With the sharing of a feeling, the telling of a truth, the ending of anger, the healing of
judgment. With the willingness to listen, and the willingness to speak. With the decision to
forgive, and the choice to release. With the commitment to give, and the grace to receive.
I tell you there are a thousand ways to release the joy in the heart of another. Nay, a
thousand times a thousand. And in the moment you decide to do so, you will know how.
You’re right. I know You’re right. It can be done even on someone’s deathbed.
I sent you a great teacher to show you that.
Yes. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I actually got to
meet her, much less work on her staff What an extraordinary woman.
I’d left the Anne Arundel County government (before Joe Alton’s troubles began. Whew!) to
take a job in the school system there. Its long-time press aide retired, and I applied for the
position. Once again, I was in the right place at the right time. I received more incredible life
training, working on everything from the Crisis Intervention Team to the curriculum
development committee. Whether preparing a 250-page report on school desegregation
(once more touching the Black Experience) for a Congressional subcommittee, or traveling
from school to school holding first-of-their-kind family meetings with teachers, parents,
students, administrators, and support staff, I was in the thick of things.
I spent the decade of the seventies there—the longest I’d ever worked anywhere—and
enjoyed the first two-thirds of it immensely. But eventually, the bloom fell off the rose, and my
tasks began getting repetitious and uninspiring. I was also starting to glimpse what looked
more and more like a dead end ahead—I could see myself doing the same job for thirty more
years. Without a college degree, I didn’t stand much chance for advancement (I was lucky, in
fact, to have the high-level job I did have), and my energies began to flag.
Then, I was kidnapped in 1979 by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And a kidnapping it was, make
no mistake about it.
I’d begun helping Elisabeth that year as a volunteer, partnering with a friend, Bill Griswold, in
coordinating some East Coast fund-raising lectures for Shanti Nilaya, the non-profit organiza-
tion that supported her work. Bill had introduced me to Dr. Ross a few months earlier, when
he’d asked me to help with some PR. for an appearance he’d managed to talk her into
making in Annapolis.
I’d heard of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, of course. A woman of monumental achievement, her
groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying, had altered the world’s view of the dying
process, lifting the taboo from the study of thanatology, spawning the founding of the
American hospice movement, and changing the lives of millions forever.
(She’s written many other books since, including Death: The Final Stage of Growth, and, her
most recent, The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying.)
I was taken with Elisabeth immediately—as was nearly everyone who met her. She has an
extraordinarily magnetic and deeply compelling personality, and no one whom I have seen
touched by her is ever really quite the same. I knew after sixty minutes with her that I wanted