13-year-old girl's ELDVs: Kerr excerpt #16

Dr. Christopher Kerr writes of dying patients having dreams or visions of renewing friendships with deceased friends and relatives:

The power the resurrected consciousnesses in ELDVs have in facilitating the dying process as well as the grief of those left behind is at no time more resonant than in the case of the passing of young children, whose innocence defies understanding. Children have an intuitive ability to understand when death is imminent, including when the reality of it is kept from them. It is often in the show-not-tell of their dreams and visions that they get informed and inform us.

I remember meeting thirteen-year-old Jessica. As I walked into her room, trying to be the doctor I thought she would want me to be, I quickly realized that no level of experience would match her innocence, or the innocent wisdom reflected in her ELDVs. Her consciousness was not clouded by any of the considerations that often darken an adult one. She dreamed in distinct tones and textures, which not only created awareness of her impending death but also secured her in love. The knowledge of death that adults first experience as grief and sadness was to Jessica an intuition reframed by her ELDVs into sensory images of joy, color, warmth, and security; what we perceive as separation, she experienced as a loving reunion. Whereas we obsess about the border that separate the living from the dying, Jessica did not so much as see a distinction between her immediate world and the imaginary one of her dreams and vision. (Link to Jessica Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCMtnkoxgs0.)

Where I was bracing myself for an excruciating conversation, I instead encountered a bright-eyed little who was eager to chat about her day, her mom, her pets, and her dreams. Jessica did not pause to mourn the life she would not get to live, or to talk about the career or kids she would not have.; she had no regrets to mull over, or could-have-beens, or missed opportunities to work through. She was too busy living in the now, and her ELDVs were part of that present, an extension of the life she was living and where the dead roamed as freely as if they were visible to all.

Children’s end-of-life experiences, like those of other patients, feature ‘loved ones’ who come back to them. The difference is in the lack of questioning and of the boundaries with which we preoccupy ourselves. Recurring dreams are lived as certainties, as if they are actual visions, visible in this world as well as in theirs, because the two worlds are one. It is not that they cannot tell which is which but that they know they are inseparable, an extension of one another. It is not a matter of failed perception but of a transcended one.

Jessica went on to dream about Mary, her mother’s best friend who’d died at 35, when Jessica was only 8: “Mary is one of my mom’s best friends who passed away from leukemia. I think I was pretty close to her, and she was very close to my mom. I liked her. She was very nice. I’d seen her in my mom’s room. Coming up the stairs, I was going into my room and stopped when I saw from the corner of my eye something playing with my mom’s curtains. She had her favorite shirt on, my mom told me that it was. Because I told my mom it was a grey and blue, checkered flannel shirt.” 

Jessica was the only child of a single mother, which left one last uncertainty once her concern about dying had been resolved: ‘What will I do without my mom?’ The vision of this mother surrogate, her mother’s best friend, in her mother’s room, brought tremendous peace to her. She felt “relief and happiness”. She continued, “Mary was a very strong person, and I know that I am strong, and my mom tells me all the time that I was, am like her.” Kristin, who never left her daughter’s side, reminded her that “You told me all the time that: ‘Mom I saw an angel,’ and then you were able to go to sleep.” “Yes,” Jessica nodded, “I was able to go to sleep... it was really comforting, and I was not afraid of it at all.” Again, ELDV’s typically address our individual needs or the wounds that need tending.

Until Jessica, I could not imagine that children would have access to their own set of tools during the dying process. I assumed that a young mind was not fit to handle a conversation about life’s end, and I failed to appreciate the sophisticated ways in which they may already have had one. Jessica had an understanding of death that exceeded anything I could have imagined; she created connections we could not have given her, in details she should not have remembered.

A child’s innocence goes infinitely deeper than ignorance. Unbeknownst to her, Jessica’s ELDVs were teaching her, as well as her caretakers, how to cope with the inconceivable. Most importantly, for her mother, they helped initiate the process she could not consciously accept, that of letting go. But it was not of her daughter that Kristin had to let go—she could never do that--it was of denial.

Mother and daughter shared an unspoken language and a spiritual bond that have carried over to this day. Six years after her daughter’s death, Kristin still feels Jessica’s presence. She still decorates her house to fit the themes of each coming holiday because “Jess would not have it any other way”. She still cares for her little girl’s spoiled and overweight orange cat Lulu, who continues to wear the silly ornament Jess once attached to its collar. She still smiles at the memories and the presence she continues to feel alongside her. 

Christopher Kerr, “Experiences of the Dying: Evidence of Survival of Human Consciousness,” an essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in response to the question: “What is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after bodily death?” Dr. Kerr, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer for Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. The full text with notes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.