Visions of the dying: Taylor excerpt #8

Death-bed visions are experiences in which a dying person sees already-departed loved ones – and also on some occasions, what appear to be otherworldly entities such as ‘angels’ – visiting their bedside in the hours, days, and sometimes weeks leading up to their passing. These incorporeal visitors are said to have come to greet the dying individual and guide them into the afterlife. For example, a recent account from a palliative carer told how a woman...

...about an hour before she died said, "they’re all in the room; they’re all in the room.” The room was full of people she knew and I can remember feeling quite spooked really and looking over my shoulder and not seeing a thing but she could definitely see the room full of people that she knew.

They are extremely common experiences, found across cultures worldwide, and have remained remarkably consistent across time. As the writer Frances Cobbe explained in The Peak in Darien – her 1882 book that discussed strange phenomena reported by the dying – over and over again death-bed visions are described “almost in the same words by persons who have never heard of similar occurrences, and who suppose their own experience to be unique.” Dying patients recount these visions calmly and rationally to others at the bedside such as family or carers; so much so that they are often observed to be almost living in two worlds, swapping nonchalantly between chatting to those in the here-and-now, and then with already-dead loved ones, or being immersed in an alternate reality full of love and light.

Sir William Barrett

One account related a century ago by the British physicist Sir William Barrett offers a fine example. Hattie Pratt was a schoolgirl who passed away from diphtheria in the early 1900s. As her family gathered around during her final hours, another family member –already deceased – appeared to greet young Hattie and guide her onwards. Hattie’s brother recounted that while Hattie’s throat “was so choked up” it required close attention to catch all of her words, “her mind seemed unusually clear and rational”:

She knew she was passing away, and was telling our mother how to dispose of her little personal belongings among her close friends and playmates, when she suddenly raised her eyes as though gazing at the ceiling toward the farther side of the room, and after looking steadily and apparently listening for a short time, slightly bowed her head, and said, “Yes, Grandma, I am coming, only wait just a little while, please.” Our father asked her, “Hattie, do you see your grandma?” Seemingly surprised at the question she promptly answered, “Yes, Papa, can't you see her? She is right there waiting for me.” At the same time she pointed toward the ceiling in the direction in which she had been gazing. Again addressing the vision she evidently had of her grandmother, she scowled a little impatiently and said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming, but wait a minute, please.” She then turned once more to her mother, and finished telling her what of her personal treasures to give to different ones of her acquaintances. At last giving her attention once more to her grandma, who was apparently urging her to come at once, she bade each of us good- bye. Her voice was very feeble and faint, but the look in her eyes as she glanced briefly at each one of us was as lifelike and intelligent as it could be. She then fixed her eyes steadily on her vision but so faintly that we could but just catch her words, said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming now.”

Hattie’s brother remarked that her clear-headedness during her final minutes, and alternation of attention between her dead grandmother and the rest of her still-living family (what Barrett calls ‘double consciousness’), “were so distinctly photographed upon the camera of my brain that I have never since been able to question the evidence of the continuance of distinct recognizable life after death.”

Hattie Pratt’s experience is just one of many cases discussed by Barrett in his seminal 1926 book Death-bed Visions. In researching the phenomenon, Barrett was particularly impressed by the commonalities related by those of a younger age, who would likely not have had a cultural expectation of the visions they saw. In fact, in several cases, the dying visions of children categorically did not agree with what their Christian upbringing had primed them to expect. For instance, 10-year-old Daisy Irene Dryden exclaimed during a death-bed vision in the final days of her illness, “We always thought the angels had wings! But it is a mistake; they don't have any.”

Like NDErs, the dying describe the realm they will soon move to as being bathed in love, light and peace. For example, in Italy a wife ran to her dying husband’s side only to be told by him that her mother – who had died 3 years previously – was “helping me to break out of this disgusting body. There is so much light...so much peace.” Furthermore, Dr Peter Fenwick points out, those having death-bed visions also sometimes experience other elements of the archetypal NDE, such as a life review and a border that must be crossed to transition to the afterlife realm. The similarities between NDEs and ELEs, Fenwick says, “suggest that both could be experiences of the same after-death reality.”

Frances Cobbe

And there is a category of death-bed vision that is similar in evidential value to the veridical NDE, offering even further support that what these people are seeing is real. In The Peak in Darien, Frances Cobbe wrote of an incident “of a very striking character”: a dying lady suddenly became joyful, and told those at her bedside that, one after another, three of her dead brothers had appeared in the room. Then, strangely, a fourth brother appeared alongside the others, despite being believed by all present to be alive and well at his residence in India. As this occurred in the late 19th century, there was no way of instantly checking on the brother, but letters were subsequently received informing the family of his death – at a time before his dying sister saw him in her vision.

Though Cobbe’s book covered a variety of strange phenomena, its title has become the unofficial name for this specific type of death-bed account, in which the dying are visited by an individual who was believed by them to be alive, but were actually deceased at the time of the vision: Peak-in-Darien experiences. Sir William Barrett believed such experiences provided “one of the most cogent arguments for survival after death, as the evidential value and veridical (truth-telling) character of these Visions of the Dying is greatly enhanced when the fact is undeniably established that the dying person was wholly ignorant of the decease of the person he or she so vividly sees.” Barrett’s contemporary Professor Charles Richet, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1913, noted that “among all the facts adduced to prove survival, these seem to me to be the most disquieting, that is, from a materialistic point of view.”

Like veridical NDEs, there are a surprisingly large number of Peak in Darien experiences recorded in the literature. Sir William Barrett devoted an entire chapter of his book Death-Bed Visions to cases of this type. One well-documented example was a woman named 'Mrs. B' (also referred to as 'Doris'), who had just given birth to a baby, but died shortly after from heart failure. Lady Florence Barrett was present as the attending obstetrician, and after she told her husband what happened, he investigated further and gathered testimony from others present during the incident.

As she began to slip away, Mrs. B had gripped Lady Barrett’s hand tightly and asked her not to leave, saying “It’s getting so dark...darker and darker.” Mrs. B’s husband and mother were sent for, but her desperation suddenly turned to rapture. Looking across the room, a radiant smile lit up her face. “Oh, lovely, lovely,” she cried. When asked what she was seeing, Mrs. B replied “Lovely brightness, wonderful beings.” Lady Barrett was shaken by the conviction with which she said this, noting it was difficult “to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision.”

Mrs. B then focused on a particular point in the air and cried joyously when a deceased loved one appeared to her: “Why, it’s Father! Oh, he’s so glad I’m coming.” Mrs. B spoke to her father, saying, “I am coming,” before turning to her mother at the bedside to tell her, “Oh, he is so near.” On looking back to the vision of her deceased father, she then said, with a puzzled expression, “He has Vida with him.” Vida was Mrs. B’s sister, whose death three weeks previously she had not been informed about, so as not to cause any aggravation to her own health. Mrs. B died within the hour.

A similar example from more modern times is that of a Chinese lady, terminally ill with cancer, reported by hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley in their 1993 book Final Gifts. The dying lady had been having recurrent visions of her deceased husband, who was calling her to join him:

One day, much to her puzzlement, she saw her sister with her husband, and both were calling her to join them. She told the hospice nurse that her sister was still alive in China, and that she hadn’t seen her for many years. When the hospice nurse later reported this conversation to the woman’s daughter, the daughter stated that the patient’s sister had in fact died two days earlier of the same kind of cancer, but that the family had decided not to tell the patient to avoid upsetting or frightening her.

As with veridical NDEs, the sheer number of Peak-in-Darien cases provides evidence that cannot be brushed away simply as chance occurrences.

 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.