Will I See My Family Again After I Die

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

After losing my sister and father inside ix weeks, I spent five years investigating what happens when we dice. While interviewing dozens of people who work with terminally ill patients, or have had deathbed experiences or have come dorsum from death, I learned that the dying often seem to know that they're going, and when. Within 72 hours of death, they begin to speak in metaphors of journey. They request their shoes, or their plane tickets or need to go domicile when they are habitation. When my sister 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 wife 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, along with fellow nurse Patrica Kelley, would go on to money the official phrase, "nearing decease sensation," and co-writer Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying). After having helped hundreds of patients transition to death, Callanan believes this vision of a journey alee is no accident. The dying are non picturing an finish. They are seeing death as a trip—possibly to somewhere else.

2. Dead family members and friends can come dorsum to us.

This sounds like a side result of the powerful hurting killers they are taking. But is information technology? In i major cross-national study (past psychologists Karlis Osis, PhD, and Erlendur Haraldsson, PhD, of the Academy of Iceland) comparing deathbed experiences in the U.Southward. and India, the majority of patients who were still conscious inside an hour of decease 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 see friends or family members they simply weren't enlightened had died. In one 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 also saw something that confused her: "He has Vida with him," she told Lady Barrett, referring to her sis, whose death three weeks before had been kept from her. "Vida is with him," she repeated wonderingly.

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

It has become a scrap of a cliché in our culture to talk about seeing "the white light." But, the truth is that this calorie-free is as well perceived as wisdom and love. Information technology'due south a feeling equally much as a visual experience. Those who accept well-nigh-expiry experiences—retaining consciousness during cardiac arrest, for case—are veritably shattered by the emotional power of this low-cal. Dr. Yvonne Kason, who had been in a airplane crash, compared information technology to an extraordinary maternal love. "Like I was a newborn baby 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 way home." Nurse Callanan oftentimes observes her patients being present, conscious, in this world and as well commencement to see and remark upon the beauty of another.

four. Even when there'southward no warning, they may still say goodbye.

It came as a true surprise for me to acquire that study after study confirms that roughly 50 percent of the bereaved sense the presence of lost loved ones, either in the moment of death, or sometime later. It happened inside my own family. My begetter died abruptly, without a warning illness, in the eye of the night in 2008. My sister Katharine, awake in her bedroom 100 miles away, suddenly sensed a presence about her, and felt hands gently cupping the dorsum of her head. She was suffused with feelings of contentment and joy, an experience so bright and strange that she found information technology remarkable—and shared information technology with her son before learning that our father had died.

Although psychiatrists call these instances "grief hallucinations," the scientific discipline of such subjective experiences remains poorly understood; certainly, it doesn't explain how we can accept them before we know someone has died. 1 human being told me nigh going downstairs to breakfast during his babyhood, and seeing his begetter seated at the table, equally e'er. He was totally mystified when his mother proceeded with the news that his father had died in the night. "But he'due south sitting right there!," he said. His father and then faded.

Simply five percentage of these experiences are visual, according to a written report done by palliative-care medico Michael Barbato at St. Joseph'due south Hospital in Auburn, Australia. The bulk involve the sense of a presence—non a fleeting, shadowy sense, simply a brilliant and specific one, ofttimes spurring people to brand urgent phone calls, or to alter direction as they're driving, or to outburst into tears. It tin happen at the moment of decease, after some weeks, or even years later. Said the Toronto advertising executive Karen Simons, of a cold nighttime 6 weeks after her male parent died: "I'm driving on the highway, and into the rider seat comes Dad. I could feel him settle in. He had a very distinctive lean to the left. He rode with me from Kennedy Rd. to Pickering (10 miles). Information technology was incredibly existent, and it was completely transforming."

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

Inquiry in 2010 by psychiatrist Raymond Moody, PhD, who coined the term, "near-death experience" in his groundbreaking 1975 book Life Afterward Life, suggests people tin occasionally co-experience the sense of entering the light. Every bit Florida-based palliative-intendance psychologist Kathleen Dowling Singh, PhD, has noted, "The dying become radiant and speak of 'walking through a room lit by a lantern,' or of their 'body filling with sunlight.'" Sometimes, if only for a moment, their family members exercise, as well. The psychologist Joan Borysenko, PhD, for instance, described having such an experience when her 81-yr-old mother died at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Heart in Boston while Borysenko was on faculty at Harvard. The room seemed to fill up with a brilliant calorie-free, which both she and her teenage son saw, every bit they watched her mother ascent spectrally out of her trunk.

We fear expiry in our culture, and find information technology difficult to talk well-nigh and witness. Simply maybe the dying empathize more than we do, and tin can offer us comfort, if only we could listen to what they're attempting to say.

Patricia Pearson is the author of Opening Heaven's Door: Investigating Stories of Life, Expiry, 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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