Nightmares of dying WW2 soldier: Kerr excerpt 14

Dr. Christopher Kerr writes of dying patients having dreams or visions that may help them find peace after reliving horrible repressed memories:

 

Sometimes, ELDVs uncover aspects of a patient’s past that they had long hidden from view. This was the case for John Stinson, the 87-year-old man who had fought his whole life to suppress his experience of war. John had never told his family about the horrors he had witnessed during his rescue mission on the shores of Normandy. He suffered silently until his final days, when distant memories fought to surface.

It was through John’s end-of-life experiences that his family got to meet the man they had never known of, the 20-year-old soldier who would one day become their father. “I learned more about my dad in the last 2 weeks than I did during his lifetime”, John’s son explained while reminiscing about his father’s end-of-life reckoning. His sister corroborated the sentiment: “My brother (as well as the rest of us) knew very little about my father’s war experience. He rarely spoke of that time in his life. Some of what we learned in those last few weeks of his life we had never heard before. He just never really talked to us about it!” They may have been in the dark about the details of the past their father was finally revisiting, but not about the positive outcome of what transpired on his deathbed. Several years after their dad’s passing, the account of their father’s peaceful transition still brought tears of gratitude.

John was only 20 when he enrolled as a gunner on the SS James L. Ackerson which entered Normandy beside the USS Texas. He was and would always remain a proud Texan who took his duty as a soldier to heart and believed in the ideals of his country. On June 7, 1944, he was part of the Infantry Division that was sent ashore to Omaha, the bloodiest of the D-Day beaches. Their assignment was to retrieve the soldiers who had been isolated from the rest of the forces ashore. The mission was successful, and the landing craft came back with the wounded Rangers they had been sent to rescue. Still, John could never wipe away the vision of the bloodied beach strewn with the mutilated bodies and floating limbs he saw upon landing. This was the experience in the war that, unbeknownst to his family, was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

As he lay dying at Hospice, John was assailed by nightmares about the fallen American soldiers he could not save: "There is nothing but death, dead soldiers all around me." I had witnessed people in a state of fear before, but John was not just frightened. He was terrified. His terror was palpable. I had never been able to adjust to the idea of a young man facing the horrors of war, the possibility of death at life’s beginning, but watching John return to that site of terror a second time as an old man defied words. He described his nightmares as so intensely real that they felt embodied. He could not overcome his pain, and his dreams reflected it.

This is why the complete transformation he underwent a few days later was all the more remarkable. I went to see him, and he was visibly comfortable, even at peace; he could sleep, he said smiling. He credited two of his more recent dreams for this welcome development. In a first joyful dream, he had relived the day he had finally gotten his discharge papers from the military. His second dream sounded more like a nightmare, but to him it was anything but. He dreamt he was approached by a soldier who had been killed on Omaha Beach and had come back to tell him: “Soon, they are going to come and get you.” John instinctively knew that “they” referred to his fellow soldiers, and that the dream was about reuniting with his comrades, not judgment. He finally had closure. He could close his eyes and rest.

Far from denying his reality, or his war, John’s ELDV’s recast these in such as to grant him his hard-earned peace. The soul of that courageous 20-year-old boy that had fought the ghosts of war for 67 years was finally released from his sense enormous obligation and from its injustice. John’s story exemplifies the process through which even the most difficult dreams can provide substantial psychological or spiritual benefits to the dying patient. For him, the tortured memory of the deadliest of the D-Day assaults morphed into the site of the very military camaraderie he thought he had betrayed. He needed to be released from the obligation he had been unable to fulfill and from the overwhelming shame he could not escape. Most importantly, he needed to forgive himself for his inability to save his brothers in arms. Thankfully, their consciousness returned allowed him to do just that.

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.