Dying wife with dead husband: Kerr excerpt #12

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

There are times when End-of-Life Dreams and Visions (ELDVs) transcend the boundary that separate the living from the dead to meet spiritual and emotional needs, those that tie couples and that restore bonds. Sometimes, ELDVs do not interrupt the reality of the bereaved so much as replace it. This often happens with elderly couples who, following a lifetime of togetherness, cannot shift to living without their other half. And so, they don’t. Instead, they maintain their unbreakable bond through and in end- of-life dreams and visions. Attention wholly switches to this other world where they go on co- existing with their deceased partner and can feel whole again. That is when bereavement does not involve a before and an after, only a different, a more so, and a with.

After Sonny’s death, Joan kept her husband alive through recurring pre-death visions that occurred in her dreams as well as when awake. Her health began to deteriorate rapidly, but her end-of-life experiences and visions helped her, as well as her family, cope with the deep wound left by Sonny’s loss. When Joan returned to her daughters’ home from the Hospice Inpatient Unit, her dreams kept Sonny alive. During many nights, Lisa and her family could hear Joan calling out to her husband: “Come get me. I miss you! Sonny, come and get me!”. The strength of these dreams would soon carry from sleep to wakefulness and Joan, fully lucid, would often claim to see Sonny in the room.

Joan and Sonny’s story exemplifies the uniqueness and the intensity with which end-of-life dreams and visions are experienced as a site of togetherness. Joan lived for two months beyond Sonny’s death but never without him. She would call out to him every night and have visions of him every day. After Joan’s death, Lisa and her family sat down for a filmed interview (Link to Sonny & Joan Family Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYnHPTmSmLo).

As seen in the film, Joan’s ELDVs not only kept Sonny present as her husband but was also shared with Lisa, their daughter and caregiver. As a result, it was only when Joan passed that her daughter finally took stock of her loss, a now double one. Lisa felt that her parents both died but only when Joan did because their consciousness was shared, whether physically present or not. She only realized the full impact of her mother’s ELDVs when her mother’s visions no longer embodied her father’s felt presence. Joan’s own consciousness had been heightened to the point that Sonny was present, not just for her but for Lisa too; this awareness was shared.

And when the time came for Joan and Sonny to be reunited and for Lisa to take stock of the reality of her double loss, the knowledge that their remarkable love story had survived death helped their daughter come to terms with her own grief and sorrow. Her bereavement process was aided by the recognition that her parents’ bond had remained unbroken thanks, in large part, to her mother’s ELDVs. 

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.