Elisabeth Kübler was born on July 8, 1926, in Zürich, Switzerland, into a Protestant Christian Family. She was one of a set of triplets, two of whom were identical. Her life was jeopardized due to complications, weighing only 2 pounds at birth, but she said she survived due to her mother's love and attentiveness. Elisabeth later contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized at age 5, during which she had her first experience with death as her roommate died peacefully. Her early experiences with death led her to believe that, because death is a necessary stage of life, one must be prepared to face it with dignity and peace.
During World War II, at only 13 years of age, Kübler-Ross worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees in Zürich. From a young age, she was determined to become a doctor despite her father's efforts in forcing her to become a secretary for his business. She refused him and left home at 16. She began working as a housemaid for a mean woman, where she met a doctor who wished to help her in becoming a doctor. She then worked as an apprentice for a Dr. Braun, a scientist in her hometown, up until he went bankrupt. Here, she remembered getting her first lab coat with her name on it.
On May 8th, 1945, at the age of eighteen, she joined the International Voluntary Service for peace as an activist.[10] Two days later, she crossed the border into France, leaving her home of Switzerland for the first time. Her first assignment was to help rebuild the French town of Ecurcey. For the next four years, she continued to do relief work in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
In 1947, Kübler-Ross visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, an experience that profoundly affected her understanding of compassion and the resilience of the human spirit. The harrowing stories of survivors left an indelible mark on her, inspiring her life's mission to assist and heal others. She was also profoundly affected by the images of hundreds of butterflies carved into some of the walls there. To Kübler-Ross, the butterflies—these final works of art by those children facing death—stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking about the end of life. Later that year, she briefly lived with Romani people near the Polish/Russian border town of Bialystok. During this period, she faced the imminent closure of borders by the Russians. She encountered American officers who assisted in her evacuation on a transport plane from Poland to Berlin.
After returning to Zürich, Kübler-Ross worked for a dermatologist named Dr. Kan Zehnder at the Canton Hospital an apprentice. After this time, she worked to support herself in a variety of jobs, gaining major experience in hospitals while volunteering to provide aid to refugees. Following this, she went on to attend the University of Zurich to study medicine, and graduated in 1957.
Later Life & Death
In 1958, she married a fellow medical student and classmate from America, Emanuel "Manny" Ross, and moved to the United States. Together, they completed their internships at Long Island's Glen Cove Community Hospital in New York. After they married, she had their first child in 1960, a son named Kenneth, and in 1963, a daughter named Barbara. The marriage dissolved in 1979. They remained friends until his death on December 9, 1992.
Kübler-Ross endured a sequence of strokes from 1987 to 1994, none of which imposed lasting physical limitations upon her. Following a Virginia house fire on October 6, 1994, and subsequent transient ischemic attack (TIA), she relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. During this period, the Healing Waters Farm and the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center ceased operations in Headwaters, Virginia. The following month, she acquired a residence in the desert near Carefree, Arizona. After suffering a larger stroke in May 1995, she found herself living in a wheelchair and wished to be able to determine her time of death.
In 1997, Oprah Winfrey flew to Arizona to interview Kübler-Ross and discuss with her whether she herself was going through the five stages of grief. July 2001 saw her traveling to Switzerland to celebrate her final birthday (her 75th) with her three triplet sisters. In a 2002 interview with The Arizona Republic, she stated that she was ready for death and even welcomed it, calling God a "damned procrastinator". From 2002 until August 2004, she was in a nursing home under hospice care, spending her final days there.
Kübler-Ross died with her two children at her side in Scottsdale on August 24, 2004, aged 78 of natural causes. She was buried at the Paradise Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Scottsdale.
