Elisabeth Kubler RossThinkers

Adversity is an opportunity — when life puts you through a tumbler, it's your choice whether you come out polished or crushed.

Adversity is an opportunity — you have to temper the iron.

Adversity is an opportunity to grow. To grow is the sole purpose of existence on this planet Earth.

Death is a graduation. When we're taught all the things we came to teach, learned all the things we came to learn, then we're allowed to graduate.

Death is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.

Death is but a transition from this life to another existence where there is no more pain and anguish. All the bitterness and disagreements will vanish, and the only thing that lives forever is love.

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

Grief is a process that will happen either as an open healing wound or a closed festering wound, either honestly or dishonestly, either appropriately or inappropriately. But emotions will be expressed.

Grief is always unique — each grief has its own imprint, as distinctive and as unique as the person we lost.

Grief is composed of a framework of five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - 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.

Grief is necessary to the healing process -- we think we want to avoid it, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid.