Michael Prescott's Blog

We are all loved

Roger Knights directed me to this story in the Washington Post. It's heartwarming and reassuring, and may provide some comfort in these increasingly crazy (and crazy-making) times.

The story is written by a hospice social worker, Scott Janssen, who, like many people in that field, has encountered patients with compelling stories of deathbed visits and similar phenomena. In this case, an elderly patient remembered a deeply meaningful event from his time in World War II. After a particularly traumatic day of dealing with casualties from a combat operation, the patient was unable to shake the memory of one patient in particular. He said:

“Later that night I was on my cot crying. Couldn’t stop crying about that poor guy, and all the others I’d seen die. My cot was creaking, I was shaking so hard. I even started getting scared that I was going insane with the pain.”

I nod, waiting for him to continue.

Then I looked up,” he says. “Saw a guy sitting on the end of my cot. He was wearing a World War I uniform, with one of those funny helmets. He was covered in light, like he was glowing in the dark.”

“What was he doing?” I ask.

Evan starts crying and laughing at the same time. “He was looking at me with love. I could feel it. I’d never felt that kind of love before.”

“What was it like to feel that kind of love?”

“I can’t put it in words.” He pauses. “I guess I just felt like I was worth something, like all the pain and cruelty wasn’t what was real.”

“What was real?”

“Knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.”

This turned out to be the first of several paranormal visits. Each time the specter arrived, he’d wordlessly express love and leave Evan with a sense of peace and calm.

“After the war, the visits stopped,” he says. “Years later, I was cleaning out Mom’s stuff after she died, and I found an old photograph. It was the same guy. I looked on the back, and Mom had written the words ‘Uncle Calvin, killed during World War I, 1918.’

Janssen asked him why he'd brought up this subject, and Evan replied:

“He’s back,” he whispers, staring out the window. “Saw him last night on the foot of my bed. He spoke this time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me he was here with me. He’s going to help me over the hill when it’s time to go.”

Janssen goes on to describe some paranormal experiences of his own, which opened his mind to the conviction that his patients were not merely hallucinating. He writes that while he tried to dismiss one such experience as coincidence ...

Inside, though, a part of me knew it was real.

After nearly 30 years as a hospice social worker, I’m certain of it. And I have patients like Evan to thank: dying patients who have convinced me that the world we inhabit is lovingly mysterious and eager to support us, especially during times of disorientation and crisis. It even sends messages of love and reassurance now and then when we’re in pain.

I would add to this only two things.

First, I think there are times when we all feel we are "going insane with pain." This particular moment in American history may be one of them – and this is true for people on both sides of the increasingly wide political divide. It is comforting to think that others who've endured their own share of earthly misery, perhaps in much larger measure, are watching over us and are ready to take our hand and lead us to a better place when it's our time to go.

As an aside, I sometimes think that only my exposure to spiritualist concepts and the evidence for them has kept me from losing my mind entirely. Admittedly, sometimes I come pretty close to losing it, anyway ... But as G.K. Chesterton reportedly said when told he was a pretty rotten person for all his Christian faith, "Imagine how much worse I would be without Christianity." (Quoted from memory, because I can't track down the actual quote.) In my case, just imagine how much worse I would be without my knowledge of the afterlife and the higher self! I shudder to think of it.

Second, I would note that my own rather limited experience with hospice workers, during the brief time when my father was on in-home hospice care, made me realize that these people – people who deal with death on a daily basis – are often profoundly spiritual in their outlook. In fact, I would even describe them as "Spiritualist." Some of them use the language and concepts familiar to me from my own readings of Spiritualist literature of a hundred years ago.

It is, of course, entirely possible that some people influenced by Spiritualism went into the hospice field precisely so they could attend the dying. But I think it is also the case that hospice workers have witnessed so many examples of anomalous phenomena – deathbed visions, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and so forth – that they have no choice but to adopt the language and mindset of spiritualism in order to make sense of it.

I might add that years ago, I was in a used bookstore when two hospice nurses asked the clerk if she had any of John Edward's books. This was a time when John Edward was the most famous medium in America. I somewhat regret not talking to those nurses, as I imagine they had some interesting stories to tell.

To repeat what hospice patient Evan said, his comfort came from "knowing that no matter how screwed-up and cruel the world looks, on some level, somehow, we are all loved. We are all connected.” This is so easy to forget and so hard to remember. Yet it is true – profoundly true.

Why do we forget? My forthcoming book The Far Horizon has some thoughts on this, essentially suggesting that we are temporarily players in a fully immersive virtual-reality environment. "Fully immersive" means we cannot easily emerge from the illusion of earthly life. We must endure all the Sturm und Drang of our environment even if it is only an illusion. Apparently, this is how we learn and grow. And those who refuse to engage with the world and endure its highs and lows, those who prefer to sequester themselves in ignorance and apathy, are missing out and will probably have to return again and again until they learn their lesson.

The late Bruce Siegel, who often commented on this blog, liked to emphasize the primary role of love in any understanding of life and spirituality. I was frequently inclined to downplay his input, preferring to focus on more "scientific" concepts like information theory. But I'm starting to suspect he was right all along. Without love, what is there? What's the point?

Ultimately, one way or the other, all the pain and drama of this world will fade like a bad dream. That's worth remembering at times when the bad dream becomes especially nightmarish.

Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

MacBeth Act 3, Scene 2

Dreamcatchers

A New York Times article from 2016, "A New Vision for Dreams of the Dying," came to my attention recently through a Facebook post. It details the research into deathbed visions (primarily dreams) conducted at Hospice Buffalo under the direction of Dr. Christopher Kerr. (It appears that Hospice Buffalo is now known as the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care.)

The article is long and includes quite a few interesting stories. As they say, "read the whole thing." I'll just offer a couple of excerpts.

I was laying in bed and people were walking very slowly by me. The right-hand side I didn’t know, but they were all very friendly and they touched my arm and my hand as they went by. But the other side were people that I knew — my mom and dad were there, my uncle. Everybody I knew that was dead was there. The only thing was, my husband wasn’t there, nor was my dog, and I knew that I would be seeing them. — Jeanne Faber, 75, months before her death from ovarian cancer.

Another article offers a fuller version of this story:

“It was a good dream,” she told the researcher ... “I know that was my mom and dad and uncle and my brother-in-law.” Seeing her mother in that and other recent dreams was “wonderful,” she said.

“I can’t say that my mother and I got along all those years,” Jeanne said, tearing up in a video recording. “But we made up for it at the end.”

The three-minute video of Jeanne Faber's interview is worth watching.

Continuing with the New York Times piece:

The dreams and visions loosely sorted into categories: opportunities to engage with the deceased; loved ones “waiting”; unfinished business. Themes of love, given or withheld, coursed through the dreams, as did the need for resolution and even forgiveness. In their dreams, patients were reassured that they had been good parents, children and workers. They packed boxes, preparing for journeys, and, like Mr. Majors, often traveled with dear companions as guides. Although many patients said they rarely remembered their dreams, these they could not forget....

Dr. Kerr, who recently gave a talk at TEDxBuffalo about the research, said he was simply advocating that health care providers ask patients open-ended questions about dreams, without fear of recrimination from family and colleagues.

“Often when we sedate them, we are sterilizing them from their own dying process,” he said. “I have done it, and it feels horrible. They’ll say, ‘You robbed me — I was with my wife.’”

The Times article also addresses the difference between deathbed visions and delirium-produced hallucinations. Essentially, a delirious patient cannot interact normally with the people around him, while a person having a deathbed vision is perfectly able to function, as in this case:

Donna Brennan, a longtime nurse with Hospice Buffalo, recalled chatting on the couch with a 92-year-old patient with congestive heart failure. Suddenly, the patient looked over at the door and called out, “Just a minute, I’m speaking with the nurse.”

Told that no one was there, the patient smiled, saying it was Aunt Janiece (her dead sister) and patted a couch cushion, showing “the visitor” where to sit. Then the patient cheerfully turned back to Mrs. Brennan and finished her conversation.

Delirium is also characterized by agitation and fear, while deathbed visions are typically (though not invariably) experienced as calming, even joyful.

A press release on the research, put out by the Palliative Care Institute (an affiliate of the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care), summarizes the findings:

•  88 percent of the patients reported having at least one dream or vision

•  99 percent of those believed the dreams or visions to be real

•  nearly 50 percent of the dreams and visions occurred while the patients slept 

•  the most common ELDVs [End of Life Dreams and Visions] revolved around living or deceased loved ones

•  60% of the ELDVs were considered to be of comfort; 19% distressing and 21% both comforting and distressing

•  religious content in the ELDVs was minimal; however there was a common existential thread                            

•  as participants approached death, comforting dreams/visions of the deceased became more prevalent

•  there are clear distinctions between ELDVs and delirium

“The study clearly indicates these dreams and visions are a profound source of potential meaning and comfort for the dying and, therefore, warrant clinical attention and further research,” says Pei C. Grant, PhD, Director of Research for the Palliative Care Institute. “Participants in the study overwhelmingly indicated their dreams and visions lessened the fear of dying, gave them comfort and made the transition from life to death easier.”

Incidentally, I briefly discussed Hospice Buffalo's research back in 2015, though I knew less about it at the time.

The far horizon

The New York Times ran a somewhat interesting piece on deathbed visions recently. Called "A New Vision for Dreams of the Dying," it was written by Jan Hoffman and appeared originally on February 2, 2016. Throughout the article, the term "deathbed" is used rather loosely, as some of these visions occurred months before the patients actually died.

A woman who died of ovarian cancer is quoted as saying:

I was laying in bed and people were walking very slowly by me. The right-hand side I didn’t know, but they were all very friendly and they touched my arm and my hand as they went by. But the other side were people that I knew — my mom and dad were there, my uncle. Everybody I knew that was dead was there. The only thing was, my husband wasn’t there, nor was my dog, and I knew that I would be seeing them.

This account is given of a 13-year-old girl:

While the patient was lying in bed, her mother by her side, she had a vision: She saw her mother’s best friend, Mary, who died of leukemia years ago, in her mother’s bedroom, playing with the curtains. Mary’s hair was long again. “I had a feeling she was coming to say, ‘You’re going to be O.K.’ I felt relief and happiness and I wasn’t afraid of it at all.”

An octogenarian WWII vet had visions that were both disturbing and omforting:

The patient had never really talked about the war. But in his final dreams, the stories emerged. In the first, the bloody dying were everywhere. On Omaha Beach, at Normandy. In the waves. He was a 17-year-old gunner on a rescue boat, trying frantically to bring them back to the U.S.S. Texas. “There is nothing but death and dead soldiers all around me,” he said. In another, a dead soldier told him, “They are going to come get you next week.” Finally, he dreamed of getting his discharge papers, which he described as “comforting.” He died in his sleep two days later.

The article notes that disturbing visions, while less common, are not unheard of:

Not all end-of-life dreams soothe the dying. Researchers found that about 20 percent were upsetting. Often, those who had suffered trauma might revisit it in their dying dreams. Some can resolve those experiences. Some cannot ...

This fall, Mrs. Brennan, the nurse, would check in on a patient with end-stage lung cancer who was a former police officer. He told her that he had “done bad stuff” on the job. He said he had cheated on his wife and was estranged from his children. His dreams are never peaceful, Mrs. Brennan said. “He gets stabbed, shot or can’t breathe. He apologizes to his wife, and she isn’t responding, or she reminds him that he broke her heart. He’s a tortured soul.”

Researchers make the point that these experiences should be called visions rather than hallucinations, a term with derogatory connotations. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not to sedate patients whose visions are troubling. Should the caregivers' priority be ensuring the patient's comfort or facilitating his/her spiritual journey?

No researcher quoted in the piece explicitly endorses the idea that some of these visions may be veridical, but at least the value of such visions is not dismissed out of hand, as might have been the case a few years ago.

Famous last words

I scoured the Internet (and my memory) for some well-known last words of famous people. Not all of these are literally the last words the person ever spoke, but they are alleged to be among the person's final communications. A lot of urban legends have sprung up about deathbed quotations, and it's possible that some of these quotes are made up or embellished. Where I'm aware of a discrepancy, I've noted it.

"Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" – Socrates just before drinking hemlock. This quote is often misunderstood as an example of Socrates making a trivial, homely allusion immediately prior to his death. Actually, he was making a reference to the practice of donating a cock (= rooster) to the god of healing, Asclepius, after one had been cured of an illness. The implication is that life is the illness which death will cure. The quotation appears in Plato's work Phaedo, and may or may not be historically accurate.

"Thomas Jefferson ..." - John Adams.  This quote is often rendered as "Thomas Jefferson survives," or in similar words. But it seems that only the name Thomas Jefferson was distinctly heard by the people at Adams's bedside. Adams and Jefferson had become friends in their old age, though they had been rivals earlier. It is usually assumed that Adams meant to say that Jefferson was still alive even as he lay dying (though in fact Jefferson had died a few hours earlier). An alternative explanation is that Adams had a deathbed vision of the newly deceased Jefferson waiting for him on the "other side."

"Beautiful." – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after her husband asked her how she felt. In an alternative version, her dying words were: “It is beautiful!”

"It is very beautiful over there." – Thomas Edison. According to Wikiquote, "These have sometimes been reported as his last words, but were actually spoken several days before his death, as he awoke from a nap, gazing upwards, as reported by his physician Dr. Hubert S. Howe, in Thomas A. Edison, Benefactor of Mankind : The Romantic Life Story of the World's Greatest Inventor (1931) by Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ch. 25 : Edison's Views on Life — His Philosophy and Religion, p. 295."

"Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." – O. Henry, quoting a popular song of his day.

"I see black light" – Victor Hugo.

"Curtain! Fast music! Light! Ready for the last finale! Great! The show looks good, the show looks good!" – Florenz Ziegfeld, the legendary showman and creator of the Ziegfeld Follies. This quote is often given, but seems to be considerably embellished. However, it does appear to be true that Ziegfeld died giving stage directions and that his last words were something like, "Looks good! Looks good!" 

"You're right. It's time. I love you all." – Michael Landon, the American TV star, after his family had gathered around him and his son had told him it was time to move on.  These do not seem to have been literally his last words, but he spoke them only a few hours before he died. He is said to have been alone with his wife Cindy at the moment of passing, and his actual last words were "I love you."

"A certain butterfly is already on the wing." – Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. Nabokov was a great butterfly enthusiast. Although this could certainly be a reference to the liberation of the soul from the body, it could also refer to an actual butterfly that Nabokov had been chasing and which had eluded him. Possibly it means both things. 

"This is all an elaborate hoax." – Roger Ebert, in a note to his wife on the day before his death.

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." – Steve Jobs' last words, according to his sister Mona Simpson. There is also an Internet story that has gone viral on social media claiming that Jobs' last words were an elaborate rejection of materialism and worldly success, but this claim has been thoroughly debunked.

 "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." – Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, after being shot by one of his own men.

"I've got to get to the top of the hill." – Financier J.P. Morgan.

"I can't see a damned thing." – lawman Morgan Earp to his brother, Wyatt Earp. They had promised each other to report any vision of the next life if they had the chance. 

And finally this example of understated heroism from the explorer Robert Scott, whose Antarctic expedition ended  in tragedy when the entire team froze to death. These words were found in Scott's diary, though they were not the very last entry:

"We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last."

Fatal vision

New research on deathbed visions has been published by a Buffalo, NY, college. 

In interviews with 66 dying patients, the investigators found that near-death dreams and visions don’t resemble typical dreams and are distinctive from the hallucinations or confusion associated with medications, dementia or illness.

Nearly 90 percent of the patients in the studies reported having at least one near-death dream or vision, and 99 percent of those believed the dreams or visions to be real. About 50 percent of the experiences occurred while the person slept, 16 percent while they were awake, and the rest while both asleep and awake. ... Religious content was minimal, but there was a common existential thread. ...

Previous studies suggest that as many as 60 percent of conscious dying patients experience end-of-life dreams and visions, but the actual number likely is higher because the phenomenon is considered underreported by patients and family members for fear of embarrassment.

Although the study is touted as the "first rigorous examination" of deathbed visions, I don't think this is accurate. Osis and Haraldsson's classic study At the Hour of Death preceded it by decades.

Despite some talk of the importance of opening up to spirituality in hospice care, the study seems to take it for granted that these visions are "dreams" whose only function is to comfort the patient as he or she expires. 

“It’s a built-in mechanism for soothing a dying patient,” said Dr. Christopher Kerr, chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo.

Be that as it may, the fact that the phenomenon is getting more attention can only be a good thing.

Men in white

Going through some old papers of mine, I came across notes I took on a telephone conversation a few years ago. The person I was speaking to had just been to see a doctor, and the doctor, in turn, had recently been present when his elderly father passed away after an illness.

Clearly, this is not a first-hand account, but I have no reason to doubt its essential accuracy.

According to the doctor, in his last moments his father became visibly happy. He pointed at a point in space and declared that "two men with white light around them" were "coming toward" him. "Right over there," he said, though of course his son (the doctor) could see nothing. His demeanor was one of complete peace; immediately after making this statement, he simply put his head down on the pillow and died.

The doctor himself was reportedly very pleased with this deathbed vision, which he found meaningful and comforting. Since he had no special relationship with the patient I was speaking to, I have to assume he shared his story widely with many patients and probably friends and relatives, as well.

Just another piece of the puzzle ...   :-)

A peek at Darien

Vitor Moura sent me an interesting article by NDE researcher Bruce Greyson, which appeared in the December 2010 (Vol. 35, issue 2) edition of Anthropology and Humanism, a journal published by the American Anthropological Association. Titled "Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences," the article lists a number of deathbed vision cases. As far as I know, only the abstract is freely available online. 

There are so many cases, I can't excerpt them all. What follows are some of the more interesting ones. All of the quoted material is from Greyson's article and consists of Greyson's summaries in his own words. 

One very early case was written up by Dr. Henry Atherton in 1680. The doctor's teenage sister, 

who had been sick for a long time, was thought to have died. Indeed, the women attending to her saw no breath when they held a mirror to her mouth and saw no response when they put live coals to her feet. Nevertheless, the girl recovered and related a vision of visiting heaven, which her relatives dismissed as “dream or fancy.” The girl then insisted that she had seen several people who had died after she had lost consciousness. One of those she named was thought to be still alive; however, her family subsequently sent out inquiries and confirmed that the girl was correct.

It's interesting that even in that more religious age, her family’s knee-jerk response was a skeptical dismissal. Some things never change!

A case written up in 1882 by Frances Power Cobbe

described a woman who, as she was dying, suddenly showed joyful surprise and spoke of seeing three of her brothers who had long been dead. She then apparently recognized a fourth brother, who was believed by everyone present to be still living in India.... Sometime thereafter letters arrived announcing the death of the brother in India, which had occurred prior to his dying sister recognizing him.

In 1885, Eleanor Sidgwick wrote up an interesting case involving a singer identified only as Julia X, who had been briefly employed six or seven years previously by an affluent lady. Now the employer was dying. On her deathbed she was coolly discussing business matters, when

[s]uddenly she changed the subject and said, “Do you hear those voices singing?” No one else present heard them, and she concluded: “[The voices are] the angels welcoming me to Heaven; but it is strange, there is one voice amongst them I am sure I know, and cannot remember whose voice it is.” Suddenly she stopped and, pointing up, added: “Why there she is in the corner of the room; it is Julia X.” No one else present saw the vision, and the next day, February 13, 1874, the woman died. On February 14, Julia X’s death was announced in the Times. Her father later reported that “on the day she died she began singing in the morning, and sang and sang until she died.” 

Here's one reported by pioneering psi researchers Edmund Gurney and F.W.H. Myers in 1889. 

Gurney and Myers also described the case of John Alkin Ogle, who, an hour before he died, saw his brother who had died 16 years earlier, calling him by name. Ogle then called out in surprise, “George Hanley!” -- the name of a casual acquaintance in a village 40 miles away -- before expiring. His mother, who was visiting from Hanley’s village, then confirmed that Hanley had died 10 days earlier, a fact that no one else in the room had known.

In 1899, Alice Johnson described the case of the dying Mrs. Hicks, who 

looked earnestly at the door to the room and said to her nurse, husband, and daughters, “There is someone outside, let him in.” Her daughter assured her there was no one there and opened the door wider. After a pause, Mrs. Hicks said: “Poor Eddie; oh, he is looking very ill; he has had a fall.” Her family assured her that the last news they had heard from him [her son, who was thousands of miles away] was that he was quite well, but she continued from time to time to say, “Poor Eddie!” Some time after she died, her husband received a letter from Australia announcing their son’s death. He had suddenly become feverish the day of his mother’s vision and was found dead, having fallen from his horse at about the time of his mother’s vision.

Another early psi researcher, James Hyslop, wrote in 1908 about a case involving two children both suffering from diphtheria. 

Jennie, age 8, died on a Wednesday, a fact that was intentionally kept hidden from her friend Edith. At noon on that Saturday, Edith selected two of her photographs to be sent to Jennie, providing evidence that she still thought Jennie to be alive. Shortly thereafter she lapsed into unconsciousness, but that evening she awakened and spoke of seeing deceased friends. Then suddenly she said to her father, in great surprise, “Why, papa, I am going to take Jennie with me!” She then reached out her arms and said, “O, Jennie, I’m so glad you are here,” lapsed back into unconsciousness, and died.

One of the more interesting stories in Hollywood history is the development of Technicolor, which is vividly described here. The system was the brainchild of Herbert Kalmus and his wife Natalie. It came as news to me that Natalie Kalmus, in 1949, reported a deathbed vision perceived by her sister Eleanor. In her final moments, Eleanor 

began calling out the names of deceased loved ones whom she was seeing. Just before she died, she also saw a cousin named Ruth and asked, “What’s she doing here?” Ruth had died unexpectedly the week before, and Eleanor, because of her condition, had not been told.

Ian Stevenson, best known as an indefatigable researcher of children’s past-life memories, wrote up a case in 1959. The dying person was an elderly lady. 

When the doctors said that she did not have long to live, her grandchildren gathered around her bed. Suddenly she seemed much more alert, and the expression on her face changed to one of great pleasure and excitement. She raised herself slightly and said, “Oh, Will, are you there?” and fell back dead. No one named Will was present, and the only Will her family could recall was a great-uncle who lived in England. Not long after, her family received word from England that her brother Will had died about two days before her death.

Some near-death experiences include elements of deathbed visions. In 1968 John Myers 

related the case of a woman who, in an NDE, perceived herself leaving her body and viewing the hospital room and saw her distraught husband and the doctor shaking his head. She reported that she went to heaven and saw an angel and a familiar young man. She exclaimed: “Why, Tom, I didn’t know you were up here,” to which Tom responded that he had just arrived. The angel then told the woman that she would be returning to earth, and she found herself back in the hospital bed with the doctor looking over her. Later that night, her husband got a call informing him that their friend Tom had died in an auto accident. 

Another NDE with a deathbed-vision component was reported by pediatrician and NDE researcher Melvin Morse in 1990. A cancer-stricken 7-year-old boy 

told his mother that he had traveled up a beam of light to heaven, where he visited a “crystal castle” and talked with God. The boy said that a man there approached him and introduced himself as an old high school boyfriend of the boy’s mother. The man said he had been crippled in an automobile accident, but in the crystal castle he had regained his ability to walk. The boy’s mother had never mentioned this old boyfriend to her son, but after hearing of this vision, she called some friends and confirmed that her former boyfriend had died the very day of her son’s vision.

Traveling up a beam of light sounds somewhat like the classic "tunnel" experience, and the crystal castle is reminiscent of the buildings constructed of glass or other transparent materials that are often reported by NDErs and mediums. These structures are sometimes said to be made of pure thought. 

In their 1993 book Final Gifts, hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley reported the case of an elderly Chinese lady, terminally ill with cancer, who  

had recurrent visions of her deceased husband calling her to join him. One day, much to her puzzlement, she saw her sister with her husband, and both were calling her to join them. She told the hospice nurse that her sister was still alive in China, and that she hadn’t seen her for many years. When the hospice nurse later reported this conversation to the woman’s daughter, the daughter stated that the patient’s sister had in fact died two days earlier of the same kind of cancer, but that the family had decided not to tell the patient to avoid upsetting or frightening her. 

The same authors related

the case of Peggy, a young hospice patient dying of lymphoma. One day, she seemed to the visiting nurse much more bright, radiant, and active than usual. She reported that the previous day she had been drifting in and out of sleep, remembering back to a happy time in her childhood when she and her brother were taken in by a beloved aunt. She woke up with a start when she felt a warm, caring hand on her shoulder, and looking around behind her saw her aunt, who lived in another state, smiling and touching her. She felt her aunt with her off and on all day, and late that night her uncle called to say her aunt had died at the same time that she was first awareof her presence.

A case reported in 1995 by a medical doctor, K.M. Dale, centered on a 9-year-old boy, Eddie Cuomo, 

whose fever finally broke after nearly 36 hours of anxious vigil on the part of his parents and hospital personnel. As soon as he opened his eyes, at 3:00 in the morning, Eddie urgently told his parents that he had been to heaven, where he saw his deceased Grandpa Cuomo, Auntie Rosa, and Uncle Lorenzo.... Then Eddie added that he also saw his 19-year-old sister Teresa, who told him he had to go back.... Later that morning, when Eddie’s parents telephoned the college, they learned that Teresa had been killed in an automobile accident just after midnight, and that college officials had tried unsuccessfully to reach the Cuomos at their home to inform them of the tragic news.

The oldest case included in Greyson's study dates all the way back to A.D. 77 and appears in Book 7 of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. It concerns two Roman brothers, Corfidius the elder and Corfidius the younger. (In those days of high infant mortality, it was not unusual for siblings to share the same name.) The elder brother was pronounced dead, and funeral arrangements were made. Unexpectedly, however, the elder Corfidius spontaneously revived and announced to amazed onlookers that  

he had just come from the house of his younger brother. He reported that the younger brother requested that the funeral arrangements he had made for the now-revived older Corfidius be used for him instead, entrusted the care of his daughter to his older brother, and showed his older brother where he had secretly buried some gold underground. As the older Corfidius was relating the account of his NDE, his younger brother’s servants burst in with the news that their master had just unexpectedly died; and the buried gold, of which no one else knew, was found in the place indicated by the revived older brother. 

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P.S. The term "peak in Darien," used to describe deathbed-vision cases, comes from Keats' poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and refers to the moment when Cortez and his men climbed a peak in Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean lying before them -- a wholly unexpected vista. The Peak in Darien was the title chosen by Frances Power Cobbe for her 1882 book on life after death, which includes some deathbed visions. 

At death's door

A recent Irish study of deathbed visions adds more cases to the database. One interesting element of the study is a comparison of patients who were heavily medicated and/or suffering a fever with those who weren't. 

One common sense explanation may be that the visions are drug- or fever-induced hallucinations. But 68 per cent of respondents agreed, or strongly agreed, that DBE have different qualities from such hallucinations.

[Researcher Una] MacConville says there appears to be a difference in the quality of the visions: they appear with greater clarity, and they are experienced as meaningful, with significant associations, rather than random, as they would be in drug-induced cases.

An earlier study also indicated that patients experiencing deathbed phenomena are usually calm and composed. In contrast, drug- or fever-induced hallucinations can be disturbing and frightening, with other symptoms of drug-induced toxicity and high temperature present as well.

It's good to see that empirical investigations into this topic are continuing. 

The study was brought to my attention by Chris Carter, author of Science and the Near-Death Experience, which I reviewed here. The book is available in both print and Kindle editions. Chris is also one of the main contributors to the newly released Debating Psychic Experiences,which I hope to review next month. 

Angel band

The recent publication of Glimpses of Eternity by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry has raised awareness of what the authors call "shared death experiences." These are cases in which the visions of the dying person are shared by someone close by. As the authors point out, stories of this type have circulated for many years. Several of them are found in the 1918 book The Ministry of Angels: Here and Beyond, by Joy Snell. (Amazon sells a new edition.) 

Snell, who apparently manifested psychic powers from an early age, worked for a while at a hospital, where she was frequently in attendance on the dying. She records various instances of what we might now call SDEs. 

Here are some examples from the book. Though written in the florid style that was conventional at the time, they match up pretty well with the more modern accounts collected by Moody:

But whether the deaths I witnessed were peaceful or painful, preceded or not preceded by the recognition of some one from the other world, always, immediately after the physical life had ceased, I saw the spirit form take shape above the dead body, in appearance a glorified replica of it. However painful might have been the last hours, however protracted and wasting the illness, no trace of suffering or disease appeared upon the radiant spirit face. Striking, at times, was the contrast which it presented to the human features, pain-distorted and deep-furrowed by suffering.... [p. 40]

It was about six months after I began to work at a hospital that it was revealed to me that the dying often really do see those who have come from the realms of spirit life to welcome them on their entrance into another state of existence.

The first time that I received this ocular proof was at the death of L------, a sweet girl of seventeen, who was a personal friend of mine. She was a victim of consumption [tuberculosis]. She suffered no pain, but the weariness that comes from extreme weakness and debility was heavy upon her and she yearned for rest.

A short time before she expired I became aware that two spirit forms were standing by the bedside, one on either side of it. I did not see them enter the room; they were standing by the bedside when they first became visible to me, but I could see them as distinctly as I could any of the human occupants of the room. In my own thoughts I have always called these bright beings from another world, angels, and as such I shall hereafter speak of them. I recognized their faces as those of two girls who had been the closest friends of the girl who was dying. They had passed away a year before and were then about her own age.

Just before they appeared the dying girl exclaimed: "It has grown suddenly dark; I cannot see anything!" But she recognized them immediately. A smile, beautiful to see, lit up her face. She stretched forth her hands and in joyous tones exclaimed: "Oh, you have come to take me away! I am glad, for I am very tired."...

[The girl expired very shortly afterward, still smiling at the "angels."]

The two angels remained by the bedside during the brief space that elapsed before the spirit form took shape above the body in which the physical life had ceased. Then they rose and stood for a few moments one on each side of her, who was now like unto themselves. And three angels went from the room where, a short time before, there had been only two. [pp. 41-43]

[Later, Snell recounts the case of a dying father reunited with his previously deceased son.]

Then again I witnessed what had now become a familiar spectacle to me -- the formation of the spirit body above the discarded earthly body. When it was complete the angel child clasped the hand of the now angel father, each gazed into the eyes of the other with an expression of the tenderest affection, and with faces aglow with joy and happiness they vanished. [pp. 46-47]

For similar accounts from a little earlier in history, see my posts on Andrew Jackson Davis here and here.

Such narratives, in themselves, may not prove anything, but the fact that people have been reporting these phenomena pretty consistently for a hundred years or more ought to suggest that something is going on. After all, it's unlikely that most of Moody's informants had ever heard of Joy Snell or other early Spiritualist writers.

It might be argued that the imagery of a spirit form taking shape above a dying person while attended by angels is simply part of the Western mythos, and as such it finds expression in hallucinations. There are at least two responses to this argument: First, one would expect much greater variation in the reports than there seems to be (e.g., appearances by Jesus or the Virgin Mary, etc.); and second, how did this mythos develop in the first place, if not through SDEs, NDEs, and similar events? 

An extraordinary rendition?

Here's an interesting tidbit from Anthony Everitt's fine bio, Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor. It concerns Augustus on his deathbed, after a long reign filled with accomplishment but also crowded with bloody strife.

Just before he died, his wits seemed to wander, for he suddenly cried out in terror: "Forty young men are carrying me off!"   [p. 314]

Considering the many cruelties Augustus inflicted on other people throughout his life, especially in his early years, one has to wonder if his wits had really wandered ... or if, in fact, he was seeing his immediate future quite clearly.