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answer came to her at home, as she stared into a pile of dying leaves, rake in hand. At the time, in 1964, death was not really a hot topic in medicine. In fact, when Kübler-Ross went back to the library to see what was available on the psychology of dying she found precious little: a single, dense, academic psychoanalytic treatise; some sociological studies on death rituals across cultures. She realized she would need to do her own research. But for her talk, she spoke only for the first hour. Then, during the break, she retrieved a patient she met in the hospital’s wards: a sixteen-year-old girl who was dying of leukemia. When the students returned, Kübler-Ross explained the girl’s terminal condition and opened the floor to questions. No one raised a hand. So she called on students, requiring them to come to the stage and think of a question.
    These were med students. They asked about the girl’s blood count, the size of her liver, her chemotherapy trials. The girl grew furious and began talking, unbidden, about what it was like to be sixteen and given only a few weeks to live; what it was like to never go on a date or have a husband; and how she was coping with it all. When she was finally wheeled from the room, the audience sat in heavy, dumbfounded silence. And gently, in her soft, Swiss accent, Kübler-Ross diagnosed what troubled them. Your reaction is a product of your own mortality , she told them, which the girl forced you to confront .
    In this sense, they had not been looking at a sixteen-year-old girl at all. They had been looking into a mirror. The experience was so powerful that Kübler-Ross stopped questioning her own commitment to psychiatry. And when she and Manny subsequently moved to Chicago, she took a position at Billings Hospital, which was affiliated with the University of Chicago, and began her mission: to reconcile the world of the dying with that of the living. She grew famous for her efforts. But what is less well known is that during her years in Chicago many strange things happened to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And she also found an unlikely professional companion.
    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.”
    â€œNo 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