The Wheel Of Life

The Wheel Of Life – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist whose book On Death and Dying transformed the way the modern world thinks about death, grief and the care of the dying, tells her own remarkable story in The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying, written near the end of her life.

Kübler-Ross describes her childhood in Switzerland as one of triplets, her determination to become a doctor despite her father’s opposition, and her work after the Second World War as a volunteer helping refugees and rebuilding communities in war-torn Europe. A visit to the former concentration camp at Majdanek, where she saw butterflies drawn on the walls by prisoners, left a lasting impression and shaped her thinking about suffering and the human spirit.

After marrying an American doctor and moving to the United States, she trained in psychiatry and began interviewing dying patients, at a time when doctors rarely spoke openly about death. Her work led to On Death and Dying and the influential model of the stages of grief, and she became a pioneer of the hospice movement and of compassionate end-of-life care, working with dying children, people with AIDS and their families.

The memoir also describes her later interest in spiritual questions and life after death, the controversies this generated, her personal hardships and her own experiences with illness after a series of strokes.

Honest, passionate and moving, The Wheel of Life is an inspiring read for those interested in medicine, psychology and the meaning of life and death. Readers should note that her later spiritual claims are not scientifically supported and that her stages of grief model has been nuanced by later research.