Deathbed Visions

Here’s a scenario from a branch of Afterlife Science called Deathbed Visions. 

A woman is in the final stage of a terminal illness. Her husband, at her bedside as she enters the last moments of life, notices a remarkable change. No longer in pain and discomfort, relaxed and contented, she starts smiling, her eyes focused on something her husband cannot see.

“It’s my father,” she says. “He’s in a beautiful place. He’s come to fetch me; to take me there.”

Her father had died a few years back. They were very close.

A palliative care nurse enters the room, and the man recounts what just happened. His wife must be hallucinating, mustn’t she, he says. Twenty years ago, the nurse would have agreed with him, but not now. She shakes her head. What his wife is seeing and experiencing is very real. 

Losing a loved one can only ever be a very distressing experience. Nevertheless, if we understand the implications of the transition a dying person passes through and to where they are heading, it can, at the same time, be a truly remarkable moment.

That people in the last phase of death see dead relatives is so common (90% or more), that it’s now accepted as the norm. According to palliative care and hospice nurses, the most rewarding moment is when someone, who has never believed in the remotest possibility of an afterlife, begins the part of their transition towards death in which dead relatives give them a glimpse of the realm that awaits them. The realisation that comes to a dying person is very profound and overwhelming. 

Science usually needs time for a body of evidence to accumulate. It can be by pure chance that a situation arises which provides almost irrefutable evidence.

Here is such a case:

A woman in the palliative care unit of a hospital was clearly not long for this life, a few days at the most. A true materialist, and atheist, she had never believed in any form of religion, let alone an afterlife. Nevertheless, she began to have visions of dead people she knew well, and of another realm waiting and ready to welcome her. She knew for sure that what she was seeing was real, in fact, many times more real than this life.

At the weekend, her sister visited. It would be their last moments together. The following Tuesday, the dying woman’s visions returned. This time though, her sister was among the dead relatives, waiting to ease her path through death and beyond. The woman was very distraught and depressed. Having seen her sister only that weekend, these wonderful visions she’d been having were clearly nothing more than annoying hallucinations. 

 A specialist nurse came to her bedside. They hadn’t wanted to tell her, but the day after her sister visited, she’d had a stroke and died. The woman wasn’t hallucinating at all. Her very recently deceased sister was waiting for her. 

Essential to this case is that the dying woman had already had a vision of her sister prior to hearing of her death. 

Psychologist, Dr Monika Renz of the Cantonal Hospital of St Gallen, Switzerland, has been a deathbed counsellor to over 1000 terminal patients. Certain drugs, especially painkillers, are known to impede deathbed visions. However, in a few of her patients, Dr Renz witnessed a truly remarkable request. They were instructing the medical staff to stop giving them painkillers. So comforting, so reassuring were their experiences of the realm that awaited them, that any discomfort due to lack of pain management was a small price to pay.

Another common feature of dying is that of choice. People can, to a certain extent, postpone their death until someone they want to see has been to say goodbye. Others wait until someone they’d prefer didn’t witness their death, has left. 

It happens sometimes, that at the time of death, or just minutes after, people in the room see what looks like a cloud rising from the body. They may also see the room illuminated by a bright light, although, others have reported that the room becomes dark for a while. If the room is brightly lit or there’s a lot of noise around, such as in a busy hospital, these phenomena may go completely unnoticed. 

These aren’t just isolated cases that caught people’s attention over the years. Such End-of-Life experiences happen every time someone dies. However, if the death is very quick, such as in a heart attack or an accident, there may be no time to see these phenomena. And, quite obviously, sedated patients will not be able to talk of their experiences.

It’s a sceptics duty to go in search of gaps in the evidence in research results. Is it not natural, they claimed, for someone, terrified at the prospect of their imminent demise and lapsing into moments of semi-consciousness, to seek through hallucination the comfort of a relative or friend to whom they had always been very close? There are some very important counter observations to make here.

Firstly, it’s the dead friends and relatives who come to the aid of the person whose death is imminent, not the other way around.

Secondly, if a dying patient is feeling the need for solace during their final moments in this life, why would they seek out someone who’s already dead? It just makes no sense. And it’s only ever deceased people who appear in these visions. 

It’s very common for the dying (even those suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s) to become lucid for a short period just prior to passing away – often just a few minutes, but it can be for a day or two. They remember everyone and everything, are calm and contented and ready to say their farewells. For the sceptical neuroscientists, this phenomenon, called Terminal Lucidity, is hugely frustrating and impossible to explain. 

Evidence from research carried out in the US, in collaboration with researchers in India, showed that the deceased relatives are there to ease the passage of the dying into the next life. The deceased person is always someone you would be pleased to see and to whom you were close. In other words, it’s never an inappropriate person. It doesn’t have to be a relative; close friends also appear. If you have absolutely no one in this life, then an anonymous carer will be there for you. You’ll never be alone.

Proof that an afterlife exists is now overwhelming, but still difficult for some people to accept due to the enormity of the implications. That said, a significant percentage of people are not in the least surprised. They’ve sensed the existence of an afterlife for most of their lives.

Very often people sense that their death is imminent. One Tuesday evening, a man phoned to hear my thoughts on a matter that was troubling him. His mother had said she was feeling not ill exactly, but very strange. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, but whatever it was, she felt it would kill her. Such sensations are very common. His mother died that Thursday night.