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TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP DEAD |
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an excerpt from
"The Secret Parts of Fortune," by Ron Rosenbaum
Turn On, Tune In,
Drop Dead The curious tale of the Queen of Death and the lustful "entities" of Escondido is one of those little disturbances of man you may have missed if you haven't been tuned in to developments in the fast-growing "death awareness" movement. The scandal that developed over the erotic escapades of the "entities" represented a serious image crisis for the movement. Defenders of death awareness feel that the incident is merely an aberration being used unfairly by the medical establishment and its pawns in the press -- servile minions of the "cure-oriented," "interventionist," "high-technology life-prolonging" old regime -- to discredit the work of the dedicated devotees of death and dying. But a case can be made that intercourse with entities -- okay, let's call it sex with the dead -- is not an aberration but a summation, a consummation, of the whole misbegotten love affair with death that the movement has been promoting. The Queen of Death, of course, is Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who reigns over a mountaintop "Death-and-Dying Center" in Escondido, California, whose work single-handedly created the death-and-dying movement, and who, until recently, endowed it with respectability. Author of On Death and Dying, Living with Death and Dying, Questions and Answers on Death and Dying, and Death: The Final Stage of Growth, recipient of twenty honorary degrees, Kubler-Ross is now taught, in her estimation, in 125,000 death-and-dying courses in colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions. She has come to be regarded as the last word on death. Not only do "death professionals" -- hospital and hospice workers, clergymen, and psychiatrists -- get their basic training from Kubler-Ross in order to counsel the dying, but her books are so widespread that most people who die these days are familiar with her "five stages of dying." Kubler-Ross's thought has given birth to whole new academic industries -- "thanatology" and "dolorology" -- helped create the hospice movement, "Conscious Dying Centers," and, more recently, an increasingly cultlike exaltation, sentimentalization, and even worship of death. In the past, like most sensible people, I've been content to leave strenuous thinking about death in the capable hands of others. Somehow I assumed from all the acclaim from varied quarters that Kubler-Ross couldn't be too foolish, assumed that she embodied the typical post-enlightenment secular consensus on the subject: awareness of death giving an urgency and intensity to life, etc. Probably sensible, caring, and boring. But I have a feeling that we're beginning to see the consequences of not looking more closely at Kubler-Ross's "science." Because something's gone awry with the death-and-dying movement Kubler-Ross helped create. Things have gotten out of hand: Kubler-Ross herself has become the guru to a nationwide network of death 'n' dying centers called Shanti Nilaya; the Conscious Dying movement urges us to devote our life to death awareness and also opens up a "Dying Center"; a video artist kills herself on public television and calls it "artistic suicide"; the EXIT society publishes a handy, do-it-yourself Home Suicide guide that can take its place next to other recent Home Dying and Home Burial Guides; a pop science cult emerges around the "Near Death Experience," which makes dying sound like a lovely acid trip (turn on, tune in, drop dead); attempts at two-way traffic with the afterlife abound, including a courier service to the dead using dying patients and even phone calls from the dead; belief in reincarnation resurfaces as "past lives therapy." Is this multifaceted flirtation with death and suicide -- you could call it the Pro-Death Movement -- some self-regulating, population-control mechanism surfacing as the baby-boom generation gets older, the better to thin its ranks before its numbers begin to strain nursing-home and terminal-ward facilities? And how did Kubler-Ross -- saintly, respected, a Ladies' Home Journal "Woman of the Decade" for the 1970s -- end up running a dating service for the dead in Escondido? Part of the problem may be heroin. Not Kubler-Ross's problem, but the problem in the very origins of her American death-and-dying movement. You see, Kubler-Ross and the American death-and-dying movement took their inspiration from the British "hospice" idea but neglected to import one crucial ingredient that made it work. The hospice movement in Britain was a practical, no-nonsense alternative to the increasingly complex, painful, and isolating process of death in modern hospitals, where, in the hectic process of prolonging life with tubes and machines, patients aren't able to enjoy peace and quiet and the company of friends and relatives as they die. The British movement offered instead cozy, small "guest houses" for the terminally ill, with a sympathetic staff and medical treatment designed to ensure comfort, dignity, and alertness rather than an artificially prolonged life. But your basic British hospice was able to offer its dying "guests" one thing American hospices could not, one thing that made these hospices more than merely pleasant places in which to expire without the aid of "high-technology life-prolonging intervention." The attraction of British hospices, the sacrament, in fact, that made them so popular, was the special painkilling mixture they dispensed, a potion described by some as the most powerful euphoriant experience available to the human senses: the "Brompton's Cocktail." A combination of equal parts of pure heroin and pure cocaine, with a dash of chloroform in an alcohol-and-cherry-syrup base, Brompton's Cocktail became legendary for its ability to bliss out patients suffering from pain so intractable that no amount of mere morphine was able to subdue it. Not surprisingly, dying hospice patients who were fortunate enough to receive the soothing sacrament were known to make all sorts of warm and endearing remarks when in its embrace; words of wisdom and spirituality and love that hospice professionals tended to attribute to the "caring and sharing" environment of their cozy death hotels, and to the visionary insights unique to the dying process, but which probably owed more to the elation and euphoria of the heroin-cocaine combo. The problem was that while the "caring and sharing" ideas of the British movement could be imported, the drug laws in this country made it impossible to prescribe heroin for even the most terrorizing bone pain. In addition, the use of cocaine as a euphoriant is discouraged. So as a substitute for the real Brompton's Cocktail, American hospice doctors have concocted a bizarre and stunted version of that sacrament: a combination known as "Hospice Mix," which substitutes morphine for more potent heroin, and frequently uses the powerful immobilizing anti-psychotic drug Thorazine instead of cocaine. For all their ostensible reverence for the wisdom of the dying and the integrity of the dying process, American hospices that use Thorazine in their "mix" are treating dying patients as if they were psychotics. Unable to offer their dying clients the kind of truly effective and humane pain relief available to the British, American death professionals seem to have overcompensated for this failure by subjecting their dying clients -- and afflicting us all -- with massive injections of sentimentality, a syrupy overdose of sanctimony about the "beauty" of the dying process, about "learning from pain," to use some typical cliches, and about the wonderful wisdom that makes dying the "final stage of growth." In doing so, the death-and-dying people have elevated the terminally ill into a new sort of oppressed class -- oppressed by "inhuman, cure-oriented" doctors who don't recognize that dying is something to be celebrated for its intrinsic worth rather than feared and fought. Death professionals have begun attributing to the dying all the qualities of instinctual wisdom, primitive visionary insight, spontaneous vitality, and organic closeness to the ground of being with which oppressed classes are condescendingly endowed by their more privileged supporters. "Many Native Americans died with great clarity," declares the co-director of a group called the "Dying Project," a statement that embodies perfectly the identification of the dying with a persecuted minority and, in its lofty condescension, is not far removed in spirit from "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." *** While this billing and cooing about death did not originate with Kubler- Ross -- the cult of "the Beautiful Death" is a recurrent one in stagnant societies -- she did come up with one concept that single-handedly revolutionized and restructured the worship of death in America and gave it an up-to-date "scientific" foundation: the "five stages of dying." Dividing dying into stages was a stroke of genius. Kubler-Ross brought forth her five stages at just about the time when people were dividing life into "passages," stages, predictable crises. Getting dying properly staged would bring every last second of existence under the reign of reason. As every student of elementary thanatology soon learns, the famous five stages of dying are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. What's been lost in the general approbation of Kubler-Ross 's five stages is the way her ordering of those stages implicitly serves a behavior control function for the busy American death professional. The movement from denial and anger to depression and acceptance is seen as a kind of spiritual progress, as if quiet acceptance is the most mature, the highest stage to strive for. What Kubler-Ross calls bargaining, others might call a genuine search for reasons to live, to fight for life. But she has no patience with dilly-dallying by the dying. She disparages "bargaining" that goes on too long, describes patients who don't resign themselves to death after they've gotten the extra time they bargained for as "children" who don't "keep their promises" to die. Yet by "acceptance," Kubler-Ross means the infantilization of the dying: "It is perhaps best compared with what Bettelheim describes about early infancy," she says. "A time of passivity, an age of primary narcissism in which ... we are going back to the stage we started out with and the circle of life is closed." Certainly this passivity makes for a quieter, more manageable hospice. Crotchety hospice guests who quixotically refuse to accept, who persist in anger or hope, will be looked on as recalcitrant, treated as retarded in their dying process, stuck in an "immature" early stage, and made to feel that it's high time they moved on to the less troublesome stages of depression and acceptance. Now let's look at the practical effect of this premium on passivity on an actual encounter between a dying person and a "death professional." Let's look at a little hand-printed pamphlet entitled It's Been a Delightful Dance: the story of Ellen Clark as told in a sermon by Dr. Richard Turner. This is an account of the therapeutic relationship between Turner and Clark, who was dying of cancer when she approached the Cancer Project of "Life Force," Turner's therapy organization, for counseling. The California-based Life Force was one of several holistically oriented therapy groups that specialize in what has come to be called "cancering." Turner charged forty-five dollars an hour for such counseling. I came across Turner and his group in 1980, in the Grand Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, at a convention of the Cancer Control Society, a national organization that supports scores of "unorthodox" and forbidden cancer "cures" -- everything from apricot kernels and coffee enemas to secret-formula serums and salves. I was somewhat puzzled to find someone like Turner speaking here, since the acceptance-oriented death-and-dying rhetoric in his speech contrasted with the feverish never-say-die, last-minute, miracle-seeking emphasis of the unorthodox-cancer-cure movement. "With certain patients I've counseled it becomes clear that at some level they are ready to die," Turner told me, when I questioned him after his talk. "They've made their choice, they feel they've lived their life. There was one patient of mine who'd done the holistic cures. But as I counseled her on her dying experience, it was as if this was what she wanted, it was as if she was releasing all her barriers and becoming fully human for the first time. She turned into a living, beautiful person so that by the time she died she'd done all her life's work in her last few weeks. Her name was Ellen Clark. In fact I wrote up my experience with her in a sermon I delivered. It's in our literature." Reading Turner's description of the progress of his therapy with the late Ellen Clark, it's impossible not to notice the influence of Kubler-Ross in the way he idealizes the progressive infantilization of the dying. The big breakthrough that Ellen Clark achieves as she's wasting away with cancer is, according to Turner's sermon, that she "develops a childlike transparency." How does Turner deal with this in his counseling session? He's eager to encourage it, eager to "reinforce those feelings that we were like children in kindergarten." His technique for reinforcing this? He responds completely only to Ellen's "childlike," "magical" looks; even when she's trying to tell him something in adult sentences he makes sure that "only part of my attention went back to what she was saying ... The result was that heavy subject matter such as life and death and problem-solving progressively lost its dominance and an air of lightness pervaded our meetings." No wonder. Dealing with an adult who's been turned into a happily compliant child is much more fun for friends and family than facing the complexities presented by a stubborn adult who's frantically fighting to live. As in other tales in the contemporary Beautiful Death literature, an element of parasitism seems to creep into the stories told by the selfless survivors. Turner tells us that after Ellen became the "transparent child," he really started getting off on the sessions. He reports feeling "light and alive" after each session. "I was gaining as much from our meetings as her." (Maybe he should have been paying her forty-five dollars an hour for the privilege.) Ellen's friends also "reported quite consistently being touched and healed in her presence." Touched and healed: The magical powers of the dying are frequent causes for amazement in the literature. By turning herself into an agreeable, transparent, loving child with Turner's encouragement, by refusing crankily to seek out some new cure or make a desperate gamble for her life, Ellen made it easy for people to be around her and feel loving. The message for dying patients in Turner's sermon is, to revise Dylan Thomas, "Do go gentle into that good night." And then the climax of the Delightful Dance sermon: "The morning after I heard about Ellen's death I went out for my daily jog," Turner tells us. "A beautiful orange butterfly landed in front of my foot. I immediately felt as if I knew this butterfly, and apparently it had this same connection with me ... The butterfly and I were doing a get-acquainted dance ... I felt I was doing a get-acquainted dance with the butterfly within me. I feel I am ready to let go of being the caterpillar ... I am more ready to dance with my life ..." And so, according to Turner, Ellen's pretty little death turned out to be a plus for everyone: Ellen got to be a butterfly and he got to dance during his daily jog. The whole thing sounded like a dance of death to me. *** This is only the beginning, this reverence for the life-giving holiness of the compliantly childlike death object. It's a long way from there to going to bed with the dead, but the route is direct, and after reading the recent profusion of death-and-dying literature, I've divided it -- in homage to Kubler-Ross -- into five stages: Stage 1: worship of
the dying; We've already seen Stage 1, with its reverence for the wisdom of the terminally ill. In Stage 2, death 'n' dying is seen to be an attractive option for healthy people. Why let the dying get all the benefits of facing death? To maximize the high of the dying experience when it comes, healthy people are urged by Stage 2 literature to devote their life to preparing for a beautiful death. Stage 2 advocates range from the Conscious Dying movement and its subsidiaries, the Dying Project and the Dying Center in New Mexico, to the "rational suicide" advocates. The London- based EXIT group is only one of several that put out practical do-it-yourself guides to painless suicide; other books tell you how to arrange the particulars of your death or burial at home. The late Jo Roman, evangelist of "creative suicide," went one step further -- she did it on TV. Stage 2 advocates tend to be the nags of the death-and-dying movement. Since we are not fortunate enough to be terminally ill, they tell us, we must make strenuous efforts to overcome our handicap by concentrating our lives on death and suicide. It is never too early to start. "Should schoolchildren be asked to write essays on 'How I Would Feel if I Had to Die at Midnight' or compositions envisaging why and in what circumstances they propose to end their lives?" asks Mary Rose Barrington, past chairman of EXIT. "The answer may well be that they should," says Mary Rose, who, oddly enough, is also "Honorary Secretary of the Animal Rights Group." (Do they favor the right to suicide for parakeets?) Missing out on early childhood death education is no excuse to avoid the subject now. And that means today. Tomorrow may be too late if you believe the nagging of Stephen Levine, director of the Dying Project. "Tomorrow," he points out, "could be the first day of thirty years of quadriplegia. What preparations have you made to open to an inner life so full that whatever happens can be used as a means of enriching your focus?" The first day of thirty years of quadriplegia. It's a particularly ironic formulation of the challenge because Levine and the Dying Project, and the Dying Center (where people check in to check out) are spiritual descendants of ex-Harvard professor and psychedelic pioneer Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass), and thus of a brand of spiritualism that expressed its incurable optimism with the slogan "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Sure, but tomorrow the wheelchair and the catheter. Such a shift says something about this branch of the Pro-Death movement -- either they've run out of good acid and have been dipping into the melancholy Hospice Mix, or, as they grow older, they're suddenly scared of death and afraid to admit it. If you read Levine's testament, Who Dies?, a bible for the Conscious Dying movement, you begin to suspect he's trying to smother his fear of death in protestations of his devotion to it. He's constantly hectoring the reader for having failed to do his death homework: "If you should die in extreme pain how will you have prepared to keep your mind soft and open?" he scolds. "What have you done to keep your mind present, so that you don't block precious opportunity with a concept, with some idea of what's happening, open to experience the suchness, the living truth, of the next unknown moment?" You could dismiss this scolding as mere schoolteacherish sanctimony, or life-insurance-salesman scare tactics (buy my theory of dying now or you'll be condemned to die inauthentically), but there's something more frightened and frightening in this prose. I think it comes out in the Dying Project co-director's description of the ideal Conscious Dying movement -- approved death: I've been with people as they approached their death and seen how much clarity and openheartedness it takes to stay soft with the distraction in the mind and body, to stay with the fear that arises uninvited, to keep so open that when fear comes up they can say, "Yes, that's fear all right." But the spaciousness from which they say it is not frightened. Because the separate "I" is not the predominant experience, there's little for that fear to stick to. Clearly a useful practice would be to cultivate an openness to what is unpleasant, to acknowledge resistance and fear, to soften and open around it, to let it float free, to let it go. If you wrote down a list of your resistances and holdings, it would nearly be a sketch of your personality. If you identify with that personality as you are, you amplify the fear of death; the imagined loss of imagined individuality. This is metaphysical heroin, a Brompton's Cocktail of the mind, the same basic anodyne for the tears of things that all Eastern cults offer: If you detach yourself and experience all passion at one numb remove, in the context of the infinitude of being, nothing hurts as much. If you go the whole route and cease being a person -- that "imagined individual" Levine disparages -- then you won't even die because there won't be a you to die. You'll never be a person afraid of death because you won't be a person. You'll be, instead, "the spaciousness" that is not frightened. Nonbeings can't cease being. If you make life as spacious and empty as death, you won't notice any transition between living and dying; you might as well be dead. Which is exactly what the "creative suicide" people say. Or they might call it "CREATING ON MY OWN TERMS THE FINAL STROKE OF MY LIFE'S CANVAS," as video death artist Jo Roman wrote in her last letter to friends. ("By the time you read these lines I WILL HAVE GENTLY ENDED MY LIFE on the date of this letter's postmark," she announces with typical gentleness.) Roman's trendsetting originality, of course, was not in her committing the act or justifying it on artistic grounds. It was in doing it so publicly. Suicide -- proud self-murderers have in the past been content to have their feverish last thoughts and justifications publicized. But Jo Roman insisted on making a federal case of the act itself and the whole tearful "dying process," summoning friends and forcing them to grovel at the altar of her honesty while the videotape cameras rolled. She made the additional breakthrough of claiming for suicides the status of an oppressed lifestyle group in need of televised validation: "I want to share it with others in order to raise consciousness. Also, and importantly, because I am averse to demeaning myself by closeting an act which I believe deserves respect." Of course, creative suicide is not the exclusive province of exhibitionistic video artists. There were the healthy young teenagers in Seattle, a boy and a girl, who, inspired by the transcendent optimism about the indestructibility of the soul in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, proceeded to get into a Pontiac and drive it at eighty miles per hour flat out into a stone wall, in order to ensure they spent eternity together. *** Suicide and suicide pacts are a predictable enough consequence of the death 'n' dying movement. By romanticizing dying, by making death more "authentic" than life, suicide is made to seem an attractive, artistic, even heroic choice. Another way of promoting the attractiveness and allure of death is through the creation of an inviting, reassuring, sugarcoated vision of the afterlife. Which brings us to Stage 3 in the development of contemporary death worship: the romance of the Near Death Experience (NDE), or playing dead. At first the NDE seemed to be a freak, based on a few isolated reports. People who had been pronounced "clinically dead," people who "died" on the operating table, in the ambulance, or the intensive care ward, whose heart and vital functions ceased for ten, twenty minutes, would sometimes, after miraculous "resurrections," tell tales of leaving the body and traveling through a remarkable, otherworldly realm. Aside from the National Enquirer ("DEAD MAN" SPEAKS!), no one paid much attention to these isolated reports until a philosophy professor named Raymond Moody compiled 150 of them into a book called Life Alter Life, which was published in 1975 with an endorsement by none other than Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who claimed that she had been doing exactly the same kind of research and that Moody's findings duplicated hers. The "NDE" became the semiofficial afterlife vision for the death-and-dying religion. It was appealing because it made death seem like something to look forward to. Hamlet's "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," whose mysteries had long terrified the human imagination, now seemed, from the reports of Raymond Moody's travelers, to be about as frightening as a day trip to the Jersey shore. Let's look at Moody's "theoretically complete model" of the life-after-life experience, which I have here divided into seven easy-to-follow steps. 1. A streetcar named death: Our traveler hears himself pronounced dead. Next he hears "a loud ringing or buzzing and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel." 2. The fly on the wall: "He suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body ... He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point ... in a state of emotional upheaval." 3. Family reunion: "He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died." 4. The heavenly customs inspector: He meets "a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before -- a being of light ... This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life ..." 5. The highlights film: The "being of light" helps him along by "showing him a panoramic instantaneous playback of the major events of his life." 6. Heaven can wait: "He finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come." 7. Deportation: "He is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude," though, he's forced to rejoin the unpleasant world of the living. Of course, it's possible that this pallid panorama of sweetness and light may actually be the afterlife and the ultimate riddle of existence has been solved. There are certainly millions of people who would like to believe its reassuring, nondenominational, downy-soft delights: Moody's book and his sequel Reflections on Life After Life, and its paperback rackmates Life Before Life and Reliving Past Lives, have all become big dime-store and drugstore bestsellers, creating a popular NDE-based cult. The only stumbling block that prevents the NDE from becoming the center of a new popular religion for the living has been that the actual ecstatic death trip experience seemed to be restricted to those privileged few whose heart, breathing, and vital functions had ceased for a certain period, or who were fortunate enough to be nearly killed in a plane crash, car wreck, or other near-death trauma. Enter the ever helpful Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who not only endorsed Moody's NDE but took the NDE cult a crucial step further by staking out that bright landscape and its loving beings of light for routine visits by the living -- those among the living who learned the correct way of playing dead. She discovered this pastime from her own travels in that realm of bright beings, she says. Her first "out-of-body experience" came at a time when she was, if not near death, at least by her account, dead tired from several years of exhausting nonstop travel, lectures, seminars, and workshops promoting death 'n' dying awareness. Drifting off into a trancelike sleep, she says, I saw myself lifted out of my physical body ... It was as if a whole lot of loving beings were taking all the tired parts out of me, similar to car mechanics in a car repair shop ... I experienced a great sense of peace and serenity, a feeling of literally being taken care of, of having no worry in the world. I had also an incredible sense that once all the parts were replaced I would be as young and fresh and energetic as I had been prior to this rather exhausting, draining workshop ... Naturally I associated this immediately with the stories of dying patients who shared with me their near death experiences ... Little did we know then that that was the beginning of an enormous amount of new research, which ultimately led to the understanding of death and life after death. While this first experience was involuntary, she discovered, after hooking up with some out-of- body occultists in Virginia, that she could learn to repeat it at will. She could play dead. Whenever her bodily vehicle needed a tune-up, whenever she wanted to set back the old odometer, rejuvenate the spark plugs, she could take a revitalizing dip into death, that refreshing fountain of youth. *** But Kubler-Ross did not stop there. She sailed right on into Stage 4: playing with the dead. Remember that benevolent "being of light" who greets you when you alight from the streetcar named death? Well, he has friends up there. Plenty of them. Spirit guides. Guardian angels. The enlightened "afterlife entities." The way Kubler-Ross describes it now, all the while she was garnering her honorary degrees, her acclaim from clergy, shrinks, and academics for working with the dying, she was spending an ever-increasing amount of her time playing with the dead. She made her own decisions only in consultation with her guardian angels and spirit guides. She counseled the living to make their decisions based on the guidance of entities from the Other Side. In Stage 4, the implications of the previous stages become explicit: Death is much more wonderful than life, the dead are much wiser, and, since two way communication with the Other Side is now possible, it's better to consult with them about the tiresome business of getting through life. By Stage 4, the dead are not really "dead" at all. They're more alive than we, the living, can hope to be. They're not even called "dead" anymore. For Stage 4 death worshipers they are "afterlife entities"; by the time we reach Stage 4 there is no such thing as death. This was another Kubler-Ross discovery, I learned from her "media person" in Escondido. "Elisabeth doesn't like the term 'near death experience,' " he explained to me, "because she doesn't believe that death exists." Doesn't believe in death? "No such thing," he said. "She believes there are just ... transitions. So it's not a near death experience because it's available to normal living people every day if they tune in to it." Turn on, tune in, drop dead. Playing with the dead has become a rapidly expanding national pastime. Spirit guides and guardian angels are becoming for many adults the comforting imaginary playmates they had to abandon as children, the perfect loving parents they never had. This two-way traffic takes some curious forms. According to a Washington Post story (apparently not a hoax), a California company has hired a number of terminally ill patients who will, for a fee, act as couriers, memorizing messages to be delivered to the dead as soon as they arrive on the Other Side. A whole new category of spiritualist phenomena is chronicled in the book Phone Calls from the Dead, which cites reports that phones all over America are practically ringing off the hook as chatterbox "entities" from the Other Side pester their friends and relatives among the living. (These days they're probably jamming the switchboards to find out if they can get a date for the next Kubler-Ross "workshop.") We're also witnessing a revival of the old-fashioned table-rapping spiritualist epidemic that swept America in the mid-nineteenth century. The modern version, which dispenses, for the most part, with tables and props, is known -- appropriately enough for the TV age -- as "channeling," and this narrowcasting from the Other Side is growing as fast as cable TV. And, like cable, it's a franchising operation. I discovered this when a woman announced to me on the phone that she'd "finally gotten her channel." It seems that she'd been a paid student of a medium who was a "channel" to an afterlife entity somehow related to "Seth," the extremely popular, extremely long-winded afterlife entity whose empty maunderings somehow mesmerize middle-class airheads with pronouncements such as: "For in the miraculous spontaneity of the sun there is discipline that utterly escapes you." After paying the Seth-related medium for months of trance training, this woman had finally been granted an authorized, franchised "afterlife entity" of her own, which would speak through her when she went into a trance and which would allow her to charge others for the privilege of getting its utterances on their problems. I witnessed one such channeling session in a SoHo loft, and a sad spectacle it was. The woman seemed to have been granted a channel with very poor reception, or else there was an exceptionally thick-headed entity in the control room on the Other Side. After ten minutes of "going into trance," complete with head rollings, eye rollings, and all the most cliched eyelid- batting expressions of the stage spiritualist, the woman finally snapped to and began speaking in the voice of her "channel" (a voice barely distinguishable from her own). But the hapless entity couldn't answer a single question she posed. I'd never seen an entity hem and haw so haltingly and ignorantly. Apparently, the slick and accomplished spiritualist franchiser who sold this gullible woman her channel hadn't even bothered to polish the entity's act enough to make it a good investment for the franchisee. It's probably a common spiritualist scam, taking advantage of such blind devotion to the wisdom of the dead to dump defective entities on the market the way swindlers sold underwater swampland lots in the Florida land boom. *** Considering this feverish eagerness to be in touch with entities one way or another, it's not surprising that some death 'n' dying cultists have carried worship of the dead to Stage 5: going to bed with the dead. It seems as if there has always been a subtext of eroticism in the growth of the death 'n' dying movement. Take the story behind Kubler-Ross's first big break into the national awareness. "She was doing her seminars with dying patients virtually unnoticed in Chicago," her media person told me over the phone. "But then Life magazine heard about her and was going to send someone to see if there was a story in her work. There was this elderly man dying who was going to be the subject of the seminar when Life was there, but the old man died the night before." There followed a hasty search for an understudy dying patient, and what happened next was in the best Broadway tradition: "They found a beautiful young girl to replace the old man." She was twenty-four or twenty-six," the media person told me. "And then Life knew they had a story. A real heart-throbber." It was this dying-heartthrob story in Life, he said, that made Kubler-Ross a sudden national sensation and enshrined her as Queen of Death. If the dying can be heartthrobs, if the afterlife entities can be warm and loving and intimate with the living, why would anyone hesitate to go to bed with the dead? By the time the sexual scandal broke in 1980, Kubler-Ross seems to have been bewitched into buying every last spiritualist trick in the book. She had no less than four personal entities -- she called them "Mario," "Anka," "Salem," and "Willie" -- attending her. She now believed in reincarnation and claimed to have memories of being alive in the time of Jesus. Where once her seminars had helped the dying, their friends, and their relatives live with despair, she now offered them a grab bag of Big Rock Candy Mountain fantasies of "life after life" to escape from life. And, finally, she'd allied her personal organization with a local sect that called itself the Church of the Facet of Divinity, hailing its minister, faith healer and medium Jay Barham, as "the greatest healer in the world." Although accounts differ as to who actually did what to whom, allegations of seductions by entities did not arise until the merger with Barham's church. According to one report, "Barham regularly conducted seances in which he acted as a medium to communicate with what he called 'afterlife entities.' At many of these sessions, the former female members of the group asserted, they were instructed to enter a side room where they were joined a few minutes later in the dark by an unclothed man who talked convincingly of being an 'afterlife entity' [who] ... then proceeded to convince the women that they should engage in sex with him ..." According to another report, the seductive entity mispronounced certain words in a manner remarkably similar to that of Barham. Some of the women began to suspect that the aroused afterlife entity had earthbound limitations when five of them came down with the same vaginal infection after being closeted with him. And then there was the woman who actually turned on the light in the entity-visiting chamber and claimed to see Barham, naked except for a turban. Barham had a wonderful explanation for his resemblance to the turbaned apparition. He denied engaging in sexual activities with any of the women but said that in order to materialize, certain entities might have cloned themselves from Barham's cells, which would explain how they might resemble him in materialized form. Believe it or not, Kubler-Ross seems to have bought that too. For a year after the "entities" conned and abused her acolytes, she defended Barham and continued to work with him, franchising death, dying, and entity-encounter sessions throughout the country. She now insists, however, that she was no fool, that nobody had pulled the wool over her eyes, that unbeknownst to everyone "I have been conducting my own first-person investigation of ... Barham." This investigation, which she must have pursued with all the stealth of Richard Nixon's personal "investigation" of the Watergate cover-up, finally uncovered unspecified conduct by Barham that "did not meet the standards ... of Shanti Nilaya." None of this substandard behavior, she insisted, took place on her premises or involved her workshops. The clincher in her investigation, Kubler-Ross told a writer, was her decision to have a doctor "measure" Barham's faith-healing power. This test, whose exact nature she did not disclose, revealed to her that his healing skills had declined measurably and that the decline was proof of his misuse of his powers. "There are those who might say this has damaged my credibility," she conceded. "But it's not important whether people believe what I say ... I'm a doctor and a scientist, who simply reports what she sees, hears, and experiences." Although Kubler-Ross has consistently stonewalled all inquiries about her reported presence at the scene of the assignations with the aroused afterlife entities, there is every indication that her disillusion with Barham has not diminished her swooning worship of death. In a copyrighted interview with sympathetic questioner Joan Saunders Wixen, Kubler-Ross brushes off the Barham activities and instead boasts of some new benefits troubled people can look forward to as soon as they die. Death is a cure-all, the ultimate panacea: "People after death become complete again. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, cripples are no longer crippled after all their vital signs have ceased to exist." If this encouragement to euthanasia as a quick solution to all physical imperfections were not so stupid and dangerous, it would be an occasion for regret: Death has claimed another victim, the mind of Kubler-Ross. Another sad but predictable triumph of death over reason, another case of an interesting mind committing suicide. It begins to seem that thinking about death is, like heroin, not something human beings are capable of doing in small doses and then going about the business of life. It tends to take over all thought, and for death 'n' dying junkies, the line between a maintenance dose and an O.D. becomes increasingly fine. When Kubler-Ross finally makes her "transition," I'm certain all her nagging physical ailments will clear up, just as she says, but when she gets to the Other Side they'll have to mark her mind D.O.A.
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