Deathbed Visions

Is the common experience of seeing dead loved ones when we are dying a hint at what lies beyond?

The night before Brittany died, the last night she spent in the hospital before we rushed her to a rented home where she could pass in more peaceful, beautiful surroundings, she talked about how it was time to leave.

I wasn’t there; I had handed overnight duty to Brittany’s aunt, who is a brilliant doctor and had been our greatest support and absolute rock for those final six months. When I left that night in order to get some sleep in a bed after a couple of days resting fitfully in a chair, Brittany had started to become confused and to have a hard time speaking. Overnight she lost most of her ability to speak, a horrible outcome for a brilliant writer and consummate punmaster.

But in those last late night hours in the hospital she found the words to talk about how it was time to go, how she was ready to leave. I wish I had been there to hear it, because by the time I came back in the morning she was almost completely reduced to two or three words that she would repeat. We didn’t know how fast it would go, we thought the confusion and language issues were medication related, but it was actually that her brain was shutting down. She was actively dying.

I wish I had been there to hear the words because in the months since her death I have begun getting interested in deathbed visions, experiences that people have in the days and hours before they die. Before Brittany died I had an expansive spirituality, and the fact that she was so sick was actually part of that - I felt like God or the Universe or whatever had shaped my whole life so that I could be sitting next to her in that hospital. But the second she died, all of that was ripped away from me. The spirituality I had found so comforting was torn to shreds; what had been a heavy and warming blanket was now useless tatters flapping in the slightest breeze. My own belief that there is no afterlife had become a stumbling block for me; when I first became spiritual the idea that I am a raindrop that will one day return to the ocean of all things was beautiful, but the second my wife gasped her last breath it was a horror. I didn’t want Brittany to return to the universe, I wanted her to continue.

This is why deathbed visions began to appeal to me. According to a New York Times article published today (very coincidental, as the last two weeks have seen me getting very heavily into my deathbed visions bullshit) about 80% of hospice patients have an experience that is considered a deathbed vision. It’s a universal phenomenon as well, happening in every culture.

What is a deathbed vision? It’s different for every person, but basically it seems to break down into two categories - one is a visitation from previously deceased loved ones and the other is the idea that the dying person is about to take a big trip. Sometimes the two are mixed - there might be a dead husband showing up to usher the dying person onto a bus or a train. Sometimes the visions are religious - saints and angels and stuff - but that’s actually rarer than simply a dead child or friend standing in the room radiating peace and wellness to the person who is dying. They can begin weeks before death, and they sometimes happen as dreams. I know that Brittany dreamed about her dead grandmother a few days before she passed.

You have to understand how common this phenomenon is. There are a couple of TikTok accounts I like from hospice nurses, and one of them - @hospicenursepenny - has a good video where she talks about being raised without religion but, after just one month working as a hospice nurse, coming to believe that something was happening with all of the people have these similar experiences.

What you also have to understand is how these experiences tend to differ from hallucinations. If you click through on the New York Times link above you’ll see that most folks who have hallucinations will experience things that are often surreal, strange and even frightening. They can be confused and angry. But deathbed visions seem to be fairly uniformly positive; people are comforted and soothed by what they see, and what they see makes sense. It’s not that the medical equipment has turned into a menacing mess of snakes but that their beloved sister is present and waiting for them. As someone who has taken quite a lot of hallucinogens in my time, the descriptions of these visions differ fundamentally from my experiences on psychoactive drugs, as well as my experiences having hallucinations caused by fevers. To quote a great movie - I know the difference between drug real and real real.

But could they still be hallucinations? Sure, but what’s the evolutionary argument for why this has developed? Again, not everyone has deathbed visions (that we know of) but enough have it that the few folks who research the phenomenon have come to believe it is an almost standard human experience. What is the evolutionary explanation for why our brains developed this end-of-life soothing mechanism - and not just any soothing mechanism, like a feeling of peace and calm, but one that usually involves seeing dead people? If we’re talking about drug experiences again, I’ve had some experience with soothing and calming drugs, and I can tell you that morphine will make you feel really good and relaxed and peaceful without having to offer you visions of the dead.

Recently a guy died while getting a brain scan and we got the first ever look at what happens inside your skull when you die, and before and after his heart stopped beating the areas of the brain associated with memory, with dreams and that is often seen activated during meditation, popped off. What’s wild is that we have done brain scans on dying rats and they had the same results. Is this a baked in feature of being alive? Is a rat having its life flashing before its eyes? Why?

If you want to get anecdotal that Times piece has some of the kinds of stories that get passed around a bunch, including one about a dying boy who sees a vision of a friend of the family who died recently without his knowledge (just to be fair, it’s possible he overheard the family discussing this death while they thought he was asleep or something). People working in home hospice will also tell you about experiences where a dying person sees a vision of a dead relative and a dog in the room appears to be responding to a presence in the place where the vision is supposedly appearing. Having spoken to people who work in hospice, and having done a bunch of reading (and yes, video watching) on the subject, I’ve become convinced that these things are happening.

Yet none of this brings me happiness. I’m trapped between wanting to believe these experiences that so many people have are meaningful and beyond current understanding and having a brain that insists on reverting to the idea that there must be a materialistic explanation for all of these occurrences. If deathbed visions are real - not just hallucinations, but a peek behind the veil in some way - I can take comfort in knowing that Brittany has, in some way, continued. And by the way, I have had my own experiences that involve Brittany after her death, some I’ve written about and some that I will one day write about. Some that I have had and some that have been shared by others. Yet I have the same conflict - can these things just be explained prosaically, and not, for lack of a better word, supernaturally?

Here’s the thing: I love Brittany. I loved her from the minute I met her, and I knew that she was my person. You can give me an EEG and you can talk about hormones and chemicals to explain why I felt that way, you can come up with a very convincing and solid materialistic explanation for how much I loved her, how it was all systemic and neurological and a function of glands and gray matter, the outcome of hundreds of thousands of years of homo sapiens social evolution. But I know that’s not the case. I know that the love we had wasn’t just neurons firing in a certain way. I know that it was deep and spiritual and transcended anything in this material world. This isn’t a question, I know it.

I hope that one day I can have that same certainty about the end of life. That there may be an afterlife or there may not be, but at the end something happens that perhaps can be materially explained but that is still a function of a bigger, deeper and more spiritual aspect of the universe. That the material element is just one piece of the bigger puzzle and that there is so much more beyond what we can measure.

And I hope that one day, when my body is shutting down and I’m getting ready for the end, that Brittany will be in that room with me, letting me know it’s time to go on another trip together.