Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (8 page)

I’ll never forget the day that Dora died. I asked Myra afterward what she thought about the experience, and she told me through tears that it was beautiful for her, not awkward or strange. She felt this way mainly because she could envision her mom being carried over, in a sense, by her own mother.

When I look back, there’s no doubt in my mind that Dora was seeing her mother, a kind of guest from the spiritual realms. I’m not a religious guy—I never was—yet the vision didn’t seem impossible to me. In fact, it seemed like a natural progression.

Parents usually die before their children, and I see them sort of leading the way when it’s the child’s turn. It’s as if a father dies before his son so that he can come back and show him that death really isn’t so bad after all. Our parents are waiting for us on the other side. When I really think about it, I have to admit the idea that our loved ones are watching over us makes perfect sense to me.

Over time, I’ve seen that visions can be very comforting for patients. And I will always remember Dora and the peace she felt from gazing upon her mother wearing the spectacular, brightly shining robe.

A M
OTHER’S
V
ISIT

by Clara

As an ICU nurse, I see it all: car accidents, heart attacks, and trauma like you would not believe. Some stories just stand out in my mind, though. I remember this particular one because it involved a family member.

My niece Jessica, a 26-year-old teacher, taught special education and was visiting our farm for Labor Day weekend. We were all very excited because our family had just purchased a black-and-white spotted horse named Dawn whom the kids loved. The grandkids, nieces, nephews, and the rest of us were gathered together to celebrate the holiday and play with the new horse.

At one point during the party, some of the kids decided to ride Dawn. I wanted everyone to have a good time, but my better judgment told me that this was a risky undertaking, especially since our family had had the horse only a day or two at this point.

Jessica, an expert rider who is also a little bit hardheaded, volunteered to ride Dawn first so I’d relax and feel safe when the others followed her lead. I reminded Jessica that while she was a really good rider, she hadn’t ridden for a few months, and the horse had only just arrived. She didn’t know Dawn’s quirks yet.

Unafraid, Jessica mounted the horse, who was becoming more and more agitated. By the time she gripped the reins, the horse shied and took off. Jessica was thrown and landed in a field, and she was unconscious when we rushed to her. I can distinctly remember hearing one of the kids whisper, “I think she’s dead!”

She was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived, but as soon as the paramedics began to work on her, she began to come to. The trouble was, however, that she had no memory of where she was or what had happened. In fact, she couldn’t remember anything at all.

When Jessica arrived at the emergency room, she still had no idea who any of us were or that she’d been in an accident. For a few days, her doctor suspected that she was having a brain bleed, and the neurologists confirmed it with an MRI. I sat at Jessica’s bedside during that terrible period when you don’t know if your loved one is going to make it.

Suddenly, Jessica blurted out, “Mom, it’s you! I can’t believe you’re here!”

Her mother had died in 1995, about six years earlier, and I knew Jessica to be a practical and realistic kind of person. She herself would never have believed in seeing visions of deceased family members. I was shocked and afraid, because after working in hospital ICUs for years and being around so many dying people, I knew that seeing a deceased relative usually meant one thing. So I took Jessica’s talking to her mother as a sign of her impending death, almost as certain as her heart stopping.

“Mother! Mother!” Jessica kept calling out. But what she said next really confused me. “Mother? Turn around . . . here I am! Why won’t you look at me anymore?”

I was sure that Jessica had seen her mother, but I couldn’t understand why she was asking her to turn around. She continued pleading with her mother, saying tearfully, “It’s so good to see you, but why won’t you face me? Why are you walking away?”

I didn’t know what to make of what I was hearing. Some of our family and friends were coming in and out of the room, and I noticed that they were really worried and kind of freaked out. “Why is she talking to her dead mother?” most of them asked. We all watched the tears pouring down Jessica’s cheeks as she sobbed, saying, “Mom is gone again.”

I will never forget it because it felt so real. Jessica had the saddest look on her face, especially at one point when she said that her mother was walking away. I could even feel the shift in the room because of the intensity of Jessica’s emotions when she realized her mother wasn’t coming back. I’d never seen my niece cry like this before, but her tears were those of someone who had just been rejected.

“It was so good to see her again,” Jessica remarked, still crying. She inhaled deeply and simply stated, “Gone.” Then she quickly fell asleep.

The next morning when Jessica woke up, her memory had returned to her, but she didn’t remember the vision or the accident. And to this day, she has no memory of falling from the horse, being rushed to the hospital, or having a conversation with her mother.

I was terrified at the time because I thought that seeing her mom meant that my niece was dying, but I learned that that wasn’t necessarily the case. Extraordinary things happen; I know that Jessica’s mother came to her, and then she turned away and left.

In all of my years at the ICU, I’ve witnessed my share of deathbed visions and have always known that when a patient experiences them, it means death is imminent. In this particular case, I can only guess that it simply wasn’t Jessica’s time to go.

A
N
E
NLIGHTENED
P
HYSICIAN

by Don

The first time I ever realized that a patient was having a vision involved a family I’d known for many years. (This was back in the days when one general physician would treat everyone in the family and be there for all of the births and deaths.) My patient had survived a radical prostatectomy and had barely regained his bladder control when he came down with hepatitis. He eventually had a blood-transfusion reaction and was in a coma, dying. His wife and son were at his side when he passed.

A decade later, this man’s widow, Regina, was dying from heart failure. Once again, I was the attending physician.

She had been close to her family, especially since her husband had died. Now Regina was very sick but had still managed to attend her grandson’s graduation from business school. But shortly afterward, it was clear that her condition was quickly deteriorating.

When her children were at her bedside toward the end, she was on a small amount of morphine to dull her pain, but not enough to induce delirium. Regina soon began talking to someone who clearly wasn’t there, so her family believed that the medication was causing her to hallucinate. But when they asked me to discontinue the morphine and noticed that she was still carrying on the same conversation, no one could blame it on the drug.

On one occasion, Regina suddenly looked over at her son and said, “I was just with your father.”

She went on to speak to her deceased husband for a few minutes, and then came back to carry on a completely coherent conversation with her family. Shortly afterward, she went back into the vision and talked to her husband, eventually “returning” and addressing her son who was sitting by her bedside.

As a physician, I’ve witnessed some interesting things, especially when I worked in hospice. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a dying patient say, “I saw Jesus,” “I saw Moses,” or “I saw my husband [or wife, friend, or child].”

People often ask me why doctors don’t talk more about visions, and I explain that there are many reasons. First of all, they aren’t really there with the patient much at the end of his or her life. They come in for a quick assessment and see how to manage nausea, fatigue, fever, or pain. They’re trained to heal and fix, so deathbed visions are considered hallucinations. For more enlightened physicians, however, they might perceive these visions as a sign of impending death. Many of my colleagues would never admit or even discuss such a thing, though, and pass it off as a side effect of medication or lack of oxygen.

When I worked in hospice, I realized that doctors have more time to sit with their patients and get to know them. While there, I was able to witness so many of my patients experiencing visions before dying, and they always seemed to bring peace and reconciliation. I consider these visions to be nothing short of miraculous.

As you can see from these stories, deathbed visions are often
a powerful experience for the living as well as the dying.

We will never be able to prove the existence of visions, but
we can control how we perceive a person’s experience. Does it
have value simply because it is authentic and meaningful for the
individual? Can the medical community be comfortable with a
phenomenon that is outside the realm of explanation? Some interesting
questions to pose are these: If a large number of scientists
can accept that God is real, can they also have faith and trust the
visions of the dying? If not, can traditional Western medicine ever
respectfully disagree, or will it continue to discount and minimize
something that it doesn’t understand? The reality remains the
same: as the dying see less of this world, some appear to be looking
into the world to come.

After listening to so many doctors and nurses share their stories,
I realized that they most often describe their experiences with
deathbed visions as profound. They say, “I don’t think it was a
side effect of a medication, nor was it due to a lack of oxygen . . .
it was just a profound moment.” They weren’t talking about the
scientific, technical aspects of dying; they were referring to the art
of dying. This made me wonder, How are the dying and deathbed
visions portrayed in our cultural expression, particularly in our
books and movies?