Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have."

"Death is staring too long into the burning sun and the relief of entering a cool, dark room."

"Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle."

"For years, I have been stalked by a bad reputation. Actually, I have been pursued by people who have regarded me as the 'Death and Dying' Lady. They believe that having spent more than three decades in research into death and life after death qualifies me as an expert on the subject. I think they miss the point."

"I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers."

"I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no death the way we understood it. The body dies, but not the soul."

"I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two."

"I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation."

"It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it."

"It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss."

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."

"It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had."

"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from."

"Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be."

"Love is really the only thing we can possess, keep with us, and take with us."

"The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief."

"The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well."

"Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body."

"Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life."

"Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever."

"When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication."

"When we grow older and begin to realize that our omnipotence is really not so omnipotent, that our strongest wishes are not powerful enough to make the impossible possible, the fear that we have contributed to the death of a loved one diminishes - and with it, the guilt."