Our concern must be to live while we're alive... to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

The quotation urges an existential shift from merely surviving to fully inhabiting one’s life. Kübler-Ross frames “spiritual death” not as a metaphysical event but as a psychological condition produced by self-alienation—living as a performance calibrated to others’ expectations. The “facade” suggests social roles and externally imposed identities that can numb feeling, desire, and authenticity. In the spirit of her broader work on mortality and meaning, the line implies that awareness of life’s finitude should press us toward honesty, presence, and self-expression now, rather than postponing real living until some safer or more socially approved moment.