Are Your Dead Family Members Present When You Die

1. The 72-hr mark is when it begins.

Afterward losing my sister and father within ix weeks, I spent five years investigating what happens when we die. While interviewing dozens of people who piece of work with terminally ill patients, or have had deathbed experiences or have come back from decease, I learned that the dying often seem to know that they're going, and when. Within 72 hours of death, they brainstorm to speak in metaphors of journeying. They request their shoes, or their plane tickets or demand to become abode when they are home. When my sis lay dying of breast cancer, she said, as if frustrated, "I don't know how to leave," and spoke of "hapless flight attendants."

"Does my married woman understand about the passport and ticket?," asked a man succumbing to the ravages of pancreatic cancer of a Virginia-based hospice nurse named Maggie Callanan (Callanan, forth with beau nurse Patrica Kelley, would go on to coin the official phrase, "nearing death sensation," and co-writer Concluding Gifts: Understanding the Special Sensation, Needs, and Communications of the Dying). Afterwards having helped hundreds of patients transition to death, Callanan believes this vision of a journeying ahead is no accident. The dying are non picturing an finish. They are seeing decease equally a trip—possibly to somewhere else.

2. Expressionless family unit members and friends can come back to us.

This sounds like a side issue of the powerful hurting killers they are taking. But is information technology? In ane major cantankerous-national study (by psychologists Karlis Osis, PhD, and Erlendur Haraldsson, PhD, of the Academy of Iceland) comparing deathbed experiences in the U.S. and India, the majority of patients who were all the same conscious within an hour of death saw deceased loved ones beckoning, regardless of whether they were medicated. When I interviewed Audrey Scott, 84, who was dying of cancer, she was receiving visits from her adopted son Frankie, she said, who had predeceased her by several years. He sat quietly in a nearby armchair.

In some cases, people run across friends or family members they simply weren't aware had died. In ane of the first well-investigated cases of a deathbed vision, a female parent dying in childbirth told obstetrician Lady Florence Barrett in a Dublin infirmary that she saw her deceased father before her. She besides saw something that confused her: "He has Vida with him," she told Lady Barrett, referring to her sis, whose decease three weeks before had been kept from her. "Vida is with him," she repeated wonderingly.

3. There's something else about that famous white light.

It has become a bit of a platitude in our culture to talk well-nigh seeing "the white calorie-free." But, the truth is that this light is likewise perceived every bit wisdom and love. Information technology'southward a feeling every bit much as a visual experience. Those who have almost-death experiences—retaining consciousness during cardiac arrest, for case—are veritably shattered by the emotional power of this light. Dr. Yvonne Kason, who had been in a plane crash, compared information technology to an extraordinary maternal dear. "Like I was a newborn infant on my female parent's shoulder. Utterly safe." Then she added: "It was like I'd been lost for centuries and I'd found my fashion dwelling." Nurse Callanan often observes her patients being present, conscious, in this world and besides beginning to see and remark upon the beauty of another.

iv. Even when there's no warning, they may still say goodbye.

It came equally a truthful surprise for me to learn that study later on study confirms that roughly l percentage of the bereaved sense the presence of lost loved ones, either in the moment of death, or sometime later. It happened inside my ain family. My father died abruptly, without a warning illness, in the middle of the dark in 2008. My sister Katharine, awake in her sleeping room 100 miles abroad, suddenly sensed a presence nigh her, and felt hands gently cupping the back of her head. She was suffused with feelings of contentment and joy, an experience then vivid and foreign that she found it remarkable—and shared it with her son earlier learning that our father had died.

Although psychiatrists call these instances "grief hallucinations," the science of such subjective experiences remains poorly understood; certainly, it doesn't explicate how we can accept them before we know someone has died. I man told me near going downstairs to breakfast during his childhood, and seeing his father seated at the table, as always. He was totally mystified when his mother proceeded with the news that his father had died in the night. "But he'southward sitting right at that place!," he said. His father so faded.

Only 5 percent of these experiences are visual, according to a study done by palliative-care physician Michael Barbato at St. Joseph'southward Hospital in Auburn, Australia. The majority involve the sense of a presence—not a fleeting, shadowy sense, simply a vivid and specific one, oft spurring people to make urgent phone calls, or to change direction equally they're driving, or to burst into tears. It can happen at the moment of death, after some weeks, or fifty-fifty years later. Said the Toronto advert executive Karen Simons, of a cold night six weeks after her male parent died: "I'm driving on the highway, and into the passenger seat comes Dad. I could experience him settle in. He had a very distinctive lean to the left. He rode with me from Kennedy Rd. to Pickering (10 miles). It was incredibly real, and it was completely transforming."

5. The living can share in the experience of dying.

Research in 2010 by psychiatrist Raymond Moody, PhD, who coined the term, "about-death experience" in his groundbreaking 1975 book Life After Life, suggests people can occasionally co-experience the sense of entering the light. As Florida-based palliative-care psychologist Kathleen Dowling Singh, PhD, has noted, "The dying get radiant and speak of 'walking through a room lit by a lantern,' or of their 'torso filling with sunlight.'" Sometimes, if only for a moment, their family members practise, too. The psychologist Joan Borysenko, PhD, for instance, described having such an experience when her 81-year-onetime mother died at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Eye in Boston while Borysenko was on faculty at Harvard. The room seemed to fill up with a brilliant lite, which both she and her teenage son saw, as they watched her female parent ascent spectrally out of her body.

Nosotros fear death in our civilization, and find it hard to talk nigh and witness. But perchance the dying understand more we do, and tin offer us condolement, if only nosotros could listen to what they're attempting to say.

Patricia Pearson is the writer of Opening Heaven'south Door: Investigating Stories of Life, Death, and What Comes After and When She Was Bad...: Trigger-happy Women and the Myth of Innocence.

Published 07/31/2014

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Source: https://www.oprah.com/spirit/truths-about-death-patricia-pearson

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