The life behind the five stages — told by the family that lived it.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss triplet who walked through a liberated concentration camp at nineteen, a country doctor who went to America and found dying patients hidden in the last rooms of the hospital, and the psychiatrist whose 1969 book changed how the world speaks about death. She was named one of the hundred most important thinkers of the century by Time, received some twenty honorary doctorates, and spent her last decades in Arizona, still teaching. This course tells her story from beginning to end, with recollections from her son, Ken Ross, who worked at her side for the last years of her life and now leads the Foundation that carries her name.

What you will learn

• Her childhood in Zurich, and the early experiences that shaped her view of death
• Maidanek, 1945: the visit that gave her life its purpose and the butterflies on the barracks walls
• How she came to America in 1958, and what she found there
• The Chicago seminars, On Death and Dying, and the Life magazine story that made her famous overnight
• The Life, Death and Transition workshops: why she stopped lecturing and what she built instead
• Her work with dying children, with AIDS patients when few others would, and with the grieving
• Her later years, her own dying, and what she said about it
• Why her work still matters, and where it is going

What's included

• A series of short, self-paced written lessons, each with a lesson graphic
• Photographs from the family archive
• Elisabeth's own words throughout, reproduced by permission of her family
• Firsthand recollections from Ken Ross that appear nowhere else
• Lifetime access, on any device

Who it's for
Anyone who knows the five stages and wants to know the woman. Students, clinicians, chaplains, death doulas, and readers who want the story behind the most influential book ever written about dying.

From the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation