Chapter 10

Shared-Death Experiences — When the Living Share the Dying Person's Journey

The Anderson family had gathered to say goodbye. Their mother had been sick for a long time, and now her breathing had grown irregular. Two brothers, two sisters, and a sister-in-law sat in the room together, quietly waiting. They were exhausted and a little numb, the way families often are at the end of a long illness. And then, suddenly, the room filled with light.

One of the daughters thought, at first, that headlights from a passing car had shone through the window. But the light did not move like headlights. It did not look like any light she had ever seen on earth. She nudged her sister. Her sister's eyes were as big as saucers. At the same moment, she saw her brother gasp out loud. Everyone in that room saw the light at the same time, and for a few seconds, they were frightened.¹

Then their mother stopped breathing. And as she died, the family watched something none of them could later put into ordinary words. The lights gathered and shaped themselves into what looked like an arched entranceway made of clouds. They watched their mother lift up out of her body and pass through it. Near the opening, they all felt a flood of joy. The brother called it "a chorus of joyful feelings." The sister heard beautiful music, although the others did not. The experience was so undeniable that they told the hospice nurse about it. She listened, nodded, and said she had heard of similar things before — that it was not uncommon for the dying process to "encompass people nearby."²

That kind nurse was right. And what she described, in plain language, is the subject of this chapter. Researchers now call it a shared-death experience (SDE). It is one of the newer categories in near-death research, and most readers — even Christians familiar with NDEs — have probably never heard of it. But once you understand what an SDE is, and once you sit with the cases for a while, I think you will see why I consider it perhaps the most conceptually devastating evidence against the "dying-brain" theory of NDEs that exists.

What Is a Shared-Death Experience?

A shared-death experience is exactly what the name suggests. A person who is not dying — someone who is healthy, awake, alert, and present at a death — shares part of the dying person's experience. Raymond Moody, the researcher who first coined the term, describes it this way: the person to whom it happens "is not themselves near death. Nor are they ill or injured. Rather they are in the presence of somebody who is dying. And as they observe the other person's dying process, they co-live that person's dying experience so closely" that Moody has come to call these experiences empathic.³

This is a very important point, so let me say it plainly. The bystander in an SDE is not in a medical crisis. They are not on medication. Their oxygen levels are normal. Their brains are working in the ordinary way. They are sitting in a chair beside a bed, or standing in a hospital corridor, or — sometimes — sleeping in their own home miles away. And yet, somehow, they share what the dying person seems to be experiencing on the other side.

What does that look like? Researchers have noted a number of features that show up again and again in SDE reports. Not every SDE includes every feature, but here is a broad list of what people commonly describe:

(a) A brilliant light emanating from or surrounding the dying person — not metaphorically, but literally. A visible, otherworldly light that may fill the room. The Anderson family case is a textbook example.

(b) Spiritual beings in the room — angels, deceased relatives, sometimes a figure the bystanders feel is Jesus or another holy presence. In one striking case from a U.S. hospital, a woman who had been talking with deceased loved ones was being monitored by camera. As she died, the staff watching the telemetry video saw "a lot of people around the bed with her" — even though only a single nurse and a respiratory therapist were physically in the room. When she passed, the camera showed all those figures leaving the bedside together. Multiple staff witnessed it on the monitor. Researcher Linda Moore, who collected this case in a survey of nursing faculty, wrote that the phenomenon "really freaked them out."⁴

(c) Seeing the dying person's spirit leave the body — sometimes described as a mist, sometimes a luminous form, sometimes a transparent image of the person rising upward. The Anderson family saw their mother "lift up out of her body."

(d) An out-of-body experience by the bystander themselves. The healthy bystander feels their own consciousness separate from their body, alongside the dying person.

(e) Being transported to a heavenly realm alongside the dying person — seeing the same landscapes, the same light, the same beings the dying person seems to see.

(f) Sharing the dying person's life review — flashes of the dying person's life appearing to the bystander, sometimes including events the bystander could not have known about.

(g) Shared music — hearing the same ethereal music dying patients so often report.

How Researchers Discovered SDEs

Although shared-death experiences have probably been happening as long as humans have been dying, the systematic study of them is fairly recent. Three streams of research stand out.

Raymond Moody and Glimpses of Eternity. Moody is the same researcher who started the modern field of NDE study with Life After Life in 1975. After spending decades collecting accounts from people who themselves had near-death experiences, Moody began noticing something unexpected. Family members and friends of the dying kept coming up to him after lectures, sometimes shyly, sometimes in tears, and saying things like, "I had something like that happen — but I wasn't dying. My grandmother was." For years he set those reports aside, because he didn't quite know what to do with them. Eventually he realized he had a whole new category of phenomena on his hands. In 2010 he published Glimpses of Eternity, the first systematic collection of shared-death cases.⁵ The Anderson family case I opened with comes from that volume.

William Peters and the Shared Crossing Project. Peters, a hospice worker and end-of-life researcher in California, founded the Shared Crossing Project specifically to study these experiences. His research team has now collected hundreds of cases and developed a classification system breaking SDEs into several types — visual, auditory, transitional, transportive, and others. Peters' work has helped move SDE research from anecdote-collecting to careful taxonomy.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick's UK research. The Fenwicks, a husband-and-wife research team in Britain, have spent years documenting what they call "death-bed coincidences." These are cases where a healthy relative or friend, often at a distance, suddenly knows or feels or sees something at the precise moment of a loved one's death. In one published study, Fenwick and his colleague Sue Brayne found that around 5% of dying patients in their sample had family members who reported "simultaneous viewing of the apparitions by the witness and the dying."⁶ Five percent may sound small, but if it is anywhere near accurate, it would mean millions of these cases worldwide.

Christian researcher J. Steve Miller adds another important strand. In his dissertation on death-related phenomena at Columbia International University, Miller treats shared-death cases as one of his core "lines of evidence" for the afterlife. He concludes the chapter on SDEs by writing that this type of experience "circumvents several possible objections to DBEs being veridical" — the bystanders' brains are healthy, the experiences come unexpectedly, and sometimes more than one person reports the same thing at once. Miller rates the evidential strength of shared experiences a "9 out of 10" for fitting the afterlife hypothesis better than any naturalistic alternative.⁷

A Closer Look at Specific Cases

Let me share two more cases that show why this evidence is so striking.

The first comes from Miller's own family. Miller has a relative, a retired history teacher he calls "Bucky," whom he describes as a serious, sane, intelligent man — not the type to make things up. One night Bucky woke at three in the morning feeling an extreme heaviness on his chest, like the weight people describe during a heart attack. He saw a light in the distance. Then he felt himself leave his body, looked down at himself from the ceiling, and observed what he called "celestial beings" near him, with a profound feeling of peace. Then he was suddenly back in his body, drenched in cold sweat. The phone rang. A nurse was on the line, calling to say that Bucky's father — who had been in good health and lived ninety miles away — had just died of a sudden heart attack.⁸

Notice the timing. Bucky did not have his SDE after learning his father had died. He had it before the phone rang. Grief cannot have caused this experience, because at the moment it happened, he did not yet know there was anything to grieve.

The second case comes from Shaun Tabatt, a Christian researcher and broadcaster who has interviewed many NDErs and SDErs. Tabatt notes that during his uncle's death in a hospital room — surrounded by his mother and several aunts and uncles — his uncle suddenly looked up at the ceiling and excitedly cried, "Mama! Mama!" That was how he had always referred to his late mother, who had died years before. Tabatt only learned about shared-death experiences and similar phenomena later in his research. Looking back, he says he is convinced his uncle truly saw his mother coming to greet him at the moment his soul was preparing to leave his body.⁹

Tabatt also points out something I find helpful: shared-death cases come in different forms. Some involve everyone at the bedside. Some involve a single relative far away. Some are linked to terminal lucidity, where the dying person briefly becomes alert and clear (a phenomenon I will return to in Chapter 34). Each type carries its own evidential weight, but together they form a much larger pattern than any one category alone.¹⁰

Why SDEs Demolish the Dying-Brain Theory

Let me put my cards on the table. I think shared-death experiences are, by themselves, enough to refute the standard skeptical explanation of NDEs. Here is why.

The standard skeptical line goes something like this. NDEs are produced by a brain that is dying — starved of oxygen, flooded with stress chemicals, firing erratically as it shuts down. The light, the tunnel, the sense of peace, the meeting with deceased loved ones — all of it is just neurons misfiring. (Appendix B addresses these naturalistic theories at length, and Chapter 6's discussion of veridical NDEs already shows why they fail.) But for that explanation to work at all, the experience has to be confined to the dying person.

SDEs blow that explanation apart. The bystander is not dying. The bystander's brain is not oxygen-starved. The bystander is not flooded with stress chemicals or anesthesia. The bystander is sitting in a chair, perfectly conscious. And yet the bystander sees the light. The bystander sees the entranceway. The bystander sees the spirit leave the body. In the camera case, the bystanders watching the monitor were in a separate room entirely.

How does a "dying brain" produce a perception in a healthy brain in another room?

It doesn't. It can't. The dying-brain theory simply cannot accommodate this data.¹¹

And there is a second point worth pausing on. SDEs suggest that what happens at death is not a private hallucination locked inside one person's skull. It is something objective — something occurring in an external spiritual reality that more than one mind can perceive at the same time. That is exactly what we would expect if the biblical worldview is true. The Bible never treats the spiritual realm as a private projection of the human mind. It treats it as real, public, and (sometimes) perceptible.

Biblical Resonance: A Realm That More Than One Person Can See

Some Christians, when they first hear about SDEs, get nervous. Is this strange? Is it occultic? I want to argue gently that the biblical answer is no. In fact, the very structure of an SDE — God allowing healthy people to glimpse a spiritual reality they would normally not see — has clear precedent in Scripture itself. Chapter 30 covers the biblical precedents for visionary experiences in detail; here I will simply highlight the parallels.

Consider Elisha and his servant in 2 Kings 6:17. The Aramean army had surrounded the city of Dothan, and Elisha's young servant was terrified. Elisha prayed:

"O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see." So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. (2 Kings 6:17 ESV)

Notice what happens. The angelic army was already there. It was real. It was objective. But the servant could not see it until God "opened his eyes." This is exactly the structure of an SDE: a spiritual reality that is genuinely present at the bedside of the dying becomes, for a moment, perceptible to the healthy bystander. As Burke notes when commenting on this passage, Elisha's prayer asked that "the veil might be lifted" so his servant could see "Heaven's angels were all around to protect them."¹²

Then there is Stephen, in Acts 7:55–56, just before he was stoned to death:

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God." (Acts 7:55–56 ESV)

Stephen's experience is treated extensively in Chapter 30, but for our purposes, notice that this is essentially a deathbed vision in a public setting. Stephen sees through the veil — and the bystanders, though they react with rage rather than reverence, hear him describe what he is seeing. As Miller observes, Stephen's vision "shares some characteristics with deathbed experiences. He was apparently aware of both the heavenly and earthly worlds at once."¹³

Or consider the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1–8), where Peter, James, and John together see Moses and Elijah — figures from "the other side" — conversing with Jesus. Tabatt rightly hesitates to call this an SDE in the technical sense, since no one is dying. But it does establish a vital biblical principle: more than one person can simultaneously perceive a spiritual reality that is normally invisible.¹⁴ If God allowed three disciples to share that vision on a mountain, it should not shock us if He sometimes allows three siblings to share a vision at their mother's bedside.

None of this is to say that every SDE is straightforwardly biblical, or that every detail of every report should be taken at face value. As I will argue in Chapter 25, careful discernment matters. But the basic shape of an SDE — multiple people perceiving a real spiritual reality at the boundary of life and death — is exactly the kind of thing the Bible itself describes.

Answering Common Objections

Two objections come up almost every time I share this material with thoughtful skeptics, so let me address them directly.

Objection 1: "SDEs are just grief hallucinations." The idea is that family members are so distraught about an impending death that their grief produces a kind of waking dream. The trouble with this objection is that many SDEs occur before the bystander knows the person has died. Bucky's experience is a perfect example. He was asleep in his bed, ninety miles away, expecting nothing unusual at all. His father was reportedly in good health. The phone call telling him about the heart attack came after the experience, not before. Grief cannot produce a hallucination about an event the person does not yet know is happening. You cannot grieve a death you have not yet been told about.

Objection 2: "SDEs are psychological contagion — the bystander unconsciously mimics what the dying person reports." This sounds plausible at first, but it falls apart on inspection. In many of the strongest cases, the dying person is unconscious. They are not communicating anything. They have not described what they are seeing. The bystander has no information to "mimic." In the camera case, the staff watched figures appear on a screen — the dying woman never said a word about them. In the Anderson family case, the mother had not spoken in hours; she could not have planted the suggestion of an entranceway in her family's minds. And in long-distance cases like Bucky's, there is no possibility of contagion at all — the dying person is in another state, and the bystander has no information about what they may or may not be experiencing.¹⁵

A subtler version of this objection says that bystanders unconsciously absorb cultural ideas about death — light, angels, music — and project them at the moment of grief. But this fails to explain the long-distance cases, the unexpected timing, and especially the cases where multiple bystanders independently report the same specific details. Two siblings might both have a vague cultural script about light at death. They are unlikely to independently describe the same Natural Bridge–shaped entranceway with cloud-like edges and ethereal music.

A Pastoral Word

I want to close with something less academic. SDEs, more than almost any other phenomenon in the field, are a comfort to grieving families. When a hospice nurse can sit with a daughter and say, "What you saw at your mother's bedside is not unusual, and it is not crazy. Many families experience it," she is offering something precious. She is giving the daughter permission to trust what she saw.

SDEs do not prove the resurrection of Jesus or the truth of the gospel; they cannot do that, and they were never meant to. But they do something humbler and very valuable. They confirm — empirically, publicly, in the testimony of healthy witnesses — that the soul really does survive the body, that there really is something on the other side, and that the dying person we love is being received into a realm of light. That is exactly what the Bible has been teaching for thousands of years. SDEs simply add their quiet, surprising voice to the chorus.

Conclusion

Shared-death experiences are perhaps the single most under-appreciated body of evidence in NDE research. They are still relatively new, not yet widely known, and many Christians have never encountered them. But once we sit with the cases — the Anderson family watching their mother pass through an entranceway of cloud-like light; hospital staff seeing figures around a deathbed on closed-circuit camera; Bucky waking ninety miles away at the moment of his father's death — the cumulative weight is, for me, decisive.

The dying-brain theory cannot account for what healthy bystanders perceive. The grief-hallucination theory cannot account for the timing or the long-distance cases. The contagion theory cannot account for unconscious patients and independent witnesses. What is left is the simplest, oldest, and most biblical explanation: the spiritual world is real, the soul really does depart at death, and sometimes — by God's gracious permission — those of us still in our bodies are allowed a brief glimpse of the journey.