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woman looked fitter. Kübler-Ross sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, and the woman smiled. The two ladies sat like that for a long time, grinning at each other. “Now,” Imara told me, “just multiply that moment by hundreds or thousands of other moments just like it.”
    For Imara, bearing witness to scenes like these transformed his position alongside Kübler-Ross from assigned functionary to more than willing collaborator.
    The terminally ill were being neglected. They sat alone in their rooms waiting for the culmination of a death sentence that had never been formally pronounced. And as Imara puts it, “hurricane Elisabeth Kübler-Ross” helped them to go on living as best they could manage until they did die. This meant reconciling relationships, acknowledging their feelings, and finding what joys they could. Most of the hospital’s professional staff allied themselves against these efforts. Some doctors and nurses accused Kübler-Ross of ghoulishness. One nurse asked the psychologist if she enjoyed telling a twenty-year-old man he was dying. The signs advertising her seminars were torn down. But Kübler-Ross seemed to gain strength from the opposition. She recognized the resistance she faced as a symptom of the illness she treated.
    And together, she and Imara didn’t just challenge the medical establishment. They sat by the bedsides of people who described incredible happenings: I left my body, I floated up to the ceiling, I saw the doctors resuscitate me. While their bodies lay below, in distress, they rose above them and felt an overwhelming sensation of peace. There was more, much more, and these patients wanted someone to tell them they weren’t crazy. But at this point in her life, Kübler-Ross not only disbelieved in organized religion, she viewed death like most Western doctors. Death meant the end—the terminus of termini, the obliteration of all possible beginnings. Even Imara, the reverend, was unprepared for these near-death tales. Many if not most sects of Christianity accept the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus but disavow paranormal happenings in our time. And here they were, what Imara calls the “Mutt and Jeff team,” hearing classic near-death experiences years before anyone had coined the phrase, years before the phenomenon was widely known. These stories suggested death was merely a gateway from one existence to another, from one incarnation to a newer, more profound one.
    The stories told by children were often the most incredible—and consistent. “So many kids would start telling these stories, in the days before they died, about spirits visiting them,” said Imara. “Some drew pictures recording the date and time of their deaths.”
    One girl told Kübler-Ross she had withheld an NDE from her mother because “I don’t want to tell mommy there is a nicer home than ours.”
    Kübler-Ross sat by the bedside of one boy who was dying in the aftermath of an accident. “Everything is all right now,” the boy told her. “Peter and my mother are already waiting for me.”
    Kübler-Ross knew the boy’s mother was dead, but thought his brother, Peter, was still alive. Peter had suffered serious burns in the accident and been taken to another hospital. She left the room about ten minutes later and was stopped on her way past the nurses’ station. There was a phone call for her, from a nurse at the hospital where Peter had been taken. “Dr. Ross,” the nurse said, “we just wanted to tell you that Peter died ten minutes ago.”
    To the skeptically minded, this is all meaningless—an anecdote captured under noncontrolled conditions and interpreted according to the belief that such a thing as life after death is even remotely possible. But Kübler-Ross was no pie-eyed believer. Her only real concern, like that of most people, was with what she saw in front