The book that changed how the world thinks about dying — taught chapter by chapter, from the family that holds her archive.

Published in 1969, On Death and Dying has been translated into more than forty languages, named by the New York Public Library among the Books of the Century, and honored by a full issue of the American Journal of Bioethics on its fiftieth anniversary. Most people know it for the five stages. Almost no one has read what Elisabeth actually wrote, or heard her explain it in her own voice. This course does both.

What you will learn

• What care of the dying looked like when Elisabeth began, and why she refused to accept it
• The barriers she met from her own profession, and how she overcame them
• The five stages as she drew them in 1969: overlapping, unfinished, and never meant as a checklist — including the states she taught that the popular version dropped
• How the stages apply to grief and loss, in her words, from the book and from her 1973 lectures
• Hope, the family, the doctor–patient relationship, guilt, and the role of listening, chapter by chapter
• Where her model stands beside the other theories of dying, grief, and change, and how it has evolved since

What's included

• Eighteen modules plus a closing lesson, one for each chapter of the book, self-paced
• Excerpts from Elisabeth's 1973 recorded lecture series Lessons from the Dying Patient, digitized from the family's original cassettes
• Her original 1969 stages figure and the lesson graphics that explain it
• A timeline of the field she worked in, 1917–1999, and a module on the other end-of-life theories
• Direct quotations from the book throughout, reproduced by permission of her family
• Lifetime access, on any device

Who it's for
Nurses, physicians, hospice and palliative care staff, chaplains, social workers, death doulas, students, and anyone who has been handed the five stages and wants to know what Elisabeth really said.

From the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation