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as the great lady. Or we see her as a crank. We bow to her memory. Or we smirk at the mention of her name.
    â€œPeople tend to see Elisabeth as they want to see her,” says Rose Winters, a friend of Kübler-Ross. “It’s hard for those of us who knew her. Because people don’t acknowledge all of her. They don’t see her as she really was.”
    We see her, it appears, in much the same way we see the paranormal (or the political), as if we only have two choices: to passionately embrace or hotly reject. But there is a messier, truer view, one we need to draw closer to if we are to understand her, or even ourselves, let alone the paranormal.
    E LISABETH K ÜBLER -R OSS WAS BORN in Zurich, Switzerland, on July 8, 1926, the first to emerge among triplets. She weighed just two pounds and was not expected to survive. As a child, perhaps mindful of her own early frailty, the young Elisabeth Kübler nursed any injured animal she found, including a crow she fed and protected till it was strong enough to fly away. She defended weaker kids from schoolyard bullies. And she even bounced a book of psalms off the head of a preacher who had unfairly punished one of her sisters. Though she was later typified as a New Age faerie queen, the truth is she was a bit more like Keith Richards—a rebel by any accounting.
    She first rebelled against her father, an assistant director of Zurich’s biggest office supply company. “He had dark brown eyes that saw only two possibilities in life,” his daughter would later write. “His way and the wrong way.”
    In the chauvinistic Switzerland of the early 1940s, her dream of being a doctor was considered just that. And one night her father sat her down to talk about her future. She was so responsible, he said, so capable, he thought she would make a fine . . . secretary .
    â€œYou will work in my office,” he told her. But the thought of being stuck in his boring office, following his boring orders, and furthering the aims of the boring office supply industry, rather than doctoring, made Elisabeth Kübler half-nuts. “No, thank you!” she told him.
    His counteroffer? “Then find work,” he said, “as a maid.”
    Having no other means to support herself, she did just that. And in the ensuing years, she made her own way in the world. She left home, attended medical school, and met her husband—an American med student named Manny Ross. Her gender shaped her path. After she moved with Manny to America and became pregnant, the only residency program that would have her was the one she didn’t want: psychiatry.
    Still, they needed the money. So she took a position at the Manhattan State Mental Hospital, working in a small unit with schizophrenic women. The head nurse allowed her cats to freely roam the ward, pissing and defecating among the patients. The entire asylum carried the ammonia stink of cat urine. And patients were punished for showing signs of their mental illness—beaten with sticks, subjected to electroshock treatments, and experimented upon with drugs like LSD and mescaline. “What did I know about psychiatry?” Kübler-Ross later wrote. “Nothing. But I knew about life and I opened myself up to the misery, loneliness and fear these patients felt. If they talked to me, I talked back. If they shared their feelings, I listened and replied.”
    She was already opening herself up to the role she would play to the dying: the woman who shared their burdens and received their woes. But psychiatry never felt right to her until she and Manny moved to Denver for hospital positions. There, a colleague asked her to fill in and deliver a two-hour lecture he couldn’t make. She cast around for a subject. She hunkered down in the library. She walked the hospital halls, wondering what topic would be suitable for a general audience of medical students and residents in various specialties. The