Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) was arguably the best-known death researcher of the 20th century. The Swiss-born psychiatrist, who later worked in the United States, received 23 honorary doctorates, initiated the hospice movement in many countries, and with her book "On Death and Dying" (1969) – translated into 20 languages and sold millions of times – shaped the modern understanding of dying and grief. In a 1981 television interview with the Swiss journalist Günther Rolling, she summarises her findings from more than a decade of research with the clinically dead and the dying. The interview was later rebroadcast as part of a Swiss "Querdenker" programme. Below is a summary of the central points. The original interview is in German; this article makes it accessible for English readers.
Her personal position
Asked whether she fears her own death, Kübler-Ross's answer is short and clear:
"No, not at all. I'm looking forward to it."
And when reminded that she once said she was "a little afraid only of life", she adds:
"Yes – living life is much, much harder than dying."
The moment of death
Kübler-Ross carefully distinguishes between the transition (dying) and the state afterwards. The moment of death itself she describes as positive and liberating:
"The moment of death is a unique, beautiful, liberating experience that one has without fear, without distress, with full awareness of what is."
Her image for it is the one many of her readers know: a butterfly leaving its cocoon. The person detaches from the physical body, observes it objectively – "without fear, without pain, without longing" – and in this state can no longer hold any negative feelings.
Regained wholeness
A pattern she keeps encountering in conversations with those brought back: people report being whole again at the moment of death.
- Those who lost fingers have them back.
- Amputees have their legs back.
- Quadriplegics and patients with multiple sclerosis, wheelchair-bound for years, report: "I was able to dance again."
- Those who could not hear can hear.
- Those who were blind can see.
The blind-patient finding – Kübler-Ross's verification
It is exactly here that Kübler-Ross introduces a methodologically striking argument: the reports of blind patients can be independently verified.
"Take people who are totally blind – who don't even have a light perception – and who die. And then they are brought back via resuscitation. You ask them what they experienced. And they tell you, in very clear detail, who came into the hospital room, what clothes they were wearing, what colour the blouse was, what kind of necklace or bracelet or watch you are wearing. […] And a blind person who cannot see simply cannot say that."
Her argument: a blind person who, while being resuscitated, correctly describes colours and patterns cannot have been sighted in that moment. Seeing at the moment of death, in her observation, is more like seeing in a dream – with closed eyes – and is independent of a working visual apparatus. Once resuscitated, blindness returns.
Being received – "one cannot die alone"
A central observation: the dying are never alone. Kübler-Ross puts it radically:
"Perhaps the most important thing people need to know is that you cannot die alone. You could send a man in a rocket to the moon, and he could miss his course and drift through space until he dies alone in his rocket – and he will always, always be awaited by the people he loved who died before him. They are always there. You cannot die alone."
The life review also belongs to this phase, she reports: a brief retrospective in which the dying "re-live all the moments of their life".
The children study – the hardest finding
Methodologically, the strongest part of the interview is Kübler-Ross's research with dying children after family car accidents. When a severe accident kills several family members at the scene and injured children are brought to the intensive care unit, she sits down by their bed shortly before they die and asks what they are experiencing. What she systematically documented over more than ten years:
"All these children, in their own words, will say: 'Everything is all right now. My mummy and Peter are already waiting for me.' And I know that the mother died at the accident scene, but Peter – the brother – was simply taken to a different hospital. And I accept what this little girl tells me. Then I go to the phone – and the other hospital is calling me: 'I just wanted to let you know that Peter died ten minutes ago.'"
The decisive control is this: the children did not know who had died at the scene. Some of the relatives they named had died only minutes before, in a different hospital. Her summary after a decade of this work is remarkable:
"In ten years of this research, not a single child has ever given me a wrong name. They only name people who have already died before them."
That a thousand children, at the moment of death, know exactly who is waiting for them – and never get it wrong – is for Kübler-Ross the decisive evidence.
Universality – "not a matter of belief, but of knowledge"
Kübler-Ross made these observations across decades and very different cultural settings: with Aboriginal Australians, Inuit, Jews, Catholics, atheists, Protestants. The core, in her documentation, is the same everywhere:
"This has nothing to do with your religious knowledge or understanding. It is simply the experience of human death."
Her summary formulation:
"For me, this is not a matter of belief, but of knowledge. And anyone who is unafraid and truly wants to study it has the opportunity to verify it."
Context
Kübler-Ross gives voice to a cross-cultural basic structure of dying – the same structure that researchers like Walter van Laack and the physicist Markolf Niemz later confirmed with different methods, and that appears in literary sources such as Andersen's Little Match Girl: being received at the threshold by a loved one who has already died. What stands out methodologically in Kübler-Ross's work is the discriminating power of the children study: uninformed children name only people who have actually just died. That is – unlike many anecdotal NDE accounts – a setting that was systematically documented.
Source: 1981 Swiss television interview with Günther Rolling (in German), on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=C_KHpHlsAM4. Quotations from the interview are translated by us and rendered in quotation marks.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it links to further material from NDE research (among them Walter van Laack and Markolf Niemz).