Les derniers instants de la vie

We can strive to become masters of death in fear of it. By charging at high speed along the motorways and remaining indifferent to war, we can feel immunized against death. Is this the expression of our most infantile desires, the projection of our dreams of all power and immortality? If a society suffers from such fear and never confronts death, the means of defense it resorts to are forcibly destructive. The wars, the massacres, the growing number of murders and other crimes can only be indices of our inability to assume death with dignity. Shouldn't we try to rethink our own death and learn to face this tragic but inevitable event with less irrational fear? The psychiatrist and psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) was a pioneer of the approach of palliative care for people at the end of life and support for the dying. She accompanied millions of people at the end of life and studied the different stages through which a person passes when realizing that they are going to die.