subject before deciding it best served the world gathering dust. It is, of course, impossible to determine the number of people who decided to shut their mouths and keep the white light to themselves. But it’s not hard to understand why. Debates on the paranormal often break down in rancor, which is surprising because in an epistemological sense this might be one riddle to which we can never really know the answer.
Death is, by definition, the end of life. Anyone who tells us about the death experience is very much alive, rendering their view of the afterlife, one way or the other, suspect. Further, materialist arguments can only be so authoritative on the subject. What happens to a person’s consciousness after death can be pondered, imagined, or hypothesized, but not directly observed or measured. The thought that consciousness is purely a product or epiphenomenon of the brain is the mainstream scientific view. But the truth is, as we’ll see in chapter 3, the source and nature of consciousness remains an unsolved mystery. There are numerous aspects of the NDE that can be studied by science, but what happens when we die still seems a subject most closely associated with philosophy.
This strikes me as rather obvious. I only bring it up because so many people seem to forget it. And I believe that if we remember our own inability to deliver a definitive vision of what lies beyond death, we might find ourselves a little less threatened by others’ opinions. Welcome to reality: you don’t know what happens when you die, and the person arguing with you doesn’t know either. Some people don’t seem to care for an afterlife. Me? I’d like to believe in an afterlife. My mother has died; so have my oldest brother and a dear brother-in-law. But I’m also not interested in fooling myself.
My mother’s death is, in part, what drew me into investigating Kübler-Ross. As my mother slowly succumbed to a long-term illness, nothing at all paranormal happened. But I did receive the benefit of Kübler-Ross’s work, rereading On Death and Dying over a couple of difficult days. The story she tells of a farmer is the one that haunted me. The farmer she describes took his beloved wife to a big city hospital in the hope of saving her. He wanted to spend every minute with her. He wanted to sit beside her during the day and sleep with her at night. But he was not allowed to stay in the intensive care unit for more than five minutes an hour. He took what he could get, coming and going under orders, staring at his wife’s white face and holding her hand till he was told to leave. In contrast, nearly forty years later, my family was allowed to stay with my mother everywhere, and at all times—when she was in a private room, and when she was in intensive care.
My father, married to my mother for fifty years, issued a simple order. “Your mother asked that she never be left alone,” he said. “So that’s it. We’re not going to leave her alone.”
And we didn’t. She had a family member by her side in the hospital, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. My father logged the vast majority of hours with her. The nurses and doctors were so taken with his dedication that they eventually put my mother in a private room and made a bed next to her for my father to sleep in.
I spent comparatively few nights there—two per week. But one night, toward the end, a nurse’s aide woke me. “I had to meet you,” she said. “I’ve met the husband, and the daughters. Now I had to meet the son. Your family’s dedication is amazing.”
I think of the old man Kübler-Ross described who could not stay with his wife for any extended period of time and feel so tremendously grateful that at the end we were able to spend this time with my mother. On maybe the most emotional of those days, my sister Karen and I spent an hour or two sitting on either side of my mother’s bed. My father had recently discovered the hospital television included an easy listening music channel. I can’t remember what song was playing. But we sat on either side of my mother, each holding one of her hands. My mother sang a little. Her voice was weak. She asked Karen to sing for her. As Karen’s voice rose, my mother closed her eyes. She smiled. “Isn’t this cozy?” she said. “Isn’t this nice? We’d never have done this if we were home.”
She repeated that last fact a couple of times. And although her medication usually made her drop off to sleep within a few minutes, she stayed awake for nearly half an hour that night. “Don’t fight,” she said suddenly. “Life’s too short. Don’t ruin it by fighting.”
Our family house, like so many, was not always peaceful—a subject my mother had never addressed. To have her mention it at all, saying no more words than necessary, released a tension built over many decades. She hung on to our hands. She fell asleep, smiling. This was the kind of moment Kübler-Ross sought to facilitate by encouraging medical staff and families and the sick to acknowledge the predicament they faced and settle their unfinished business.
Had Kübler-Ross not decided to focus her book purely on the end of life, rather than the afterlife, it’s possible my family and countless others would have suffered far more difficult experiences than we did. Kübler-Ross may even have been fated to obscurity. That said, I think it’s high time we—believers and unbelievers alike—acknowledge what we do know for sure about the NDE: right now, the ultimate conclusion we each choose to draw seems based more in the vision of the world we bring to the data rather than the data itself. Believers applaud the researchers who conclude there is an afterlife; skeptics celebrate those who decide the NDE is the product of brain function. I argue that, in many cases, the data merely become a means of landing ourselves in the world we most wish or expect to see.
By Jeffrey Long’s count, at this time skeptics have put forth no less than twenty explanations for the NDE. The number, I think, has ventured so high because people report NDEs at times when they were physically dying, and times when they weren’t dying; at times when they were merely in fear of death, and at times when they felt no fear at all; at times when they were under general anesthetic or some cocktail of drugs, and at times when they were completely unfettered by pharmaceuticals. Skeptics, then, are searching for some singular explanation or combination of explanations that can occur in various states of consciousness, yet each trigger an NDE.
It has been speculated numerous times that some medication administered by hospital staff helps produce the NDE. But thus far, no clear correlation has been found between the use of recreational or medicinal drugs and NDE incidents. Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand-born psychiatrist, has argued for a connection between these mystical flights and the drug ketamine. But ketamine is an ass-kicker of a narcotic with profound dissociative effects; while it can lead to experiences similar to the NDE, it can also lead to myriad other sensations—trippy happenings, feelings of falling, even psychotic experiences. Intriguingly, though Jansen started as a skeptic, ascribing purely material theories to the phenomenon, he has come to believe both ketamine use and NDEs may represent a glimpse at a larger, more fundamental reality. But there seems to be some fundamental difference between the two trips, so ketamine, at this point, looms more as an idea than an explanation.
Dr. G. M. Woerlee has claimed that NDEs during resuscitation are produced by cardiac massage, which he says can produce enough blood flow to the brain to allow consciousness. But as we’ll see in a moment, it seems unlikely that the amount of blood flow generated by CPR is sufficient to sustain consciousness at a high enough level for the brain to formulate the orderly, vivid experiences associated with an NDE. We can best view that, however, through the lens of the perhaps most publicized skeptical theory, which belongs to U.K. psychologist Susan Blackmore. She delivered the real poison pen letter for NDEs in her book Dying to Live; I focus on her version of events because most modern debunkings of the NDE originate with her “dying brain hypothesis.”
Blackmore is an elegant writer who makes her case over the broad length of a book. But her argument can be summarized rather quickly: in short, a lack of oxygen, known medically as anoxia, results in a narrowing of vision, fading first at the edges, that would create the illusion of a tunnel and light. Further, endorphins released at the time of death, under stress, might serve as the source of euphoria associated with NDEs. Accurate perceptions made while “out of body” are created out of memory, expectation, and the sensory detail accumulated before consciousness was lost. A sensation of timelessness is created by our loss of a sense of self as the brain breaks down.
Dying to Live stands as the most comprehensive argument anyone has launched against the NDE as a window on the afterlife. That said, some of Blackmore’s key points don’t stand up well under scrutiny. A number of medical doctors have conducted their own research into NDEs. Sam Parnia, Michael Sabom, and Jeffrey Long have all written books on the subject, and Parnia, as do others, notes that many people who report NDEs aren’t lacking for oxygen at the time. Perhaps even more damaging to Blackmore’s case, in his book What Happens When We Die?, Parnia writes, “If the dying brain theory were correct, then I would expect that as the oxygen levels in patients’ blood dropped, they would gradually develop the illusion of seeing a tunnel and/or a light. In practice, patients with low oxygen levels don’t report seeing a light, a tunnel or any of the typical features of an NDE; and, in fact, this experience has never been reported by any other doctor or scientific study as a feature of a lack of oxygen.”
While Blackmore focuses much of her attention on the subject’s experiencing a lack of oxygen, her explanation falls apart most readily in that very instance (the same goes for Woerlee’s cardiac massage theory). According to Parnia, “Memory loss is so closely associated with any insult to the brain, whether from a blow or a lack of oxygen, that the degree of memory loss is used as a diagnostic tool to assess the severity of the brain damage.”
Such memory loss usually encompasses a period of time from minutes to days or even weeks before losing and after regaining consciousness. So even if people were regaining awareness as chest compressions were administered, they still seem deeply unlikely to report anything at all or at best fragmented memories. Yet people who undergo NDEs enjoy seemingly complete recall. Further, numerous studies have also shown that their recollections of what happened during their resuscitation are incredibly accurate. Conversely, when patients with no claimed out-of-body experience are asked to describe their resuscitation—even if that means guessing—they get it wrong. Television hospital dramas, it seems, are no substitute for being there. But there is another subtler yet important point that I think gets lost in the debate.
The real mystery is what happens to human consciousness after death—our memories, perceptions, and sense of self. Skeptics who adhere to a physical or materialist worldview argue that consciousness is purely a product of the brain. When the brain in my skull dies, so do “I.” But the NDE has ultimately forced skeptics into adopting, unwittingly, the same position as believers: the NDE occurs independently of the brain.
Skeptics, more than forty years after Kübler-Ross declined to publish her own accounting of the NDE, are essentially arguing that the same experience can be had both with and without any number of drugs; in or out of the death state; and with or without a lack of oxygen—the same experience irrespective of whatever circumstances the brain might find itself in. This makes no sense from a materialist perspective. Drugs, anesthesia, a lack of oxygen, the flood of chemicals released by the brain after the heart stops beating—all these factors have known affects on the nature and quality of brain function. Skeptics, no doubt aware of this, often contend that many of the experiences lumped together under the umbrella term “NDE” are somehow different from one another. But thus far, they have failed to produce data that comprehensively demonstrate how the NDE takes on predictable, quantifiable changes in content and character, concurrent with the state of the body and brain.
Materialists take heart. This doesn’t mean there is an afterlife. But it does mean the source of the NDE remains a mystery and could yet be proven an illusion or reality. Something is at work here, but what? I argue that, at the moment, we don’t know. We understand far too little about the experience, and the reports of experiencers yield far too little actionable data for anyone to firmly conclude the NDE represents a real glimpse of the afterlife. But as yet we have no firm materialist theory to explain the NDE away.
So where does this leave us?
Well, as noted metaphysician and philosopher Terence McKenna put it, in a Wired interview conducted shortly before his own passing, all argument about our mortality comes to naught. Death remains the vast black hole of biology: “Once you go over that event horizon, no messages can be passed back. It represents a limit case in the thermodynamics of information. So what is it?”
It hurts, I think, for all of us—believers and skeptics alike—to admit it. But in answer to McKenna’s question, all we can say is, We don’t know. The black hole is just . . . black. We can, however, learn something about ourselves by taking a look at how we react to all these arguments. And we can best begin to glimpse this insight, I think, by looking at a powerful modern example of both skeptics and believers seeing only what they want and expect to see.
The occasion was a 2004 study conducted by Willoughby Britton, then working on a doctoral thesis in psychology at the University of Arizona. Britton had been reading about theoretical connections between epilepsy and paranormal experience. Some epileptics report they hear heavenly music or have religious visions just prior to seizure (though this happens far more rarely than skeptics would have us believe). The seizures themselves are triggered by mass firings of neurons in the temporal lobe, so Britton thought she might look for a connection there with NDEs.
She knew this sort of research was fraught with implications for her career, all of them bad. “The paranormal isn’t supposed to be discussed,” she says now. “It isn’t supposed to be studied.”
She brought the idea to her supervisor, thinking he would shoot her down. But to her surprise, he agreed. “I’ve made my reputation,” he told her. “What are they going to do to me?”
Britton’s idea was to find people who had experienced NDEs and monitor their brain activity overnight. In the end, she found just twenty-three subjects—not, by her own estimation, a large enough sample size to render her study authoritative but enough to start developing a picture. She also enlisted twenty people who had not undergone NDEs, or any life-threatening events, as controls. She believed that people who had undergone NDEs might show the same altered brain firing patterns as people with temporal lobe epilepsy. And five of her subjects did show these altered firing patterns. None of them were in fact epileptic, but they did display sudden spikes of neuronal activity. In the average population, according to Britton, the researchers might well have turned up no one with such abnormal brain activity, but among those who experienced NDEs they had found five—or 22 percent.
That meant her findings were, from a statistical perspective, highly significant. Still, she also knew her study’s limitations: a small sample size, conducted over just one night, with no baseline reading for the people who had undergone NDEs. Without knowing what their brain activity looked like before the experiences, it’s impossible to know what was cause and what was effect. “I thought the study suggested it would be worthwhile to conduct further research,” she says today. “I thought it suggested there might be some link between the temporal lobe and the experience. But I also thought it was a pretty humble study.”
She was shocked at the attention she received, which included articles in the New York Times and Discover. She also didn’t expect that people would interpret her work to be so authoritative, precisely because she knew it wasn’t. “I guess, usually, you’ll find scientists arguing for the importance of their research,” she says. “But people really went overboard with this.”
They went overboard in arguing for her study’s significance, and worse, seemed to interpret her findings in a peculiarly biased fashion. Britton thought both the Discover and Times articles “subjected the people in my study to being told they were dysfunctional.”
This was deeply ironic. Because in the psychological questionnaire Britton gave all her participants, those who experienced NDEs rated more highly than the controls on measures of “active coping.” What this means is that people who experienced NDEs were more likely to handle life’s problems directly—without waiting for time, someone else, or a miracle to do it for them. They were, in comparison to the control subjects who had no NDEs, more optimistic and aggressive in their approach to building the lives they wanted. From my perspective, however, as a reporter, I can understand why these stories turned out as they did. The default position for media covering the paranormal is gentle, learned skepticism. In these media formulations, the NDE isn’t a profound life-changing experience but an abnormal firing of neurons. And people who experience NDEs are to be characterized in kind.
But what most stunned Britton were the letters she received afterward. “I got letters from people who told me, ‘Thank you so much for proving the Near Death Experience is real,’ ” she says, even though she felt she had done no such thing. “And I also got letters from people, including colleagues, scientists, saying ‘Thank you for proving there is no afterlife and religious belief is a brain disorder.’ ”
Of course, she hadn’t studied religious belief at all. But to some people all paranormal claims are supernatural claims—and both belong in the same dust basket. So in this instance, even scientists weren’t immune to seeing things in Britton’s study that weren’t there.
We could choose to see the fallout from Britton’s research as evidence of all that divides us. Some of us believe in the paranormal and see it in every coincidence. Some of us believe in a strictly materialist interpretation of the universe and see believers in the paranormal as retreating into comforting superstitions. But I believe Britton’s study didn’t reveal a fissure in our society—or at least, she didn’t just reveal a fissure. I think what she revealed is a stunning point of relatedness.
Believers and skeptics alike tend to look at the paranormal and see what they want to see; they look at the paranormal and see a reflection of their own worldviews. And so what she calls her “humble study” and her “agnostic data” becomes confirmation in the eye of a passionate beholder. Whatever it is they’re passionate about.
We should hover over this fact for a good, long while. We are, each and every one of us, just trying to get from day to day as best we can, with as little pain as possible. In this deep and abiding similarity, we each fight to maintain our worldviews. And we become irrational in various areas of life, from the paranormal to politics. In the year after President Barack Obama’s election, in fact, polls were conducted that showed both Democrats and Republicans held withering opinions of each other’s presidents. Big chunks of the Democratic electorate believed George W. Bush had some foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and allowed them to happen. An even higher percentage of Republicans believed Obama to be a socialist, questioned his citizenship, and wanted to see him impeached. Nevermind the facts. When someone advances an idea inconsistent with our own worldview, we don’t just disagree—we start painting a mental picture of the person we oppose as somehow deficient, all higgledy-piggledy in the temporal lobes, perhaps, or just an outright villain.
And the beat goes on.
Just as I was finishing this manuscript, a study was released in which a small correlation was found between elevated carbon dioxide levels and the occurrence of NDEs. The study sparked headlines of the “NDEs Explained” variety. But anyone who has reviewed the literature can immediately recognize this research as a total outlier. Number one, the sample size was just eleven people, and their CO2 levels were only slightly elevated—in fact, scuba divers can have similar carbon dioxide levels, but they don’t go around claiming they swam their way to God. More important, numerous studies had already found that there is no apparent link between an NDE and heightened levels of carbon dioxide.
Jeff Wise, a science reporter for Psychology Today, was among those who wrote enthusiastically about this new carbon dioxide study, claiming it as an explanation for the NDE. Alex Tsakiris invited him on his podcast, Skeptiko, to discuss why he granted so much authority to research with so little actual weight. For the most part, the discussion was completely cordial. But toward the end, after Tsakiris had gently schooled Wise for about twenty minutes, the reporter broke in with a question of his own. “Are you,” he asked Tsakiris, “a creationist?”
His implication was clear: anyone arguing that the NDE remains unexplained must not believe in evolution, must be anti-science. And that pretty much captures the tenor of the debate between believers and skeptics, each side harboring ill opinions of the other, each side making strange assumptions about the other’s beliefs.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross made history by initially avoiding such debates altogether. But before long, she would be drawn into them. And the personal consequences she suffered were tremendous.
WHEN ON DEATH AND DYING was published, the changes in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s life came quickly. She had written an unlikely bestseller, a book that became, seemingly overnight, part of the canon of course work for medical and nursing students; and, she reached the people who watched loved ones die in a soulless, dehumanizing fashion. Everyone wanted a piece of her. And in time, she visited nearly every continent and received twenty honorary degrees.
Her son Ken remembers the biggest change came in the form of a giant U.S. Postal Service sack that arrived every few days, bearing hundreds of letters. “My mother thought it was important to respond to every letter, personally,” he said. “I didn’t feel abandoned. She took me on trips with her when I was out of school. But it was different. She tried to do all the things we did before, and called us on the phone every night when she was gone.”
Speaking to Ken Ross, I can’t help but notice that his normally ebullient tone drops an octave when he talks about those days. Kübler-Ross’s sudden, international celebrity created a massive strain on her marriage. And she had also developed a kind of paranormal problem. She didn’t publish her own experiences with NDEs in On Death and Dying. But she kept working at the bedsides of the sick, and strange events did not seem to leave her be. Less than two years later, in fact, she had her strangest experience of all, which she documents in Wheel of Life.
The constant lectures, seminars, and out of town speaking engagements, the hours spent attending to the dying, had worn her down. She was considering giving up the work.
She stood in the Chicago hospital where she became famous, talking to a colleague, when she noticed a woman near the bank of elevators. Kübler-Ross had been deep in thought. But this woman caught her attention. She thought she had seen her, somewhere, before. Then she noticed something alarming.
The woman was semi-transparent.
After Kübler-Ross ended the conversation with her colleague, the woman approached her, not walking so much as floating. “Do you mind if we walk to your office?” the apparition asked.
Kübler-Ross said yes, and started the strangest walk of her life, a few dozen yards to her office. Inside, she remembered the woman’s face. It was Mrs. Schwartz. She sat down, thinking she might faint. Schwartz had died some ten months earlier.
Kübler-Ross questioned her own sanity.
In the course of her work she had counseled schizophrenics. And when they saw something that wasn’t there, she didn’t feed their fantasies. She told them they were hallucinating. So she reached for her pen, her papers, her coffee cup. She tried to tether herself, through touch, to the real world. But the apparition didn’t fade at the great lady’s attempts to make her go away. In fact, the spook spoke. “I had to come back,” Schwartz told her, “for two reasons. Number one is to thank you and the Reverend [Imara] for all you have done for me. However the second reason I came back is to tell you not to give up your work on death and dying . . . not yet.”
Kübler-Ross wondered how Schwartz could possibly know she was planning on quitting. But she also continued to question whether the entire event was transpiring at all. At the ghost’s behest, she promised not to quit her work yet. And in return, she asked the ghost for a favor. “Will you,” she asked, “write a brief note for Reverend Imara?”
Mrs. Schwartz complied, taking a pen in her hand, then disappeared. We’ll get back to that note. For now, understand her old patient’s alleged reappearance as a ghost would become a prominent feature in the story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But for the moment, it was private. Kübler-Ross only outed herself as an experiencer of anything odd at all in 1975 when the author Raymond Moody asked her to write the foreword to Life After Life—the book that coined the phrase “near-death experience.” She and Imara looked over his manuscript. The experiences their own patients recounted were accurately mirrored in Moody’s own research. They also believed he had written credibly. But there was something more: Kübler-Ross was changing. “At this point in my life,” she later wrote, “I was open to anything and everything. Most days I felt as if a curtain was being lifted to give me access to a world no one had ever seen before.”
This was also the problem. Because just then, vulnerable in the confines of a strained marriage, a grueling career path that was wearing her down, and new scrutiny related to her own investigation of the paranormal, she received a phone call. The people on the other end were Jay and Martha Barham, who had been drawn to her by coverage they had seen of her controversial endorsement of Moody’s book. They called her from San Diego and promised her something more incredible than she had ever experienced, something that, deep inside, she longed for. They promised to introduce her to spiritual entities. They promised to reproduce the strange, sporadic mystical experiences Kübler-Ross had enjoyed—and to do so on demand.
The Barhams had found a fertile target. And the esteemed psychologist quickly booked a speaking engagement in San Diego so she could take a side trip to meet the Barhams, who met her at the airport and hugged her like old friends. From there, they whisked her to the Church of Divinity, where Barham channeled spirits for a congregation of about a hundred people. “On my first day there,” she later wrote, “I joined 25 people of all ages and types in the dark room [of a windowless building]. Everyone sat on folding chairs. Jay placed me in the front row, a spot of honor. Then the lights were switched off and the group began singing a soft, rhythmic hum that built to a loud group chant, which gave Jay the energy needed to channel the entities. . . . As the chanting reached a new, almost euphoric level, Jay disappeared behind a screen [my emphasis]. Suddenly, an enormously tall figure appeared to the right of me. . . .”
Over the ensuing months, Barham introduced her to spirit guides named Salem, Pedro, and an entity named Willie. This was strictly old-school, séance-style mysticism. In the 1930s people advertising themselves as psychic mediums turned out the lights and channeled the dead, asking the spirits to knock once for yes, twice for no. But really it was an assistant in on the gag or the medium making all the noise. Like the mediums of old, Barham, too, insisted all the lights be turned off—lest he or the spirits be damaged by the terrible power of the 60-watt bulb.
Kübler-Ross should have known better, but she was too vulnerable, it seems, to see straight.
Attempts were made to save her.
Her husband Manny answered the phone once to find what he took to be a man disguising his voice on the line. The man claimed to be Kübler-Ross’s spirit guide. Manny hung up. How, he asked his wife, could she possibly fall for such obvious bullshit? But fall for it she did. She had quickly grown dependent on Barham and his church. And when she wouldn’t give up this newfound mysticism, or the constant lectures, Manny asked for a divorce.
Ken says it was clear “they never stopped loving each other.” And because of his mother’s hectic travel schedule, the kids lived mostly with their father. Without her husband or children, Kübler-Ross fled to the Church of Divinity. She acquired a parcel of land nearby and started a center she called Shanti-Nilaya, meaning the “final home of peace.” She put Barham to work as a full-time spirit channeler.
Manny still worried about her and made a phone call of his own—to Imara, who traveled to the center to investigate. He found the landscape around the center incredibly beautiful—forty acres of swaying trees and lakefront views. But what was happening inside was “pure evil.”
On the very first night, he sat through a séance. His friend had fallen for what he calls a “bad acting job.” But he was chilled, the next day, when he walked through a hallway in the center and noticed Barham in a common room, staring intently at a television with the sound turned down. Imara stood in the doorway and says he knew, felt, just what Barham was up to—immediately and in his bones. “That sick bastard was practicing reading lips,” he says. “Who ever does that?”
Was this one of Barham’s means of gaining supposedly “psychic information”? Imara didn’t care. He just wanted to get his friend away from the man, and tried, several times, to share his own observations with Kübler-Ross. But every time he said something negative, she interrupted him. She changed the subject. This told him all he needed to know. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with whom he worked had never interrupted people.
She listened.
In old videos of her at the bedsides of the dying, Kübler-Ross can still be seen gazing so intently at the sick as they speak that she seems to have no other possible purpose but to serve as a kind of universal mother—the receptacle for her patient’s woes. But this woman seemed trapped inside herself. “I think it was all internal,” Imara says. “This was about where she was and what she needed at the time.”
He also shared with me an observation that is key to understanding the paranormal—and coming to grips with the paradoxical tale of Kübler-Ross, the insightful psychologist who seemingly lost her own grip on reality. “The things we saw,” he says, “had been incredible, but they were sudden, and you couldn’t count on them.”
The paranormal, as we’ll find throughout this book, simply doesn’t ever occur on demand. We move through this life on life’s own prosaic terms, mostly. In the materialist formulation, we feed our stomach-furnaces with food to sustain us. We input and output information using our computer brains. We live in a Newtonian realm, where most everything, most all of the time, moves in precise, predictable, patterns. Kübler-Ross had, like many others before her and since, come to need someone or something in her life that could recreate those unexpected glimpses of something other—that could, metaphorically anyway, show her the tunnel of light she’d heard of in her patients’ near-death experiences. And she needed it so badly, she could plainly no longer see past her hopes and wishes—to spot even the most obvious con. And so she looms, I think, as the ultimate cautionary tale for all those who wish to explore the paranormal: Here be dragons. And by 1979, they were at her door.
Time, People, the Los Angeles Times, and Harper’s magazine all wrote in-depth accounts of Kübler-Ross’s fall. And for a while, Kübler-Ross defended herself and Barham. She began to share the Mrs. Schwartz story at lectures and talks and endorsed all manner of nonsense. Things were bad, and they got worse. “Appearing at sessions in darkened rooms . . . ,” reads People, “these ‘entities’ [Barham channels] have assumed human form and according to some reports engaged in sexual relations with church members.”
Church congregants noticed things they should have seen early on, things that had been painfully obvious to Imara. The supposed entities smelled of cigarettes, like Barham, and spoke with similar accents, pronouncing “escape” as “ex-cape,” for instance. Five women, each of whom thought they had sex with an afterlife entity, came down with the same vaginal infection. And finally, one of them did the unthinkable. She turned on the lights during one of Barham’s channeling sessions. The entity that had supposedly materialized was Willie. But when the lights came on there was no spirit. There was just Barham. Naked except for a turban.
Kübler-Ross hung on to her fantasy for a while longer. But when Barham’s explanations no longer satisfied her, she parted ways with him, the great psychologist now the victim of a very long con, carried out over four years.
A skeptical mind most certainly would have been helpful, a good, ruthless debunking was called for; because a too-open mind had ruined a reputation.
KEN ROSS, THE GREAT lady’s son, now looks after his mother’s foundation. When someone like me comes along, looking for information, he serves as gatekeeper. HBO worked with him as they tried to develop a script. The latest to give it a go is actress Melina Kanakaredes, formerly of CSI: New York, who was developing a script with the cooperation of Kubler-Ross’s estate as I put the finishing touches on this book. She faces a significant challenge. Because Kubler-Ross’s life won’t submit itself to a neat, one-hour-and-forty-minute retelling.
In her life’s final acts, after Barham, she seemingly reinvented herself yet again, working with AIDS patients throughout the 1980s, the new disregarded among the terminally ill, who faced a level of stigmatization perhaps not seen since the lepers of biblical times. Then began the series of debilitating strokes that ultimately ended her life. The story is difficult to tell not only because of all the events packed into it, however, but because the twists and turns could polarize an audience.
What do we do with the paranormal stories that accumulated around her? What do we do with . . . the note?
Remember, Kübler-Ross asked the ghost of Mrs. Schwartz to write a note to Imara, the story goes, and the semi-transparent being complied. According to Imara, Kübler-Ross did hand over the note—it was addressed to him, after all—and he owns it still.
People have asked him for copies over the years, intending to analyze the handwriting, to compare it to a sample from Schwartz. An attorney from Florida recently implored him to submit the note for investigation. But Imara said no. “One more argument behind that woman’s name is not something I’m going to contribute to,” he says.
His math is simple, and unassailable, and provides a fitting end to this tale: if the handwriting doesn’t match (as seems to me by far most likely), skeptics will use that information to undermine the veracity of everything Kübler-Ross ever said. But as Imara puts it, the “story about Mrs. Schwartz is nothing. It is inconsequential, in comparison to the many things that happened. Things I witnessed myself.”
Believers, in turn, would argue, less logically, that a change in Mrs. Schwartz’s handwriting style might reflect some effect of, I dunno, crossing over? But, as unlikely as it seems, what if the note did match some existing sample of Schwartz’s handwriting? Well, even that wouldn’t get us any closer to real answers: skeptics would just holler fraud—or more profitably point out that handwriting analysis is downright subjective, arguably not science at all.
This tale ends, then, in the mire, the debate so polluted that sometimes, for the people involved, it seems best simply to permit no further inquiry. And so the life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross will continue to be punctuated both by exclamation points and question marks—the sum of a life spent collecting the last stories of the dying.