Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  The Reverend Mwalimu Imara (then named Renford Gaines) was assigned to Kübler-Ross by the hospital’s administration, almost as a kind of bodyguard. No one thought she would be the victim of actual violence. But the academic seminars she began on the topic of death and dying caused great controversy in the hospital’s halls, so Imara, one of the hospital’s chaplains, walked alongside Kübler-Ross as a sign she was not alone. She had the administration’s support. The truth is, Imara wasn’t that experienced himself yet, certainly not in the duties he’d be attending to beside Kübler-Ross. And he watched as her colleagues lied to her, again and again. “I am here,” she would say, “to meet with your dying patients.”

  “No one here,” she was told, “is dying.”

  No doubt, they thought they were doing the right thing. They thought it better for the patient not to discuss what was happening. No matter. She could read a patient’s chart like any other doctor and found the terminal for herself. Imara still remembers watching Kübler-Ross attend the first patient they ever visited together. The woman sat alone in the dark, perched on the edge of her bed. Uneaten food rotted on a stack of trays left on a nearby table. Kübler-Ross pulled up a chair and sat down across from the woman. “And how are things going for you?” she asked.

  The patient, her head down the entire time, finally looked up at Kübler-Ross. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  Kübler-Ross stood, opened the blinds, and called the nursing staff down the hall. “Get this woman fed,” she said. “Help her eat.”

  The next day, Kübler-Ross returned to the woman’s room. The blinds were still open. The uneaten food had been thrown away. The woman looked fitter. Kübler-Ross sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, and the woman smiled. The two ladies sat like that for a long time, grinning at each other. “Now,” Imara told me, “just multiply that moment by hundreds or thousands of other moments just like it.”

  For Imara, bearing witness to scenes like these transformed his position alongside Kübler-Ross from assigned functionary to more than willing collaborator.

  The terminally ill were being neglected. They sat alone in their rooms waiting for the culmination of a death sentence that had never been formally pronounced. And as Imara puts it, “hurricane Elisabeth Kübler-Ross” helped them to go on living as best they could manage until they did die. This meant reconciling relationships, acknowledging their feelings, and finding what joys they could. Most of the hospital’s professional staff allied themselves against these efforts. Some doctors and nurses accused Kübler-Ross of ghoulishness. One nurse asked the psychologist if she enjoyed telling a twenty-year-old man he was dying. The signs advertising her seminars were torn down. But Kübler-Ross seemed to gain strength from the opposition. She recognized the resistance she faced as a symptom of the illness she treated.

  And together, she and Imara didn’t just challenge the medical establishment. They sat by the bedsides of people who described incredible happenings: I left my body, I floated up to the ceiling, I saw the doctors resuscitate me. While their bodies lay below, in distress, they rose above them and felt an overwhelming sensation of peace. There was more, much more, and these patients wanted someone to tell them they weren’t crazy. But at this point in her life, Kübler-Ross not only disbelieved in organized religion, she viewed death like most Western doctors. Death meant the end—the terminus of termini, the obliteration of all possible beginnings. Even Imara, the reverend, was unprepared for these near-death tales. Many if not most sects of Christianity accept the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus but disavow paranormal happenings in our time. And here they were, what Imara calls the “Mutt and Jeff team,” hearing classic near-death experiences years before anyone had coined the phrase, years before the phenomenon was widely known. These stories suggested death was merely a gateway from one existence to another, from one incarnation to a newer, more profound one.

  The stories told by children were often the most incredible—and consistent. “So many kids would start telling these stories, in the days before they died, about spirits visiting them,” said Imara. “Some drew pictures recording the date and time of their deaths.”

  One girl told Kübler-Ross she had withheld an NDE from her mother because “I don’t want to tell mommy there is a nicer home than ours.”

  Kübler-Ross sat by the bedside of one boy who was dying in the aftermath of an accident. “Everything is all right now,” the boy told her. “Peter and my mother are already waiting for me.”

  Kübler-Ross knew the boy’s mother was dead, but thought his brother, Peter, was still alive. Peter had suffered serious burns in the accident and been taken to another hospital. She left the room about ten minutes later and was stopped on her way past the nurses’ station. There was a phone call for her, from a nurse at the hospital where Peter had been taken. “Dr. Ross,” the nurse said, “we just wanted to tell you that Peter died ten minutes ago.”

  To the skeptically minded, this is all meaningless—an anecdote captured under noncontrolled conditions and interpreted according to the belief that such a thing as life after death is even remotely possible. But Kübler-Ross was no pie-eyed believer. Her only real concern, like that of most people, was with what she saw in front of her—not the dead, but the dying. “We weren’t looking for this,” says Imara. “It was just happening, again and again, to us.”

  Once, Imara looked in, by himself, on a little girl dying of leukemia. She had been visited, she said, by a man she didn’t recognize. He wasn’t a doctor. He had been dressed in civilian clothes. Imara did his best not to upset the girl. But inside he felt anxious. Somehow, hospital security had lapsed. Somehow, a stranger had spent time alone with an exceedingly vulnerable little girl. Imara stayed near the girl’s room until her parents arrived, then intercepted them before they could go inside. “Your daughter is fine,” he told them. “But there is something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  With Kübler-Ross accompanying him, he led the parents into a large conference room. “The hospital will make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said, “but someone came in to see your daughter. A man. He didn’t hurt her. He was apparently very kind. Hospital staff will be on the lookout.”

  Her parents looked understandably upset, until Imara relayed the girl’s description of her visitor. Then, the girl’s mother got … interested. The description matched that of her own brother, the girl’s uncle, who had died before the girl was born. Even the description of his clothing matched what her uncle had been wearing at the time of his death. The scene quickly shifted to the little girl’s room, where her mother had her repeat her story. Imara says that, after multiple strange happenings like these, he and Kübler-Ross agreed to start taking notes not just on the psychological impact of death and dying but the weird stuff, too. “In her office,” he said, “she filled a couple of deep filing cabinet drawers just with stories like these. And when we could, we corroborated them.”

  One of the most intriguing stories was that of Mrs. Schwartz, who appears and reappears rather dramatically in the tale of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A middle-aged mother with Hodgkin’s disease, Schwartz went into cardiac arrest in the hospital as she was being wheeled off an elevator. Imara was among the people who witnessed the scene. Her clothes were stripped off to give doctors access to her body. A med student stood by and took notes, a dispassionate act Imara says was designed so early med students could have something to do when real doctoring was necessary.

  Doctors successfully revived Schwartz. And she later told Kübler-Ross and Imara how the scene had looked to her, from the position she assumed after her heart stopped—out of her body, up near the ceiling. She accurately described the resuscitation efforts and comments made by the people at the scene. She claimed she floated behind the med student and even looked at his notes. He had drawn doodles at the top of the page, she said, and she described those, too.

  Skeptical, Imara retrieved the student’s notebook and looked for himself. Mrs. Schwartz’s de
scription matched—right down to the doodles.

  Imara says Kübler-Ross was “knocked from her moorings” by these strange events. And all the ordinary explanations they could dream up couldn’t account for all of the weirdness.

  As time passed, word had spread about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s death and dying seminars. Life magazine printed an extensive profile of her. Book publishers came calling. And Kübler-Ross began work on the book that would become On Death and Dying. By this time, Kübler-Ross had accumulated enough stories about NDEs and deathbed visitations that she was giving serious consideration to publishing them along with her famous psychological stages.

  In fact, according to Imara, in its original incarnation, Kübler-Ross wrote a concluding chapter to On Death and Dying in which she detailed numerous near-death experiences. She wrote that her research had suggested something extraordinary, comforting—and beautiful: at the very end, after the tremendous emotional and physical pain associated with death, there may be another life to live, another plane of existence to visit.

  As might be expected, given the closeness of their professional relationship, she asked Imara to give the manuscript one last look. Manny and the children were asleep, so it was just the two of them up late at night in her house, going over manuscript pages, patching in quotes, and tweaking sentences. But the most important conversation of the evening was about the last chapter.

  The room was filled with smoke from Kübler-Ross’s cigarette addiction, Imara remembers. And they had long since moved on from tea to whiskey sours. “Do I put this chapter in?” asked Kübler-Ross.

  “Not if you want it published,” replied Imara. “You don’t tell them about the kid on the second floor who spoke to his dead sister. You don’t talk about getting into someone’s house, after they died, and finding a picture he drew with a map and a clock, of the exact time and place of his death. You don’t do it. That shit will not fly.”

  Kübler-Ross was already taking on an incredibly taboo topic: death. The idea that she might end a book that already challenged the biases of the powerful medical profession with an oh by the way chapter, suggesting the possibility of an afterlife, would have been way, way too much. Her entire life’s work would have been dismissed. And in her last chapter she would have given people the means with which to attack her. So fraught is our relationship to the paranormal that Kübler-Ross was forced to consider self-censorship.

  The house was quiet, and so were they. This was a pivotal discussion, and both of them knew it. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was not someone who routinely cared what cultural or political forces were at play. She only cared about what she took to be the truth. But in this case, the stakes were so high, the suffering she had seen among her patients so great, she agreed. She would hang on to this chapter. She would put these tales of the dying on a shelf.

  That night was perhaps the most crucial of Kübler-Ross’s professional life, and in the lives of millions of people with terminally ill family members all over the world whose lives would be changed for the better by her book. Because that night Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did what was, in this instance, the right thing. She consigned the paranormal to the dark.

  THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE IS a phenomenon associated with the paranormal, but it is the product, in its modern incarnation, of science. It is no coincidence that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross started hearing these remarkable stories so often in the mid-1960s. It was in 1963 that CPR was first widely publicized and adopted, allowing doctors to save more critical patients than ever. The unexpected result was a boom in reports of an experience that had been rare but nonetheless described for millennia.

  The Greco-Roman historian Plutarch related the story of Aridaeus of Soli, who “died” after a fall and came back with a story to tell. He reported traveling to other realms and meeting with a younger relative who had already died. His personality changed so much after his NDE, and so much for the better, that his name was changed to Thespesius, which meant “divine” or “wonderful.” This is a particularly interesting detail, given that modern day NDErs, as they’re known, routinely change their lifestyles for the better.

  Thomas De Quincey included the following account in Confessions of an English Opium Eater: “I was once told by a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.”

  In the 1887 book Euthanasia or Medical treatment in the Aid of Easy Dying, Dr. William Munk quotes an Admiral Beaufort of the British Navy: “The whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.”

  There are several reasons these accounts, and the NDE, have gained a kind of traction among scientists. Number one, the number of people reporting the phenomena is impressive. Studies show that roughly 6 to 12 percent of cardiac arrest victims report NDEs, and though particulars vary wildly, the general character of the NDE—the arc of the narrative—remains the same across accounts. Radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long gathered more than 1,600 NDEs, which he analyzed in a bestselling book. He identifies twelve recurring elements of the NDE, including the sensation of leaving the body, heightened sensory ability, intense and generally positive emotions, encountering a brilliant light, mystical beings and/or deceased loved ones, passing through a tunnel and visiting other realms, and undergoing a life review. These are commonly discussed in media accounts, but perhaps most intriguing, many NDErs also report feeling that time and space as we know them have ceased to exist. Thus, their life review seems to take place in an instant, yet they are aware of each event as it flashes before their eyes.

  Long’s breakdown of the NDE seems most relevant, for our purposes, because it is the newest and arguably the most comprehensive and because his results don’t differ markedly from most other surveys. The relative consistency across accounts is usually regarded, among believers, as indicative that one central phenomenon is at work here. Skeptics, of course, focus on the differences among people’s stories. But there are two things I find compelling: in our culture, the NDE itself is an orphan—entirely unwanted by those at the extreme poles of belief and unbelief. Skeptics are inclined against the NDE representing any objective reality. Fundamentalist Christians often deny it any veracity on the grounds that it presents the possibility of an afterlife steeped in a nondogmatic, irreligious spirituality.

  The problem, for those of us in the middle, is that these polarized views tend to obscure what might be most important about the NDE: its impact. In sum, whatever happens in an NDE, experiencers tend to react to it in much the same way. The vast majority take the experience to be real, and they change. They more greatly value their families and friends. They become less materialistic. Most remarkably, they no longer fear death.

  In other words, NDE research confirms what Kübler-Ross experienced in her own journey through the halls at the Chicago hospital: people who undergo some kind of near-death experience feel a sense of contentment. For them, death looms as a kind of spiritual eject button, separating them from their living friends and families yet popping them out into an infinitely more expansive existence.

  This last fact lends the NDE real heft. If this is an illusion, it is one that is irrefutably important to nearly everyone who experiences it. This also gives psychologists something real and measurable to work with. The historical accounts provide further verification, corroborating the NDE across centuries and millennia as an experience endemic to humans—and not borne from the power of suggestion.

  I reached out to a former mili
tary nurse, a retired colonel named Diane Corcoran. She first encountered the NDE phenomenon in the late 1960s and early ’70s, in Vietnam soldiers, well before Raymond Moody’s bestseller. Corcoran is career Army, and in our conversation she spoke with the matter-of-fact authority of a lifelong member of the military. In 1969, while serving in Vietnam, she tried, like Kübler-Ross, to make herself a receptive ear to all the wounded soldiers on her ward. But one day, a soldier told her about the accident that left his body wrecked. He had been knocked unconscious, yet he remembered it all. Because after he was struck by a moving vehicle, he left his body and looked down on himself. He saw other soldiers come running to help him, or his body, anyway, which lay still far beneath him. Then he saw a tunnel nearby, floated toward it, and peered down its length. He hovered there, seemingly between two worlds, certain that whatever happened to the husk of him below, he was going to be all right. Corcoran listened to the soldier and blinked dumbly. “At first I said nothing,” she remembers. “It seemed like the smartest thing to do. I mean, I just didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.”

  But then she understood something else: the soldier was at once convinced of the reality of what he had undergone and worried that other people would think he was crazy. He needed her validation. He needed her to honor the importance of what he had gone through. And so she said, with supreme understatement, “That must have been an incredible experience.”

  The skepticism these early experiencers encountered suppressed any widespread public knowledge of the phenomenon for quite a while—at least six years that we know of, by my count, given that Kübler-Ross herself wrote a chapter on the subject before deciding it best served the world gathering dust. It is, of course, impossible to determine the number of people who decided to shut their mouths and keep the white light to themselves. But it’s not hard to understand why. Debates on the paranormal often break down in rancor, which is surprising because in an epistemological sense this might be one riddle to which we can never really know the answer.