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That was the mission. Let them experience a moment of love before they die.

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The Monthly Aspectarian: What happened in your life and what choices did you make to get you to where you are now?

David Kessler: Professionally, I started out in hospice care working with the dying. I found that I really connected with it on a deep level. After working with hospice, I went to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and worked with children who were dying of cancer. I saw that they had much less fear around death. Their parents had more fear of death and dying than the children did.

TMA: How do you explain children being less afraid?

DK: I don’t think they’ve been conditioned that death is unnatural and should be feared. I don’t think that children have been exposed to it as much as we have.

My next experience was working with children who had cystic fibrosis. I worked with children who were only going to live twenty years. I would look at them and think how sad they’re missing sixty years. And yet, they would end up getting married at thirteen and fourteen, and have a full life in twenty years. I saw them as lacking life, but they saw themselves as having a full life. These were some of the early experiences that shaped me.

I would talk to people in the book industry and say that there has to be something out there to comfort people at the end of life. It’s said that if you can’t find what you’re looking for, then maybe you’re the one who is supposed to do it. So I launched into thinking about what would I tell people. Through that process I became very interested in how trauma and end of life connect. I became involved in the Red Cross aviation disaster team and became a reserve police officer on their trauma team. I saw how people who have a life challenging illness are not only dealing with the end of life, but also the trauma of finding out, getting the diagnosis and living in a society where we don’t prepare them. So I ended up writing The Needs of the Dying. Part of that included a time with Mother Theresa in Calcutta. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross also helped me write the book.

People have asked, how do you become a reserve police officer, be on the Red Cross’ aviation disaster team, and do hospice? How do you put those things together? I look back on my mother dying when I was ten years old. She was in the intensive care unit of a hospital out of town, so we had to go stay at a hotel when we were visiting her. The day she died, a sniper took over the hotel and we couldn’t get to the hospital. So I was of two minds, I was that young boy wanting desperately to get to his mother. I was also a young boy seeing the police in action for the first time, up close and in real life. Those two worlds blended. We eventually got to the hospital, but because I was too young, I wasn’t allowed to be with her when she died at the end of the day. My mother had died and I couldn’t see her. I had witnessed the police in action and I was on my first plane flight. So I had this huge mixture of emotions that I think about when people ask, how did you get where you are in your career? I think about how I’ve become a person who could go back and help that boy. All this has been my own healing of that day.

That brings us up to The Needs of the Dying. I wrote what I believe are the sixteen needs that people deserve to have met at the end of life. Some of these are the need for hope, the need to express emotions, the need to participate in care; the need for honesty, the need for spirituality, and the need to be free of physical pain.

TMA: This is a lot more thinking about death than most people have done.

DK: If you’re just going to go on a day trip, you plan it. If you’re going to go away for the weekend, you put in some time, a few hours, planning it. If you’re going on a vacation across the country, you may put weeks and months into planning it. This is the trip of a lifetime and we put very little time into thinking about it.

TMA: Because of my own beliefs and practices, I don’t believe that I have a fear of death. It’s an inevitability and there are none of us that are going to escape it. There’s very little to be gained by being afraid of it, but how it happens is quite another matter.

DK: My father died years after my mother. I was older and able to provide him with great end of life care, and to be with him the whole time. For him, it was a very different experience. He thought of it as an incredible adventure he was about to go on. He couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen. He had had a long life and he was very curious about what was around this next corner.

TMA: It sounds like he had a great death.

DK: I have one chapter in The Needs of the Dying that is about the need to understand the process of death. I went through so many books from medical and nursing schools and found so little of death mentioned. Literally it was just an afternote ... if you have this disease, it may result in death. No one talked about what death was going to look like. A woman came up to me after a lecture and said her father had a horrible, horrible death and he was such a good man. I asked her to describe this horrible death to me and heard about a pretty normal death. But she didn’t know what it was going to look like. I thought, what if we did the same with women and childbirth. What if we never told a woman that her water was going to break? She would think that something horrible was happening. What if we never told her there was going to be pain in contractions? She would be unbelievably devastated by what was going on. There are similar things that are going to happen to us when we die that people are unwilling to share, and yet those who need the information, deserve it.

TMA: It’s interesting how women in childbirth forget how bad it was. Moments after the birth of our first child, my wife grabbed my arm and said, I can’t do this again. Two years and four months later, there we were again.

DK: I think about my time with Mother Theresa and how she said to me, “Life is an achievement and death is part of that achievement.” We don’t think of death as part of the achievement of life and yet it is.

TMA: Talk a little more about your time with Mother Theresa.

DK: When I was in Mother Theresa’s home for the dying destitute in Calcutta, I was stunned by so many people dying in one room. I looked for something medical to do for the people and there wasn’t anything. I realized I not only didn’t have any medicine, I didn’t even have a language to speak with these people. For the first time in my life, I had to be with someone, one human being to another. No language, no tasks to do, just one human being to another.

TMA: How important a cool washcloth on a forehead can be.

DK: Exactly. Those are the kinds of things that I did there. One of the things that Mother Theresa really instilled is that people need to feel one moment of kindness before they leave this world. Many of us can talk about our rough childhoods, our tough marriages, tough times or huge challenges and tragedies, but we’d be hard pressed in this country to say that we’ve never had a second of kindness. Whereas over there, you would care for people who had lived their whole lives in the gutter and had never had a moment of kindness. That was the mission. Let them experience a moment of love before they die.

TMA: We have no conception of the Untouchable life.

DK: One day when I was thoroughly lost for direction, I was told that Mother wanted to see me. She had heard I was writing a book. We sat down and one of the things that I said to her was that we have so many resources in my country and you have so few, how do you do it? She looked at me like, silly boy, and said, “The dying need tender loving care, nothing more.” We throw so much technology at the dying in this country, and forget the tender loving care. I was certainly blessed that, when the book came out, Mother Theresa had praise for it. I think that some of the most beautiful words of the whole book are her words that are on the back. I’ll just read what she said,

“This book is a source of reflection over that mysterious and beautiful moment which awaits us all. It helps people to understand that death is the full surrender of ourselves to love, like falling into the arms of God. That is death, going home to God.”

I just love those words. I think that’s the essence of it.

TMA: You also worked closely with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the rumors of her demise having been greatly exaggerated.

DK: Elizabeth and I were supposed to go on a trip to Egypt together when she had a stroke in 1995 and was unable to go. Someone from the associated press interviewed her and she was angry, and the headline read across the country, “Kubler-Ross dying a bitter death.” That was the headline, that she was dying and she was angry. Of course, she didn’t die, and “Kubler-Ross recovering slowly and working through her anger” is not a headline, so it never made the news. Many people think that she died.

So one message is, Kubler-Ross is alive, contributing and still caring about what goes on in the world. She and I went on to write a book together. The book is about all those lessons that people learn at the end of life when it’s too late to apply them in this lifetime. We thought, wouldn’t it be great to be able to apply them when we’re still healthy in the midst of life. The book is called Life Lessons, Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living. The lessons that it goes over are the lessons of authenticity, love, relationships, loss, power, guilt, time, fear, anger, play, patience, surrender, forgiveness, happiness, and a final lesson.

We wrote that book together and it recently came out in paperback. She is paralyzed on her left side and close to being bed bound, but her mind is still there and still sharp. She says one of the hardest things for her is that she feels oftentimes like she’s on a runway, that she’s left the gate to take off but hasn’t taken off, but hasn’t returned back to the gate either.

TMA: Are you involved in the Near Death Experience?

DK: I am not, which is why I was thrilled to be invited to the conference in Chicago. I have witnessed so many people in the medical profession who have had a near death experience talk about how important it is to get people involved who have had them. I feel it’s very important for someone like me, who is seen as not having had that experience, to talk about the importance of having people who are otherwise not afraid of death being involved in providing end of life care. I think that the biggest thing that I try to teach people is that fear doesn’t stop death, fear stops life.

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The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference, "Creativity from the Light," June 24-26, in Evanston, IL. A pre-conference lecture by David Kessler, "Using Your Experiences and Creativity in the Service of Others: Your Mission in End-of Life Care." will be open to the public June 23, 7 pm, at the Music Institute of Chicago (Auditorium) at 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston. For more details, please see the advertisement and announcement in this issue.

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