Children ask profound questions: mommy are you going to get old like grandma?
Are you going to die? What happens when you die? Few of us are prepared to
answer these questions fearlessly because we are not sure of the answers or
because we dread the subjects.
Enter Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., Scottsdale, Arizona. She has talked with over
20,000 people who had died clinically and “recovered”. She found that each had
remarkably similar experiences – regardless of age, nationality or religious
background. They reported remembering every detail during the state of
transition – who was present, how they were dressed, what they thought, said and
did.
The human body is not your real self. It's only the house you live in for a
while. “Dying is like real self moving from one house to a more beautiful house”
to make a symbolic comparison. The passage is similar to a butterfly emerging
from a cocoon, comparing the cocoon to the human body. “As soon as the cocoon is
in an irreparable condition, it releases the butterfly, your soul, so to speak”.
It doesn't mean that you have died but that you are alive operating on psychic
energy in the invisible realm. What we commonly call death “is a birth into a
different existence”.
What Dr. Kübler-Ross discovered through twentieth century medical/scientific
research and practice is something that the ancients knew well thousands of
years ago. The Egyptians, for instance, had no word for death and regarded life
as cyclic in nature rather than linear.
To respond to the children's wish to know, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross may be a source
of help to frame answers that are reasonable, profound and lasting. She has
written many books and is known for her work with children and AIDS patients.
She is credited with bringing the hospice movement to North America.
