An end-of-life doctor has revealed what people see right before they die, and it may not be what you expect.
Dr Christopher Kerr, a palliative care specialist from Buffalo, New York, says he has pieced together the dying visions of nearly 1,000 patients, suggesting that these sightings can offer comfort.
In his anecdotes, Dr Kerr recounts how dreams and visions of love and connection often soothe the dying, creating a sense of peace.
“It’s fascinating,” he remarked, adding that children’s experiences are markedly different from adults, as they see comforting fantasies rather than real memories.
Dr Kerr also divulges that individuals with a chequered past frequently face reunions in their mind’s eye with those they’ve wronged.
Dr Kerr, a guest on the Next Level Soul podcast, shared the poignant story of a man in his 40s who had spent most of his life in prison due to drug addictions and was suffering from neck cancer.
The man experienced distressing visions in his dreams of being attacked by those he’d wronged in his past, leading to an emotional breakdown.
However, these visions prompted the man to seek out his daughter to express his love and apologise. Dr Kerr revealed that following this reconciliation, the man passed away peacefully.
Dr Kerr, who is based at Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, believes through his research that patients “are not denying the bad things and painful things [that] transpire, but they address them and use them in a way that’s very interesting”.
He also recounted the story of another patient who had participated in the Normandy invasion as a teenager and lived with PTSD his entire life without seeking help.
He said: “He came into our unit at the end of his life … He was having such horrific experiences where he’s seeing body parts and bloody water and screams and he couldn’t rest.
“Patients need to be relaxed and accepting of their situation, to some extent, in order to die. You can’t really die unless you can sleep. It’s pretty hard to do because you just pass in sleep.”
However, one day, the patient managed to sleep briefly, and Dr Kerr asked him about his dream. He explained: “He goes, ‘I had a great dream, where I relived the best day of my life,’ which was the day he received his discharge papers.
“He had a really good dream, presumably in Normandy, and a soldier who he didn’t know approached him and said, ‘No, we’re going to come get you’.”
Following this, the man slept peacefully and passed away in his sleep, according to Dr Kerr. “So that sense that he had abandoned people had come full circle,” the doctor added.
The general theme is that patients come to peace with decisions they’ve made in their lives. It’s at the end of life that you might see what Dr Kerr termed “post-traumatic growth” where positive elements of previous hardship come to light.
Interestingly, children have a different end-of-life experience to adults, says Dr Kerr, something he believes happens because they don’t have a proper concept of mortality.
It’s also often because they may not have known anyone who’s died as a reference point or someone whom they can picture meeting in some form of the afterlife.
Instead of seeing a person, Dr Kerr revealed that children will often see animals who give them the message “that they’re loved and not alone”. “Children are creative and imaginative and can access that part of them”, he added.
Describing one such vision, Dr Kerr recounted the experience of a girl who had conjured up an entire scene around her hospital bed surroundings into a vivid scene while confined to her hospital bed.
“She created a castle for herself … There was a swimming pool, the animals were returned, there’s a piano, there was a window with warm light coming through,” Dr Kerr said. When asked what the castle symbolised, the girl’s poignant response was: “A safe place”.