How the Afterlife Stopped Evolving

LATE IN HER CAREER, after she’d already become famous for her critique of the medicalization of death in America, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published a letter that she’d written to a child: a little boy with a terminal cancer diagnosis. He’d written to ask her to explain death, and tell him why children have to die. Her response was published as she’d written it: by hand, illustrated in felt marker with images of dandelion seeds, sunshine, trees shedding their leaves, and butterflies. The image of the butterfly was especially important. Death, Kübler-Ross wrote, is a natural process in which we shed our bodies like a butterfly sheds a cocoon. This is when we return “home to God”, or “a place where we are never alone” one where, “we are with those we loved (who shed their cocoons earlier).”

People familiar with Kübler-Ross’s famous book On Death & Dying (the one where she laid out that contentious theory on the five stages of grief) tend to be unfamiliar with what happened to her career after that book came out. But those who are often see her later work and ideas as strange aberrations. She started her career as a psychiatrist who wanted to fix the medical system, but she ended it as the discredited purveyor of a California retreat center who espoused fringe spiritualist afterlife theories about resurrection and Near Death Experiences.

I’ve always struggled with Kübler-Ross’s ideas. In some ways, the points I made in my book Sister Death are pitched against her argument that death is something we must accept. I argued that it’s a fact we can’t help but be ambivalent about, at best. But I’ve always thought of her as a theologian, and I’ve used this letter in my theology course on death and the afterlife many times. I tell my students, when we read it, that some day someone they love (maybe a child, maybe someone who’s dying) may want to talk to them about what happens after death. And they might find themselves wanting to say something that feels real, and true; like something they actually think. But also something that doesn’t erase the grandeur of life, the incredible gift of the time they spent together, something that will illuminate the powerful (but easy to overlook) ways in which the other person will continue to endure. This is the thing, the rather theological thing, that I think Kübler-Ross is struggling to articulate. And I read her as a kind of tragic story about theology, and the strange ways that it gets muted, and erased, and can stop evolving.

THIS SUMMER I’M working on final revisions for my second book, More Than Human Power: The Afterlives of Theology. Although the afterlife is in the subtitle, it’s not really a book about life after death. But I’ve been thinking about it, nevertheless, and a couple of recent conversations have reminded me that it’s one of my oldest and most enduring intellectual obsessions. In the preface to Sister Death I wrote about a story from my childhood; at the age of three I became obsessed with the question of what happens after death and asked any adult I came across until I found an answer that felt good enough for the moment (I didn’t like the stale white idea of heaven, I preferred the more poetic and verdant image of a paradise; they were totally different things, for me). I’ve always been curious about these kinds of speculations. I’ve always been interested in repeating patterns. Even in my most skeptical moments, I’ve been convinced that both life and death are more mysterious and less formulaic than most accounts tend to allow for.

When I look back into the long stretch of available and recorded history, the afterlife appears to me like a changing and evolving collective dream. But it doesn’t really look that way right now, in 21st century mainstream American life. It looks more like a secret that you’re not really supposed to talk about. If you do, you end up looking like either a hammer of tradition or a wacky conspiracy theorist.

I’ve argued that death is the least secular part of secular life, and the least religious part of religious life. It’s something that sits in the strange middle zone that’s often neglected by both. And the afterlife is a kind of casualty of the fact that the space where death actually lives has become something of a no-man’s land in some regards. Religious traditions (or Christianity, at least) seem to want to claim ownership or sole possession of the afterlife, given that their archives tend to hold some of the oldest and most influential speculations that are still in active circulation. And secular spaces and traditions tend to let them have it. They’ve claimed something else: what exists, what we can use science to study. But there’s no real boundary where secular life begins and religious life ends. Nothing is actually fixed permanently on one side or the other.

The afterlife stops evolving when it becomes frozen in tradition. And even secular people want speculative resources for coping with mortality, despite the fact that this can mean something that looks a bit like an afterlife. So in my view, everyone sort of loses when the afterlife becomes privatized and frozen in this way.

ONE OF THE APPEALING things about Kübler-Ross’s first book, On Death & Dying, is that it seems as if she’s able to contain death within a secular setting. Colin Dickey has described it as a secular ars moriendi. Kübler-Ross was somewhat critical of religious ideas in that book, and the way that they can sometimes do damage to dying or grieving people (like when mourners are discouraged from grieving, because the dead have gone to be with God). But if we think of that book as a secular one, or we think of her project as secular, then we end up looking at her career as kind of self-betrayal. It looks as if she went from being someone with secular and scientific aspirations and became someone who went off the rails with strange fringe spiritual ideas and poisoned her own thinking.

Kübler-Ross’s late career has been pretty uniformly criticized. And I’m not trying to absolve her, or validate her claims that she’d lived during the time of Jesus and had been reincarnated. I also won’t defend her retreat center collaboration with a spiritual leader who was later accused of sexual assault. What I do think is that she was was probably pretty theologically inclined for her whole career. The traces are there, even in On Death & Dying, if we know how to look for them. And I think the fact that she was never quite able to find a comfortable public space to say what she really wanted to about death is what drove her towards those fringes in the first place. She was too religious for secular spaces, and too secular for religious spaces. So she ended up in the no-man’s land where things happen that no institution with aspirations to legitimacy will claim.

IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS Kübler-Ross has been clear about the fact that death, and the boundaries of our mortal (individual) selves, are things that she was always fixated on. She was born as one of a set of triplets, and was identical to one of her sisters. This made her immediately curious about the boundaries of individuality, and the ways in which it doesn’t always hold up as we often assume it to. When she was five she was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness, and the little girl who was sharing her hospital room actually died. Kübler-Ross grew up near farms, where she saw people die during routine accidents. And late in her adolescence (in Switzerland) she volunteered in WWII recovery efforts. This is how butterflies were carved into her imagination as an icon that hovers just beyond death.

In the recently liberated Majdanek concentration camp, in Poland, Kübler-Ross apparently saw hundreds of butterflies carved into the walls, some probably carved out with stones others perhaps with fingernails. The image stayed with her, as a kind of message from that liminal space between life and death. It was a message written from hell, but it was a message about beauty.

The link between butterflies and that life just beyond death isn’t an entirely novel association. It’s one of those recurring images that shows up in different, disconnected, cultural traditions across the course of time. Butterflies are little flying flowers; fleeting and ethereal reminders of the fragile power of beauty. Kübler-Ross grew up in a religious world, but she herself wasn’t especially pious. The butterflies were, for her, messengers from the world of nature, which is where she’d always found the most moving and acute forms of spiritual power.

This power of nature, perhaps even especially in its spiritual guises, was precisely what she was trying to reintroduce into conversations about death, in medical settings. When death is treated as a disease to be cured, or a problem to eliminate, it becomes something like a form of evil. On Death & Dying is an argument that death is not evil, but natural. And what’s evil is something apart from nature. These are essentially theological points. One can draw any number of conclusions from them. It doesn’t have to mean that death is “the end”, but it can. Kübler-Ross never really seemed to be drawn toward that reading.

She was cautious about her messaging in On Death & Dying, however. She seemed to understand that she would be taken more seriously, by medical professionals, if her ideas weren’t couched in religious language. She wanted to be widely read. She wanted to have a structural impact on her field; the field of medicine. She knew that she needed to tone down the spiritual content, even if she sometimes couldn’t quite help herself.

But I think it’s important to remember that her whole public platform was essentially built alongside theologians. In 1964 she gave a talk during which she critiqued the medical field for failing dying people. The following year she was, famously, approached by four students from Chicago Theological Seminary whose names I have never been able to find. They wanted to work, with her, on a pastoral project to bring more dignity to dying people. I’m not sure that they were ever credited anywhere, publicly. I don’t know what they made of that collaboration, in their own careers, or how it impacted them. But it was a collaboration, and I’m sure that Kübler-Ross learned from, and borrowed from, their pastoral and theological knowledge in the conversations they had with dying people.

In 1966 Kübler-Ross published the essay that would eventually become On Death & Dying in a theological journal: the Chicago Theological Seminary Register. It was apparently spotted by an editor at Macmillan (because editors at trade presses apparently used to read academic journals!) who helped her turn it into a book. While I know that she was critical of the way that religion, or at least Christianity, treated death I can’t help but imagine that this editorial process was part of the way that the theological dimensions of her project became actively muted.

I don’t think that her theological curiosity about death, and what might endure in the wake of it, disappeared however. It might have gone temporarily underground. And by the time she decided to bring it back, or bring it into the open, people felt as if it were a distraction or even a betrayal of her initial agenda. The American public wanted a more secular ars moriendi, and they didn’t want its purveyor to look as if she were pillaging religious archives for content. Secularization is supposed to make its connections to religion look invisible, if they exist at all.

WHAT EMERGED OVER the latter half of the 20th century, from a kind of tacit agreement between avatars of religious and secular authority, made the concept of the afterlife as a living, collective, speculative idea sort of unspeakable. In religious contexts, it became an element of tradition that’s been fixed by the tradition. It’s something to inherit and if you don’t like it as it is, you can either speak little or of it, or go elsewhere. In secular spaces it’s assumed to be something not worth talking about, or an awkward conversation if you’re foolish enough to bring it up. But, I think the fact that we still see countless images of heaven on steroids emerging from evangelical pop culture (translating it into the media of the moment) and a lot of wacky scientistic ideas from people who want science to validate our impulse to resist death though collective dreaming is a sign that many people just can’t help themselves. There’s a really powerful speculative drive to resist the silence of the afterlife. Maybe it’s not a drive that everyone has. But many of us do.

What’s missing I suppose, is the space for more boring and mundane visions to emerge. And these tend to be the sort that feel a bit more real, or true, to most people. This is the space where people imagine, for instance, that at the boundary between life and death we become something like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

Try a little theological experiment, for me. Think of your own little theory about what remains or endures in the wake of death, about what’s a little stronger than death, about how the powerful star of someone that we love keeps burning. Try your theory out on someone you love, not out of necessity but just for fun. Just to see what they say. See if it triggers, in them, a recognition of something you both know on a gut level but often forget about. See if it makes mortality glow a bit more for both of you, even just for a moment. See if it affirms something that you both know, and love, about the incredible powers that brought us here in the first place, into life.