Shared experience of dying loved one

Writer and researcher Nick Cook relates this story: "In 2014, I gathered with my wife’s family at her family home to be with my much-loved mother-in-law as she slipped into unconsciousness after a long illness. Besides my mother-in-law, there were six other family members in the house.

"After a day in which we’d taken turns to be with her, her breathing changed suddenly, and we all assembled by her bed for what her nurse told us would be her last moments. My wife, who had been exceptionally close to her mother, took her hand. At the precise moment of her mother’s passing, still holding Sylvia’s hand, she turned unexpectedly to the rest of us and, in a joy-filled voice that belied the pain everyone knew she was feeling, announced to the room that ‘all was well’. When, some hours later, I asked her what had happened in the midst of her turmoil to make her say this, she looked at me, perplexed. 'Didn’t you experience it, too? Didn’t everyone?'

"She told me that what she had experienced had been so vivid – so real – she was convinced everyone in the room had been ‘there’ too: a place where time didn’t exist, but where it also seemed to stretch endlessly. In this realm, she told me, everything had felt so primally ‘connected’ that she had been presented with every piece of information that had ever existed across all time – and every bit of it ‘made sense’. Fear, anxiety, and pain had all disappeared to be replaced by a different state of being – a realm, my wife described it as – that felt infinitely ‘more real’ than our own; the world that for a second or two (as we had experienced it) she had left behind.

"She felt in this moment overwhelmingly that her mother had gone ‘home’; and that for some reason she had been allowed to experience that place too. These were words that had come from someone who wouldn’t have categorized herself for a moment as ‘religious’ in any recognized sense.

"The other word my wife used was ‘love’ – love of the purest and most joyous kind had permeated this place at every level of its being and of hers; and, in this sense, she said, there was no distinction, no separation, between ‘it’ and her; they were, in effect, one.

"Here is her personal experience in her own words: I felt like I’d been taken part of the way with her. I felt, as I was holding her hand, something else was holding her, and that I was a part of that moment. I just felt loved. I knew everything. I didn’t need to know what I knew. I just understood it. I felt a part of everything, connected with everything. It was like: ‘Ah, I get it’, but I can’t tell you what it is that I got. There was no division. I was it and it was me. All I remember (on returning to the room) is turning around and going: ‘All is well. It’s all OK. She’s fine.’ I had never felt more loved, more safe. I was just one with everything. I had perfect understanding of everything and knowing that where she was was real.

"Over the next several months, this event had a profound effect on me. I had been given testimony of an anomalous event from someone whom I trusted intimately – and there was no question that, for the person to whom the event had happened, it had been real. When I Googled it, I found it was something others had experienced – a phenomenon allied to the OBE and the NDE known as a ‘shared death experience’.

 

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.