“It was fascinating, she was a fascinating woman and we were so surprised that she agreed to stop in Santa Paula,” said Barringer. “She was very intelligent and very impressive.”Kubler-Ross, was a native Swiss psychiatrist who famously theorized in 1969 that terminally ill patients go through five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She brought the forbidden topic of terminal illness to the public, a cause she embraced when she was frustrated with the lack of discourse on the subject, even from physicians of the day.Although she did not invent it, Kubler-Ross pioneered Hospice care after working with dying hospital patients whose plight she considered intolerable, and her writings and lectures energized the Hospice movement.Kubler-Ross moved to Arizona in 1995 after a series of strokes left her partially paralyzed on her left side and in a 2002 interview with an area newspaper she said that in her own case, God was a “damned procrastinator.” At other times during her illness she said she was looking forward to “dancing with the stars. . .”Kubler-Ross wrote a dozen books after “On Death and Dying,” with topics ranging from the AIDS epidemic to coping with the death of a child.In 1979, she received the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Decade Award. In 1999, Time magazine named Kubler-Ross one of the “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the past century.
Kubler-Ross: Death and Dying author, pioneered Hospice care, dies
September 01, 2004
Santa Paula News
It took a few minutes for the Santa Paulans who crowded the high school auditorium to warm up to the world-famous author and lecturer on that freezing cold night over a decade ago, but Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross soon fired them up.
By Peggy KellySanta Paula TimesIt took a few minutes for the Santa Paulans who crowded the high school auditorium to warm up to the world-famous author and lecturer on that freezing cold night over a decade ago, but Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross soon fired them up.Kubler-Ross, the author of “On Death and Dying” and the woman who pioneered Hospice care, died on Aug. 24 in Phoenix at the age of 78 after her own prolonged bout with illness.Hospice of Santa Clara Valley President Cathy Barringer remembers well the night that Kubler-Ross lectured, a last minute appearance that drew a huge crowd that braved the freezing night to hear her speak.Barringer had discovered that Kubler-Ross was lecturing in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and was pleasantly surprised when she agreed to make a stop in “the middle” at Santa Paula.Kubler-Ross, like her audience, was bundled up against the cold, her glasses at time fogging up as she wrote on the large blackboard and then would impatiently shift speaking gears and erase her writings while she spoke in her thick accent.
