Summary Of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s

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Death: The Final Stage of Growth. Summary

What could possible define quality of death? Death and dying are often perceived as the antithesis of quality of life, completely opposed to overarching philosophies of health consciousness, that focus on tapping every possible resource to prolong healthy, active living, and which accepts death as a last resort, whose destination must be cloaked with as much pharmacology (both literal and figurative) as possible, in order to obtund and dull its links with suffering. Death therefore seems to resemble a dark and ominous cave. To transform such attitudes to accept death as a natural process, and to consider entry into this territory as a quality, empowering experience seems a tremendous challenge, yet this is exactly the task that psychiatrist/author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross achieves in her book Death: The Final Stage of Growth. Through multiple experiential and cultural lenses, Kubler-Ross exposes the fears that shape human perspectives of death, and simultaneously reveals new hopefulness through a model that embraces death as the epitome of human opportunity for transformation and growth.
Death comes to us all. Yet as Kubler-Ross observes in her introduction to this work, acceptance of death does not come to as many as it should. All at its door seem to find tremendous fear, anxiety and revulsion at the entrance to this cave. Clearly, the general conditions of death have remained constant throughout time, though perhaps they are better documented and empirically validated today than they were in ancient history. An anonymous student nurse, enduring the end-stage of terminal illness, found himself in a unique position to comment on the institutionalization of death as it existed in 1975, as he revealed it to Kubler-Ross in Death: The Final Stage of Growth:
Nursing must be advancing. I wish it would hurry. We’re taught not to be overly cheery now, to omit the ‘Everything’s fine,’ rou...