The second anniversary of Japan's monstrous earthquake has me thinking about Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross.

The five stages of grief outlined in her 1969 book, "On Death and Dying," aptly capture where the collective Japanese psyche has journeyed, and where it hasn't, in the 24 months since a 9-magnitude quake and giant tsunami forever changed the relationship between nature and the nuclear reactors in the nation's midst.

I first learned about Kuebler-Ross from my mother, a bereavement counselor and Catholic chaplain in New York. She met with Kuebler-Ross occasionally to compare notes in the 1990s, and says the psychiatrist "brought death out of the closet" to vastly improve the lot of dying patients.