I had moved to the farm in Head Waters, Virginia, ten years earlier. But that was my home and I stubbornly refused to pack up. They sent the kind of messages that made life in that gorgeous spot unpleasant and dangerous. They fired bullets through my windows and shot at my animals. Later in my life, I was compelled to buy a 300-acre farm in rural Virginia, where I created my own healing center and made plans to adopt AIDS-infected babies, and, though it is still painful to admit, I see that I was destined to be driven out of that idyllic place.Īfter announcing my intention of adopting AIDS-infected babies in 1985, I became the most despised person in the whole Shenandoah Valley, and even though I soon abandoned my plans, there was a group of men who did everything in their power short of killing me to get me to leave. 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 had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I was destined to work with dying patients. The things that happened to me had to happen. If I am opinionated and independent, if I am stuck in my ways, if I am a little off-center, so what? That is me.īy themselves, the pieces do not seem to fit together.īut my experiences have taught me that there are no accidents in life. But I still indulge in these tiny pleasures. My doctors warned, and then begged me to give up smoking, coffee and chocolates. For instance, throughout the past few years I suffered a half dozen strokes, including a minor one right after Christmas 1996. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love. I think modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own. Nor could I have imagined that afterward I would spend the rest of my life explaining that death does not exist.Īccording to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. As a little girl raised in Switzerland, I could never, not in my wildest dreams - and they were pretty wild - have predicted one day winding up the world-famous author of On Death and Dying, a book whose exploration of life's final passage threw me into the center of a medical and theological controversy. It may also raise a few new questions and perhaps even provide the answers.įrom where I sit today in the flower-filled living room of my home in Scottsdale, Arizona, the past seventy years of my life look extraordinary. Maybe this, what is certain to be my final book, will clear that up. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear. I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. The only incontrovertible fact of my work is the importance of life. They believe that having spent more than three decades in research on death and life after death qualifies me as an expert on the subject. Actually I have been pursued by people who regard me as the Death and Dying Lady. For years I have been stalked by a bad reputation.
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