Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dies
I interviewed Dr. Kübler-Ross some time in the mid 1970s for an article for Maclean’s in Canada. At the time, she had gone beyond her “five stages of dying” meme and was fully into proving that there’s life after death by documenting weird coincidences and poorly substantiated tales. I was disappointed because, although I am agnostic about life after death, her methodology was anecdotal and seemed to me to be aiming at supporting a position she merely wanted to believe.
And yet, she did something remarkable. Deeply impressed by her work helping Nazi refugees and by a visit to the Maidanek death camp, she gave us a way to talk about dying. Before that, although it’s hard for today’s young’uns to believe, it was generally a forbidden topic, just as 20 years ago polite people didn’t acknowledge that Uncle Sid wasn’t a bachelor because he’d just never found the right lady. Whether or not the five stages of dying is the right framework — and very likely it is — the mere existence of a framework gave us all, including health care workers, a way to admit that dying is a process, not a door that slams. Thanks to EKR, we have gotten better at keeping the dying with us, tangled in our social relationships, until the twin doors do indeed close.
I admire her life and appreciate what she did for us.
FWIW, I am aware of and deny the supposed irony in my complaining about newspapers pretending to be objective in my previous entry and my complaining about EKR not being sufficiently objective in this one. Objectivity is a useful goal for scientific studies but a self-contradictory one for all but the most limited types of newspaper reportage.
The conflict, if there is one, between scientific and journalistic objectivity must be partly a difference in scale. Briefly, science is long, and journalism is short. Science returns to a problem again and again, reaches conclusions, decides it’s wrong, tries again, settles on a consensus, tweaks it, reconsiders, starts over, is consumed in controversy, redefines, finally proves that Newton is right and shows that is so in practical terms, and then an Einstein comes along and says, “Yes, but….”
Journalism, on the other hand, has to reach a plausible conclusion immediately –every year requires more immediacy than the last – on a basis of terms that often no-one can agree on, and whatever else that is laying around and can be pressed into service, before the whole question is overtaken by the next crisis, public boredom, or restive advertisers.
As a geologist, I don’t know how many times I have seen professionals with decades of academic and practical experience behind them, under the no-nonsense pressure of a commercial mining exploration program, argue heatedly over whether a rock is igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary. In other words, the most basic and elementary categorization of an object that philosophers often use as a metaphor for the concrete and indisputable. Eventually an answer is found, of course. In journalism, there is no “eventually.” “Eventually” is for history.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has died
David Weinberger has written a nice post