The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation
Carrying forward Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work through education, grief support, and compassionate end-of-life care in communities around the world.
Online Learning
Online courses on Elisabeth's work
Learn from Elisabeth, in her own words.
Self-paced courses built from Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s own books, recordings, and workshops, taught by the Foundation and by people who worked beside her. On Death and Dying, chapter by chapter. The Five Stages of Grief® as she actually taught them. The Universal Laws from her Life, Death and Transition workshops. Available worldwide, at your own pace.
“We need time to move through the pain of loss. We need to step into it, really to get to know it, in order to learn.”
– Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Latest Projects
EKR Singapore / Southeast Asia
- In 2026, the Foundation partnered with St. Luke’s Hospital to launch a Compassionate Community Program in Singapore, working with government partners to support community-based education and end-of-life care.
- EKR Southeast Asia runs fellowship programs training medical professionals in essential end-of-life care across the Philippines, India (Assam and Kerala), Nepal, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, and Lebanon
- In Nepal, the Foundation has supported palliative care education and conferences with Green Pastures Hospital in Pokhara since 2023.
Elisabeth's Legacy Worldwide
- Elisabeth’s 24 books are now published in 44 languages; On Death and Dying alone appears in 42
- Biblioteca EKR, a ten-title Spanish-language collection, launched with Ediciones Luciérnaga, joined by other new editions in Romanian, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, and Japanese in 2025/26
- In December 2025, Japan’s NHK national Television network broadcast a documentary devoted to On Death and Dying
- The Foundation’s online school at ekrfoundation.mykajabi.com offers self-paced courses built from Elisabeth’s own books, recordings, and workshops, including On Death and Dying, Unfinished Business, and The Universal Laws of Kübler-Ross
EKR Guatemala
- The Foundation’s 44-bed respite center in Guatemala City houses patients who travel from rural areas for medical care, along with one companion each, providing safe lodging, meals, basic medical care, and free transport to area hospitals
- In the Río Dulce region of Izabal, the chapter feeds 18 Mayan villages and is building a new hospice and respite center, now under construction
- Vínculos de Amor supports families who have lost a baby; a memorial butterfly garden at El Campanario was dedicated to the Foundation in October 2024
- The chapter also provides Safe Birth kits, food packages, prenatal vitamins and infant formula to new mothers, and reading glasses to seniors
The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation — Global
THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF ®
Most people know Elisabeth Kübler-Ross for the familiar five stages. Her own work tells a fuller story: On Death and Dying (1969) includes a chart with ten overlapping bands, and she continued to revise and broaden her framework in later books, lectures, and drawings.
These responses can overlap, recur, or never appear at all. Her work extended beyond dying patients to families and people facing other profound losses and changes. The stages offer a language for recognizing human experience—not a checklist, timetable, or required sequence.
What became known as the “Five Stages” was only one part of Elisabeth’s larger body of work. She also wrote and taught about hope, anxiety, guilt, unfinished business, family reactions, symbolic language, and the importance of listening to the person experiencing illness, loss, or change.
The Four Quadrants
Elisabeth saw every person as physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Care that attends to only one quadrant, she taught, leaves the person unmet. This whole-person view underlies hospice and palliative care today.
The Patient as Teacher
Elisabeth's method began with listening. She brought dying patients into the seminar room to speak for themselves, and asked physicians, nurses, and students to learn from them rather than about them. That reversal changed how medicine talks to the seriously ill.
Unconditional Love
For Elisabeth, the purpose of facing death was learning to live without fear. The Life, Death and Transition workshops she led for two decades helped people release unfinished business so they could love, and be loved, without conditions.
Unfinished Business
Grief that goes unexpressed does not disappear; it waits. Elisabeth's Life, Death and Transition workshops were built to help people reach and release the losses, fears, and unspoken words they had carried for years.
We envision a world where all people and their families can have a dignified life even when approaching death and are supported with compassion while dying — by family, friends, the community, and healthcare providers who embrace all of life including death.