In the Midst of Life

began. She had found her vocation.
    Elisabeth had never really wanted to go to America, still less did she want the post of psychiatric resident at Manhattan State Hospital, but it was the only job she could get. She worked with the mentally ill for nearly two years, and learned a great deal about the psychology of the human mind, its dark recesses and closed doors.
    One day her chief asked her to examine a man who was supposed to be suffering from psychosomatic paralysis and depression. The man also had an incurable degenerative disorder. Elisabeth examined him, and spoke with him at length. She had seen this state of mind before in the ravaged towns and villages of Europe, and she knew what it meant.
    ‘The patient is preparing himself to die,’ she reported.
    The neurologist not only disagreed, he appeared embarrassed, and ridiculed her diagnosis, saying that the patient just needed the right medication to cure his morbid state of mind. Days later the patient died.
    This encounter started Elisabeth thinking, watching, and noting her observations. She saw that most doctors routinely avoided mentioning anything to do with death, and the closer a patient was to dying, the more the doctors distanced themselves. She asked questions of her medical colleagues, but they avoided giving her direct answers, and she gained the impression that very few of them had been present at the bedside at the actual moment of death. ‘That’s not my department; I leave that sort of thing to the nurses,’ was the implied response. She questioned medical students and found that they were taught nothing about death and how best to handle a patient with a terminalillness.
    At first she was intrigued, and not a little amused by the head-in-the-sand attitude of her colleagues, and wondered how it would be defined in the school of analytical psychology. But then she began to wonder what effect it had on the patients themselves; and she gravitated towards those who were the most sick and the closest to death. Her experience in war-torn Europe made it easy for her to talk to these people, and she would sit with them for hours. What she discovered, mainly, was the grief of loneliness and isolation. Very often a patient had first learned of the gravity of his condition by the altered behaviour of those around him – avoidance, evaded questions, lack of eye contact. The silence of physicians added to their fears. Relatives and friends, it seemed, were also engaged in a massive game of ‘let’s pretend’, thereby closing the door on empathy and understanding. There is not a single dying human being who does not yearn for love, touch, understanding, and whose heart does not break from the withdrawal of those who should be drawing near.
    What she was observing was so at odds with her upbringing in her village in Switzerland, where a dying person was treated with love and compassion, that she thought it must be something peculiar to New York. But in 1962 the family – by now they had two children – moved to Denver, Colorado, and she and her husband got jobs at the University Hospital. Quietly, she continued her observations and discovered, to her astonishment, that the medical and social attitude to the dying was exactly the same in Colorado as in New York. Throughout America, apparently, death was a subject no one wanted to deal with.
    ‘This is a national sickness, more serious than anything I have seen on the schizophrenic wards,’ she opined.
    Her new job was working on liaison between psychiatry and general medicine, covering all disciplines. The team was headed by a professor whose main interest was in measuring the relationship between the mental, emotional and spiritual with the pathology of physical illness. Elisabeth and the professor were on the same wavelength, and she was able to discuss with him the effects that rejection and non-communication had on terminally illpatients.
    He was the first doctor with whom she had been able to express her concerns, and he understood, and encouraged her to continue her quest.
    The professor was a brilliant and charismatic lecturer, and he drew large crowds to his weekly seminars, at which he discussed with students of all faculties how psychology and psychiatry could be applied to general medicine. One day, in 1964, he called Elisabeth to his office and said that he would soon be travelling to Europe for a period of time, and that he would like Elisabeth to take over his lectures.
    ‘I