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VISIONS, TRIPS "See who?" the daughter asked.

What we experience "I see a dock; and there are your dad, grandmother, grandfa-
ther and uncle."
before we die
When the daughter said she still didn't see anybody, her
mother exclaimed, "Well, they're all there! They're standing on
the dock, waiting for me to come across." After a pause, her
gaze fixed again on the wall, she directly addressed the people
...continued from page 12... in her vision. "There's no boat at the dock," she said. "How can
I get to you?"
The next day, the elderly frail woman uttered her last words
there was somebody right in front of him. And it soon became with an expression of complete contentment: "The boat is
apparent that he was speaking to his father's parents, whom finally at the pier."
he'd been particularly close to. The conversation lasted for a
couple of hours, with the patient smiling and calling both of The final kind of deathbed experience reported to Kessler
his grandparents by name. was crowds and crowded rooms, or what he likes to call the
"standing-room-only experience." The dying often reported be-
"As a doctor, it's very easy to dismiss this sort of thing until you ing in a room - or about to enter one - full of people, some of
see it firsthand," the oncologist told Kessler, adding, "Before whom they didn't even recognize.
the episode, there was a sense of struggle and tension in the
air, but now there seemed to be only peace surrounding my "We may think we only have a handful of friends, but what
brother. I truly believe that it was a result of my grandparents' about all the people we've interacted with or shared a kind-
visit as he died." ness with during our life?" he notes. "What if there's a lineage
that we do gather with once again in the afterlife, in heaven?
Kessler found that deathbed vision happenings shared a num- There was an awe of how many people were present for many
ber of things. First, death had to be imminent, within at least of the dying."
a week and sometimes the same day. Only really dying people,
in short, had visions. And these end-of-life visions were re- Like the account a hospital chaplain told him of a middle-age
markably similar, with mothers or mother-like figures being the woman who was losing her battle with ovarian cancer. Focusing
most likely apparitions. her eyes upward at a corner of her bedroom, she said, "Oh, it's
a door. A lovely golden door."
"The more I thought about it, I wasn't as surprised as I might
have been, because our mother ushers us through this thresh- Then she told her mother, who was present, there were more
old into life - and wouldn't she be there at the end?" he muses. and more people trying to push the door open. "Mom, look how
many are here for me," she said. "They're going to help me."
The healthcare administrator and former nurse stresses that
the visions were more than hallucinations or the result of The chaplain, who was also at her bedside, remarked at how
oxygen deprivation. He explains that hallucinations feel unsafe happy she looked, especially when her mother said, "Dorothy,
and don't make a lot of sense. The same can be said for the you can go with these folks if it's time."
ramblings of people who are oxygen deprived. But the death-
bed witnesses he talked to reported that the dying patient Placing her hand on the dying woman, the chaplain assured
carried on a coherent conversation with the unseen visitor and her, "It's all right to go. I'll take care of your mom."
then had no trouble switching back to people in the room.
Shortly after, Dorothy died peacefully.
STANDING ROOM ONLY
'IT CHANGES EVERYTHING'
Dying people spoke a lot about getting ready for a trip, which
was the second commonly shared deathbed experience, Kes- "You hear people say, 'we're born alone, we die alone,' but
sler found. And he emphasizes that the journey was a real con- from the deathbed it doesn't seem like a lonely experience,"
crete trip versus an abstract notion of heading into eternity. observes David Kessler. "It feels like we're not going into the
People asked "Where's my ticket?" or "What happened to my emptiness but arriving into a fullness."
passport?" not "I'm about to go into the abyss of death."
After a moment, he confides, "One of the most starling things
A social worker at a major hospital shared a story about a for me in hearing these stories is what if death isn't that lonely
woman in her 80s dying of congestive heart failure. After not experience that we should all fear? What if we are comforted
talking for days, she sat up, waving at her daughter to look and loved and cared for - and there is standing room only? It
where she was pointing. "Don't you see them?" she declared in changes everything. I mean, it reaffirms our faith.
a steady voice.
R.W. Dellinger excerpt from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
religion/2555283/posts
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