Stop and Smell the Roses...Again?

Early in the 1960s, Jessica Mitford published "The American Way of Death," a book that had little to do with death itself and more to do with the math of caskets, the cost of funerals, and the abuses of the funeral trade.

Mitford wrote charming and cheery prose, and the enduring appeal of her book is that it gave people to believe that if they got the numbers right-the dollars and the cents of it-they'd manage the existential event of a death in the family with the same jaunty good humor and stiff upper lip that the British Mitford did.

In the late '60s, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published "On Death and Dying," and with it changed the conventional wisdom and public discourse on mortality issues. Where Mitford saw a death in the family as a retail event, Kubler-Ross saw it as a psychological one. Where Mitford provided numbers that always added up, Kubler-Ross provided stages through which the dying proceed, the understanding of and proper conduct through which would make the mystery of death more manageable.

Both books sold millions. There was and apparently remains much comfort in the assurance that funerals cost too much and dying has five stages. If we can just avoid the former and get through the latter, all will be right with the world.

In the 30 years since "On Death and Dying" appeared, Kubler-Ross has published 11 more titles, "Questions on Death and Dying," "Death: The Final Stage of Growth," "Living With Death and Dying," "Death is of Vital Importance," etc. Her claim to be an "expert on death and dying" cannot be questioned for lack of publications. A stroke she suffered in 1995, which partially paralyzed her, has left her understandably ambivalent about life and living. David Kessler, her co-author, has among his credits "The Needs of the Dying" and his having helped "hundreds of men and women, including the late Anthony Perkins and Michael Landon," making him "a leader in the field of hospice care." Their collaboration on this text would seem a perfect fit.

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