Do not go gentle into that good night

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The pattern is now familiar, so familiar that, like most things that get absorbed into a culture, it's been applied to areas well beyond its original meaning.

But it was new, revolutionary, in fact, in 1969 when Elisabeth Kubler-Ross labeled and explained the "five stages of grief" associated with death. Her book, On Death and Dying, became a standard text for those dealing with terminally-ill patients and those around them and was central to her being named among the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the 20th century by Time magazine in 1999.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, 78, having gone through her own five stages, died of natural causes Tuesday at her home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"For the past two years, I have — thanks to a series of strokes — been totally dependent on others for basic care," she wrote at the time [1997]. "Every day is spent struggling to get from bed to a chair to the bathroom and back again. My only wish has been to leave my body, like a butterfly shedding its cocoon, and finally merge with the great light."

She was ridiculed by some for her later beliefs in near-death experiences, reincarnation, and channelling the spirits of the dead, which were perhaps her own way of bargaining. I don't share those beliefs, but I won't mock her for holding to them.

In fact, I'm perhaps best described as an agnostic on life after death. I don't believe in it because I see no basis for doing so. At the same time, I say with Alexander Alekhine "I can't conceive that there will be nothing left of me when I am gone." Yet I know that may simply be my own failure of imagination, or even an inability of the human mind to imagine its own non-existence (since to imagine it there must be something doing the imagining). All of which means that while I believe the mind, the spirit if you will, which the more we look the more it depends on physical processes within the brain, does not survive the body, I can't absolutely rule it out.

So no, I will not mock her. Instead I will celebrate her life and the understanding she brought to and of both life and death.