"On Death an Dying" author Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross dead at 78. Isn't it ironic? Like stirring your coffee with a tea spoon - on a rainy day.

AP calls her one of the 20th Century's greatest thinkers:

Kubler-Ross' 1969 book "On Death and Dying" was a best seller with her theory that the dying go through five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

A whole self-help industry blossomed as a result.

She also coined these phrases, which fade and appear again helpfully on her Web site:

"Beautiful people do not just happen."

"Dying children are some of our greatest teachers."

Here's one of mine. The world has so many teachers; your journey is spent trying to find the best ones.

I missed on this one - she seems real nice. She must have seen a lot of death up close. I wonder how she handled her own?

The strangest experience I had with death involved a family whose son had just died. Five years old, he'd struggled through countless illnesses; been in and out of hospital all his life with a rare blood illness. And when he died early one morning, coughing up blood, they called me - less than a week after an article I had written about their struggles as a family came out. I had been able to talk briefly with the boy, as well. He was just so tired.

The mother called and they were in total acceptance. No grief (it appeared). He was with God and that's all there was to it - they had all faith in God's decisions. But just listening to them, with the enormity of what they were telling me, and the graphic details they gave on how he died - it creeped me out.

Thinking about your own death is mostly not as hard as thinking about the one's you love — unless you have no one left who loves you. Death is ....