Accepting and understanding death is the first step toward improving the quality of your life. Once you have accepted the certainly of death, death can then perform a function: it can act as a stimulus for examining and rearranging your own values and priorities in an effort to enrich your life. In this sense, death is not an end in itself, rather it is the impetus or the beginning of a new and better kind of living. The implication of death are therefore interwoven with life to create a more meaningful existence. This concept is illustrated best in the way terminally ill patients change their attitudes toward their lives once they have accepted the fact that death is near. In her book To Live Until We Say Goodbye, Kubler-Ross wrote about Beth, a 42-year-old New York model who discovered a new meaning in life once she had accepted her impending death:
What Beth demonstrated to us is that when human beings have the courage to face their own finiteness and come to grips with that deepest agony, questioning, turmoil and pain - they emerge as new people. They begin to converse with God, or the Source, or whatever you want to call it, and a new kind of existence begins for them. We have seen this in countless cases. These patients often become poets; they become creative beyond any expectations, far beyond what their educational backgrounds had prepared them for.
This process is exemplified in Beth by some of the thoughts that demonstrate the kind of person she became.
The following are two excerpt from Beth's diary:
It is nice to go out and walk in the sunshine, it just feels good to be alive and aware.
I used to wish for death
A lot of the time
Then I died
For a little time
Now I wish to die
Some of the time.
But, now I know
It will be
For all the time.
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