End-of-life experiences (ELEs): Cook excerpt #12

Nick Cook writes: Dr Christopher Kerr, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Hospice and Medical Care Buffalo, NY – a psychologist and physician with a PhD in neurobiology - has pulled together, with the active cooperation of his many patients, a large dataset of so- called end-of-life experiences (ELEs)³⁹. These mostly comprise ‘visitations’ by deceased relatives, friends and even pets. Some appear in dreams, others as manifestations in what we would describe as everyday ‘waking reality’ - but most, if not all, are “qualitatively different from hallucinations”, Dr Kerr explained to me⁴⁰.

Dr Kerr was a hard-boiled, 37-year-old cardiology fellow finishing his specialty training while working weekends at Hospice Buffalo to pay the bills, when he had a transformative experience. In expressing a thought to a veteran charge nurse called Nancy that his patient, Tom, would respond well to IV antibiotics and fluids, she told him it was too late – Tom was dying. When Kerr queried how she could be so sure, she told him that he had been dreaming about his dead mother. Kerr responded: “I don’t remember that class from medical school.” To which, Nancy – with the wisdom and directness that comes from a career spent on the front line – replied that he, Kerr, must have ‘missed a lot of classes.’⁴¹

Dr Kerr’s ELE research is focused on his patients – his first and only concern is on how these experiences can help them and their caregivers as they approach death.

The study he subsequently launched had a two-fold objective: first, to demonstrate that pre-death dreams and visions exist and occur routinely; second, to address their ‘prevalence, content, and significance’ from the patient’s perspective.

To document ELEs as related by the patients themselves, he and his team utilised a standardised questionnaire in conjunction with more open-ended questions. Every participant was asked the same questions about dream or vision content, frequency and degree of realism, many of them having reported, as NDE’ers and SDE’ers (like my wife) so often did, that they seemed ‘more real than real’. A numbered scale was used so that answers could be quantified and compared.

In a fusion of the research carried out to date, what it has shown is that 88.1 per cent of patients report having at least one ELE; 99 per cent report their ELE as seeming or feeling real; and 60.1 per cent that their dreams were comforting (18.8 per cent that they were distressing)⁴². The ELEs they most frequently reported as soothing included the presence of dead friends and relatives (72 per cent), followed, in order, by living friends and relatives, dead pets or other animals, past meaningful experiences, and finally, religious figures. ‘Taken together,’ Dr Kerr concludes, ‘the data suggest that the dying process includes an extraordinary but built-in mechanism that soothes our fears as our inner world becomes ever more populated by those we have loved and lost.’⁴³

Can it be said, then, that ELEs have some kind of purpose? Many dying patients describe having been ‘put back together’ by their experiences; others to have significantly higher ‘post-traumatic growth scores’ than their non-ELE-experiencing counterparts – evidence, Dr Kerr says, that, even as we approach death, we are yet afforded an opportunity to grow. 

39 Since I interviewed Dr Kerr, he and his research team now to refer to ELDVs (end-of-life dreams and visions) as ELEs: end-of-life experiences.
40 Interview with the author, 27.7.20
41 From Introduction, Death Is But A Dream, Dr Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Quercus Editions, London, UK, 2020. 
42 https://www.drchristopherkerr.com/research
43 Percentage and quote, p.49 ‘Death Is But A Dream’. 

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.