Chapter 5
What Deathbed Visions Are — A Primer for Families and Pastors

Catherine had not slept in her own bed for nine days. She had set up camp beside her mother's hospice bed with a folding chair, a thermos of bad coffee, and a Bible she kept forgetting to open. Her mother, Ruth, was eighty-seven. The cancer had taken her appetite first, then her strength, then her words. For three days Ruth had said almost nothing. She drifted in and out, her breath slow and shallow, her eyes mostly closed. The hospice nurse had gently told Catherine that it would probably be soon.

It was a little past four in the afternoon. The room was dim. Catherine was leaning forward in the chair with her forehead on her mother's hand. She was not praying. She was not thinking. She was just there.

Then her mother's eyes opened.

Not a flutter. Not a confused half-open. Wide open. Ruth was looking toward the ceiling in the corner of the room, above the closet door. Her face — which for days had been slack and drawn — was completely alert. Her lips parted. And then, in a voice Catherine had not heard in almost two weeks, her mother said, quite clearly, "Daddy?"

Catherine sat up. Her mother's father had died in 1983. Catherine had been four years old. She barely remembered him.

"Daddy," Ruth said again, and now she was smiling — the first real smile Catherine had seen in months. "Is that you? Oh — is Mama with you?"

Catherine did not know what to do with her hands. She did not know what to do with her face. She felt the tears come before she understood why.

The nurse walked by the open door, took one glance inside, and gave Catherine a small, calm nod. Later, outside the room, she would tell Catherine, "Honey, I've been a hospice nurse for twenty-one years. I see this almost every week. It's a good sign. She's being met."

But in the moment, Catherine did not know any of that. She only knew that her mother, who had barely moved for days, was now speaking with a joy Catherine had not seen on her face in a decade. Ruth reached one thin hand up toward the corner of the ceiling. "I'm tired, Daddy," she said. "I'm so tired. I'm ready." And then, softly: "Yes. Yes, I'm coming."

She lived for another forty minutes. She did not speak again, but her face stayed peaceful. When she died, her hand was still half-raised.

Catherine came to see me about three weeks later. She brought coffee. She sat down across from me in the small office off the fellowship hall and she cried in that particular way grieving people cry when the tears have been stored up for the only person who knows how to receive them. She was a deeply thoughtful woman, a lifelong Baptist, someone who had taught Sunday School for thirty years and served on every committee her church had ever formed. The question that had brought her to my office was not "Was my mom really seeing her father?" She already knew, in the deep place where such things are known, what she believed about that. The question was this: "Pastor — why did no one ever tell me this happens? I've been in church my whole life. I've been at deathbeds before. I've read books. And no one ever said a single word."

I did not have a good answer for her. I still don't, if I am honest. But it is part of why this book exists.

What Is a Deathbed Experience?

The phrase deathbed experience (usually shortened to DBE) is an umbrella. It covers a cluster of unusual things that have been reported, with remarkable regularity, by or about people who are dying. Researchers who study this field — doctors, nurses, hospice chaplains, psychiatrists — have slowly sorted the phenomenon into categories. You do not need to memorize the list. I only want you to know the shape of the territory, so that when something happens at your loved one's bedside, you have a word for it.¹

Here is the basic map.

Deathbed visions (DBVs). These are the most famous. The dying person sees, and often speaks to, people who are no longer alive. Most often it is a parent, a spouse, or a sibling. Sometimes it is an angel, a figure of light, or Jesus himself. Sometimes it is a beautiful place — a meadow, a garden, a doorway. The dying person typically describes this "visitor" as having come to fetch them, to walk them somewhere, to welcome them home.

Nearing-death awareness. This is when the dying person simply knows they are going to die — and sometimes knows roughly when — even though their body has not yet given clear signals, and sometimes even though their doctor has given a different forecast. Often the awareness is expressed in gentle, symbolic language: "I need to catch the train." "Where are my shoes? I have to go." "Please pack my bag."²

Terminal lucidity. This is the sudden return of full mental clarity in someone who had lost it. A grandmother with advanced Alzheimer's who has not recognized anyone for three years will, in the last hours of life, call her daughter by name, hold a conversation, and say goodbye. We will look at this more closely in Chapter 11 and again in Chapter 17, because it matters enormously for families of those with dementia.

Shared death experiences (SDEs). These are experiences that family members or caregivers at the bedside sometimes share with the dying person — a sense of presence in the room, an impression of lifting, sometimes even a glimpse of what the dying one seems to be seeing. We will take this up more fully in Chapter 11.

After-death communications (ADCs). These are contacts reported by the bereaved after the death — a sense of the loved one's presence, a vivid dream, something heard or seen. Because these happen to the surviving family rather than to the dying person, we will give them their own full chapter (Chapter 22).

For the rest of this chapter we will mostly be looking at the first two — visions and awareness — because those are what usually catch families off guard at the bedside. These are the moments when Grandpa suddenly speaks to his mother who has been dead for sixty years, or when Mom starts asking about a journey she clearly plans to take without us.

One more thing before we go further. None of the categories above is a guarantee. Some Christians die having every one of these experiences in clear succession. Some Christians die having none at all. Both kinds of deaths can be good deaths. Both kinds of Christians can be fully received by Christ. The presence or absence of a DBE is not a measurement of the dying person's faith. It is not a scorecard. If your father died without a single unusual experience, you have not been given less. God meets each of his children in the particular way they need to be met. What we are doing in this chapter is simply opening a window — so that if something does happen, you will not be caught flat-footed; and if nothing happens, you will not think anything is missing.

How Common Are Deathbed Experiences?

When I first started reading this research, I assumed DBEs were unusual. Something that happened to one grandmother in ten, maybe. A lovely story for the family photo album, but statistically rare.

I was completely wrong.

Dr. Christopher Kerr is the chief medical officer of Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo in New York. He is a trained cardiologist. He runs a large hospice organization. He is about the furthest thing from a mystic you can imagine — the kind of careful, soft-spoken, evidence-driven man who would not put his career at risk for a whimsy. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Kerr's team started systematically interviewing hospice patients, often daily, asking a simple question: Had the patient had any unusual dreams or visions? Kerr's first published study, covering 59 patients, found that 88.1 percent reported meaningful end-of-life dreams or visions before death.³ Follow-up studies pushed the number above 80 percent again and again.⁴

Other studies agree. A Gloucestershire nursing home study by Peter Fenwick and his colleagues found widespread end-of-life visions reported by nurses and care assistants.⁵ A study of Australian palliative-care patients by Michael Barbato found similar rates of paranormal experiences near the time of death, and found that patients, families, and even clinicians tended to under-report the experiences for fear of being judged.⁶ A systematic review of the existing DBE literature concluded — in a phrase I have come back to many times — that these phenomena cannot be predicted by a patient's religious, cultural, psychological, or medical background. They cross every line we draw.⁷

This matters pastorally because of what it means for Catherine's question. She did not have the unusual experience. The unusual experience was the one Catherine had been trained to expect — a quiet, tidy death with no mysterious last words and no reach of the hand toward a corner of the ceiling. That picture, it turns out, is the statistical outlier. The picture where Ruth looks up and says "Daddy?" is, give or take, what happens in the majority of American hospice rooms. Your grandmother's experience, your father's experience, your husband's experience — whatever its exact shape — is almost certainly not strange. It is common. It is studied. It has a name.

I want you to feel the weight of that gently. Because it will change how you read the weeks after your loved one's death. The whisper you heard at the bedside and did not know what to do with was not an anomaly. It was part of a pattern thousands of trained, sober, careful researchers have now watched unfold thousands of times.

A Brief History: From Sir William to Hospice Buffalo

It helps to know where this research came from, because the story is older, and more serious, than the average reader imagines. DBEs were not "discovered" by a television special in the 1970s. They were being carefully studied a hundred years ago by people whose academic credentials would make most of us blink.

The modern history starts with a knighted British physicist named Sir William Barrett. Barrett was a professor at Ireland's Royal College of Science and a founding figure in the scientific study of unusual human experiences. One January evening in 1924, his wife — a distinguished obstetrician — came home from the hospital with tears in her eyes. She had been with a young patient named Doris who had just given birth to a healthy baby but had died of complications shortly afterward. Just before Doris died, she had looked up, fully lucid, and begun speaking to her own deceased father, whom she saw in the room. Then — and this is the detail that broke open Barrett's scientific curiosity — she said, "He has Vida with him." Vida was Doris's sister. Vida had in fact died three weeks earlier, but the family had hidden this news from Doris so as not to distress her during her pregnancy. Doris did not know her sister was dead. She had just seen her.⁸

Barrett began collecting such cases. Two years after his death, his manuscript was published as Deathbed Visions: How the Dead Talk to the Dying (1926). It remains a landmark. For Barrett — a careful physicist trained to distrust the fantastical — these experiences were not easy to dismiss. They were too consistent. They came too often. And too many of them contained a "Vida detail" — information the dying person could not have known by ordinary means.⁹

The next great milestone came in 1977, when two psychologists — Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research and Erlendur Haraldsson of the University of Iceland — published At the Hour of Death. It was the first large, cross-cultural study of the phenomenon, based on surveys of roughly 1,000 dying patients observed by doctors and nurses in both the United States and India — two cultures with very different religious and visual expectations of the afterlife. The findings stunned both researchers. The content of DBEs was strikingly consistent across cultures. American and Indian patients saw different specific figures, as one would expect (a Hindu in India rarely sees an angel in the European sense), but the deep structure of the experience — a welcoming figure, a feeling of peace, an invitation onward — was the same.¹⁰

From there the field grew. In the 1990s, the British hospice nurse Maggie Callanan and her colleague Patricia Kelley wrote Final Gifts, a book still read as a rite of passage in hospice training, which brought the world the phrase "nearing-death awareness."¹¹ In England, the neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth produced The Art of Dying, drawing on hundreds of interviews with dying patients and hospice staff.¹² In 2010 the pioneering NDE researcher Raymond Moody published Glimpses of Eternity, opening up the strange terrain of shared death experiences.¹³ In 2022, William Peters of the Shared Crossing Project gave us At Heaven's Door, a careful collection of modern cases.¹⁴ And in our own decade, Dr. Kerr's Hospice Buffalo team has produced what is probably the most rigorous body of clinical research on DBEs ever assembled, including his 2020 book Death Is But a Dream.¹⁵

For our purposes, the most important voice is that of J. Steve Miller, whose book Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 is the most thorough Christian-scholarly treatment of the whole field. Miller is a university professor with a Ph.D. whose doctoral dissertation was on DBEs. He read over 800 sources. I lean on him gratefully throughout this chapter.¹⁶

I list all of this not to impress you with the bibliography, but to reassure you. If your grandmother spoke to her own dead mother in the last hour of her life, and if your cousin chuckled nervously and blamed the morphine, the literature on this is a century deep and full of doctors, professors, and knighted physicists. You are not chasing a ghost story. You are standing where serious people have stood.

The Core Features of a Deathbed Vision

If you talk to hospice nurses long enough, a portrait emerges. DBEs have a certain shape. Not every experience contains every feature, but the pattern is unmistakable. Here is the consensus portrait drawn from Osis and Haraldsson, Fenwick, Kerr, Callanan, Miller, and many others.¹⁷

The visitor is almost always a deceased loved one. In the great majority of cases, the dying person sees a parent, a spouse, a sibling, or a child who has already died. Studies of Christian experiencers also commonly include angels or a figure understood to be Jesus. Strangers — people unknown to the dying person — are rare.

The visitor has come to fetch them. This is one of the most consistent features across cultures. The dying person does not merely see the deceased; they describe the deceased as having come to take them somewhere, to walk with them, to lead them home. In the Osis-Haraldsson study, this "take-away" purpose was overwhelmingly the dominant theme.¹⁸

The experience is peaceful, not frightening. This is not always true — a small minority of DBEs are distressing, which we will come to — but the overwhelming majority leave the dying person visibly calmer, not more afraid. Pain eases. Breathing slows. The face softens. Family members say, over and over, "It was like watching her get ready for a wonderful trip."

The dying person is typically lucid. DBEs are not delirium. Most often they occur while the dying person is awake, aware of the room, and capable of naming the people there. Ruth knew Catherine was Catherine. She just also saw her father.

The experience is described as more real than real. This is one of the most striking features in the Kerr studies. Patients rated the "realness" of their experiences at 10 out of 10. They said, "It wasn't a dream. I've had plenty of dreams. This wasn't that."¹⁹

The core features cross every cultural line. A Hindu woman in Mumbai and a Methodist farmer in Iowa will report different faces. They rarely report different structures. The welcoming deceased, the peaceful tone, the sense of being ushered — these appear on every continent studied.²⁰

Children have them too. This is one of the details that shook me when I first read it. Dying children — who have not yet absorbed any mature theology of the afterlife, who often have not even been told they are dying — report classic DBEs. They see grandparents. They talk about going somewhere beautiful. In some studies, they mention relatives who have only recently died, whose deaths they could not have known about.²¹

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who changed how the modern West talks about death, wrote of this: in all her decades of collecting data, she said, every single child who mentioned that someone was "waiting" for them mentioned a person who had in fact died — even, in some cases, moments before. And none of those children had been told.²²

"Could I Have Dreamt This?" Two Real Cases

Let me give you two cases that come straight from the literature. Both are well-documented. Both have many, many cousins.

The first is Doris, the young mother from Sir William Barrett's files. I've already told you part of the story. Here is the rest. Doris had given birth a few hours earlier to a healthy child. She was weakening rapidly. As she faded, she suddenly lit up and said, "Oh, lovely, lovely." She looked across the room and said, "Why, it's Father. He's come for me." Then her face changed a second time, this time with a puzzled look, and she said, "He has Vida with him." Her own family, watching her, froze. Her husband began to cry. They had hidden Vida's death three weeks earlier. Doris had never been told. "Vida is with him," she said again, and then, very simply, "You do want me, Dad. I am coming." She died moments later.²³

Researchers call this kind of case a "Peak in Darien" experience — a phrase borrowed from a John Keats poem about explorers cresting a mountain and seeing something they did not expect. In a Peak-in-Darien case, the dying person sees someone on the other side whose death they did not know about. Sometimes the person had died weeks or years earlier; the family had hidden the news. Sometimes the person had just died, in another city, that very hour.²⁴

Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia — one of the most careful clinicians ever to study this field — published a paper in Anthropology and Humanism documenting three varieties of Peak-in-Darien cases. In the first, the deceased person had died before the vision, but the experiencer did not know. In the second, the deceased had died at the very time of the vision, so no ordinary learning was possible. In the third, the deceased was someone the experiencer had never even met. Greyson catalogued dozens of cases in each category.²⁵

Here is the second case, from Greyson's collection, and I will let it stand without much commentary. Two young girls, Jennie and Edith, had both fallen ill with diphtheria. Jennie, age eight, died on a Wednesday. The family made the decision — as families often did then, and still often do now — to keep the news from Edith, who was fading herself. On Saturday, just after noon, Edith was still lucid enough to choose two photographs to mail to her friend. Evidence that she still believed Jennie to be alive. She lapsed into unconsciousness soon after. That evening she woke briefly. She spoke of seeing deceased friends. Then suddenly, with a tone of surprise, she turned to her father and said, "Why, Papa, I am going to take Jennie with me!" She stretched out her arms and said, "Oh, Jennie, I'm so glad you are here." Then she lost consciousness, and then she died.²⁶

Reading stories like these — and the literature holds hundreds of them — you begin to understand why Sir William Barrett, the careful physicist, was unable to write them off. Greyson himself, a psychiatrist with no theological axe to grind, concludes that such cases "provide some of the most persuasive evidence for the ontological reality of deceased spirits" that his field has produced.²⁷

Not the Same as a Hallucination

I want to address, carefully, the first question that always comes up when Christians encounter this material. "Couldn't it just be the morphine?" Or "the dementia"? Or "the dying brain making things up"?

This is a fair question. You are right to ask it. The short answer — and I want you to sit with it, because it is important — is this: the researchers asked the same question, and the evidence, over and over, has forced a careful distinction between DBEs and ordinary hallucinations.

Let me give you a few of the reasons.

First, hallucinations caused by medication or a failing brain tend to be disorganized and unpleasant. They are typically fragmented, shifting, confusing, and — this is the crucial part — they produce agitation, not peace. The medical term for this is "terminal delirium," and it is in fact common at the end of life. It looks very different from a DBE. In terminal delirium, patients pluck at the air, grow restless, become frightened, and do not make coherent sense. Family members know when they are watching delirium. It is painful to watch.²⁸ DBEs are usually the opposite: organized, brief, coherent, and followed by a visible calm.

Second, many DBEs are reported by patients who are not on medications that can cause hallucinations. Dr. Kerr's Buffalo team specifically studied this. Their data distinguished DBEs from delirium on standardized measures and found that DBEs could not be chalked up to drugs, oxygen levels, or brain changes.²⁹

Third — and this is the reason Barrett could not walk away — there are the Peak-in-Darien cases. A hallucinating brain cannot produce accurate information about a fact it does not know. If your dying mother has not been told that her sister died last week, and she has been in and out of consciousness for days, and she now says with perfect clarity, "He has Vida with him" — the morphine did not tell her that. The dying brain did not compute that. The family wrote it down because they themselves could not explain it on any ordinary grounds.

Fourth, dying children have DBEs. Children who have not been told they are dying. Children who do not yet have a developed theology of the afterlife. Children who are not on pain medications at all. If this phenomenon were purely a function of dying brains and cultural expectations, we would not expect children to produce the same pattern adults produce. But they do.

Fifth, there is the "more real than real" quality. DBEs and ordinary hallucinations feel different to the patients themselves. Patients in the Kerr studies were emphatic about this. They could tell the difference. One does not fool them for the other.³⁰

None of this means every unusual experience is a real encounter with heaven. Some reported DBEs are hallucinations. Some are fragments of memory stirred up by an exhausted brain. And occasionally — rarely — the experience is genuinely distressing and does not fit the classic pattern. We will come to discernment in a moment. But the honest, careful answer to "Couldn't it just be the morphine?" is: sometimes, yes. But most of the time, no, and the reason we can say that is not because we want it to be true but because the research has been done.

When the Dying Talk in Signs: Nearing-Death Awareness

There is a second phenomenon I want you to know the name of, because it can be even more confusing to families than a vision. It is called nearing-death awareness, a phrase made famous by the hospice nurse Maggie Callanan and her colleague Patricia Kelley in Final Gifts.³²

Here is what it looks like. A dying patient — sometimes days before her body gives any medical reason to think death is imminent — begins to speak about a journey. She asks where her coat is. She wants to know if the bus is coming. She tells her son, "Please pack my bag, honey. I don't want to be late." She talks about needing to catch the train, or needing to "go home," or waiting for someone to pick her up. Sometimes she refers to people — "He's waiting for me" — and no one in the room knows who "he" is.

Callanan's great pastoral gift to the hospice movement was to recognize that this is not confusion. It is a second language. The dying are telling us, in gentle symbolic imagery, that they know they are leaving. Often they know when. Sometimes they know within hours. The doctor may still be quoting a longer prognosis; the patient has already read the room.

Callanan tells story after story of this in Final Gifts, and the stories are remarkable — but only if you know to listen. A woman who has not spoken coherently for days will suddenly, calmly, ask her daughter to fetch her the map, because "I don't want to make a wrong turn." A man will begin giving his son careful instructions about family matters he has never raised before, as if clearing a desk. A grandmother will ask for the little green dress her mother made her. None of these people are "losing it." They are saying goodbye in a dialect we have not been taught.³³

I share this because I think it is one of the most common places where well-meaning families accidentally miss a holy moment. "Mom, there's no train. You're in hospice. You're safe. Go back to sleep." That sentence, spoken a thousand times a day across America, is almost always said out of love. But it closes the door. If you can learn to hear nearing-death awareness for what it is, you can open the door instead. "A train, Mom? Where is it going?" That question — gentle, curious, unhurried — is sometimes the last gift a family ever gives.

Do not be alarmed if your loved one starts speaking this way. You are not watching them lose their mind. You are watching them pack their bags.

When the Fog Lifts: A Word on Terminal Lucidity

Many readers of this book have watched a loved one disappear by degrees into Alzheimer's or advanced dementia. If that is you, please hear me. I am going to speak very briefly here and then come back to this in Chapters 11 and 17 — because the research on terminal lucidity is a specific, extraordinary gift for families of those whose minds have been stolen, and it deserves full chapters of its own.

Here is the short version. A surprising number of patients with severe dementia, late-stage Alzheimer's, meningitis, brain tumors, and even long-term schizophrenia return — for minutes or hours, occasionally a full day — to complete mental clarity shortly before they die. They recognize family members by name. They carry on real conversations. Sometimes they sing old hymns. Sometimes they make peace. This phenomenon has been documented for centuries; the Germans call it terminale Geistesklarheit ("terminal clearness of mind"). The modern scholarly term is terminal lucidity. Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson have catalogued dozens of cases in the psychiatric literature.³⁴

Pastorally, here is why this matters: the mother you buried was not lost in her disease. Some part of her — the part that stepped back into the room for a few clear minutes at the end — had been there the whole time, held by God through the long fog. That is worth a whole chapter. We will get there.

When the Family Shares the Vision

One more category, briefly. Sometimes — and I want to speak carefully here — the family member at the bedside seems to share in aspects of the dying one's experience. A sister feels a physical lifting. A son briefly glimpses a corner of the same figure his mother is describing. A friend at the bedside suddenly finds herself aware of music no one else is playing. Raymond Moody, the NDE pioneer, called these events "shared death experiences" in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity. William Peters, in At Heaven's Door, has documented hundreds of them through the Shared Crossing Project.³⁵

Peters himself, a therapist who did not come at this material from any religious direction, ended up convinced there was a real phenomenon here. Because shared death experiences cannot be explained by the dying brain — the bedside family member is not dying — they have become an important thread in the research on whether DBEs are more than neurochemistry. We will look at the shared death experience more fully in Chapter 11.

If something like this happened at your loved one's bedside and you have kept it to yourself for years, I hope this paragraph is, for you, a small permission. You are not alone. Many, many Christians have had such moments and not known where to take them. Bring them, gently, to this book.

Does the Bible Leave Room for This?

This is the question a thoughtful Christian ought to ask, and I would not want you to skip it. When we say that the dying sometimes see the face of a deceased loved one, or of Jesus himself, or of an angel — are we saying something Scripture forbids? Or something Scripture quietly allows, and even seems to expect?

Let me take you to one passage, and then point you at another. The first is 2 Kings 6.

The prophet Elisha and his servant have been caught at Dothan by a hostile Syrian army. The servant wakes up at dawn, steps outside the walls, and sees the horizon filled with enemy chariots. He runs back in terror to Elisha: "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" Elisha's reply is remarkable.

Sit with this for a moment. The chariots of fire were already there. Elisha was not performing a magic trick. He was not making something appear. He was asking God to let the servant see what was already in the room. The Hebrew verb translated "opened" (paqach, פָּקַח) is the same verb used for opening the eyes of the blind.³⁷ The heavenly reality did not arrive. The curtain simply parted.

That is the category I want you to hold. Scripture takes for granted that there are real, populated unseen realities pressing in on our physical world all the time. Sometimes — rarely in ordinary life, more often at the thresholds of life and death — God briefly opens human eyes to what is always there.

The second passage is Stephen, the first Christian martyr. As he is being stoned, Luke tells us he looked up and said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). We will take up Stephen's experience more fully in Chapter 10 — his is, in many ways, the model of a Christian deathbed encounter. For now, simply notice: the Bible's own picture of a righteous death includes a dying man seeing Jesus in a moment the rest of the room cannot see. Stephen's face, Luke tells us in the previous chapter, had already begun to look "like the face of an angel" (Acts 6:15). Something holy was already leaning in.³⁸

The biblical pattern is actually not hard to find once you start looking. Jacob's dream of the ladder with angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth (Genesis 28). The angels at Jesus' empty tomb, seen by women but not others (John 20). Paul caught up to "the third heaven" (2 Corinthians 12). The transfiguration, where Moses and Elijah — both long dead — appear and speak with Jesus (Matthew 17). Scripture does not treat the physical world as a sealed room with nothing outside of it. It treats the physical world as porous, with a larger reality always on the other side of the veil, occasionally permitted to show through.³⁹

So when Ruth, in my opening story, suddenly sees her father across the room, this is not — I want to say this very carefully — this is not "the Bible being violated." This is, at most, the curtain parting briefly, in the way Scripture itself describes as happening, at the threshold of death.

I also want to name something the Scriptures quietly assume about God himself: he is tender toward those who are dying. Psalm 23 puts the dying Christian in the valley of the shadow of death with the Shepherd's rod and staff nearby. Psalm 116:15 says that "precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints." Isaiah 46:4 promises, "Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you." If God is this attentive — if he is this kind of God — then the fact that he sometimes gives a dying believer a glimpse of a familiar face as the journey begins is not a surprise. It is a mercy entirely in keeping with his character. The God who carries his saints into old age does not abandon them at the doorway.

That does not mean every DBE is of God. Scripture also calls us to "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1). Not every experience in a hospice room comes from the same place. We will return to that. But the idea that a dying Christian might briefly see her own parents, safe with Jesus, and be calmed by that sight? That idea is not foreign to the Bible. It is closer to Scripture than most of us have been taught.⁴⁰

How to Receive What Your Loved One Is Seeing

If a DBE happens at your family's bedside, I want to offer you three gentle principles. These come out of the hospice literature and out of years of pastoral experience, and they will serve you well.

First: believe your loved one. I do not mean you have to sign off on every detail. I do not mean you have to know for certain that your grandfather is really standing there. I mean: do not start from a posture of doubt. Your mother is telling you what she is experiencing. Receive it as her gift. Over and over again, patients report that what they most wanted — and most rarely received — was someone at the bedside who would simply take the experience seriously.⁴¹

Second: pay attention. If she mentions a name, write it down. If she says "the train leaves at five," mark the time. If he smiles at a particular corner of the ceiling, note the corner. Not because these details will usually matter. Because sometimes they will, and you will want to remember. Some of the most powerful Peak-in-Darien cases in the literature only became evident because a nurse or a daughter wrote down a name she did not recognize.

Third: evaluate charitably but carefully. You are not required to say yes to everything. If the experience seems to contradict Scripture — if the "figure" is telling your loved one something false about God, if fear is increasing rather than peace, if the content pulls toward occult practices — you are right to be careful. That is what discernment means. We will come to it in a moment. But be careful in the way a thoughtful Christian is careful, which is not the same as cynicism. Do not rush to declare what the experience is not. Let it unfold. Ask gentle questions. Pray.

If the dying person is a believer and the experience is of the classic, peaceful, welcoming kind — as the overwhelming majority are — then the most pastoral thing you can do is simply this: stay, listen, and weep quietly when they smile. You are watching your beloved be met.

What NOT to Do

I want to name four things gently, because each of them, done at the wrong moment, has hurt families in ways they did not know they would feel for years afterward.

Do not rationalize the experience to the dying person. "Grandma, there's no one there. You're imagining things. Go back to sleep." Whatever its intent, this sentence communicates to a dying person that the most vivid experience of her final day is being dismissed by the people she loves most. Please do not do this. Even if you are uncertain, even if you suspect it is not quite what she thinks, say nothing rather than say that.

Do not tell them they are hallucinating. The word "hallucination" has a clinical meaning and an everyday meaning, and the everyday meaning is almost always heard as "crazy" or "not real." Your mother is not crazy. The research is clear that DBEs are not clinically the same as hallucinations, whatever they ultimately are. Do not lay that word on her in her last hours.⁴²

Do not ask the doctor to "fix it" with more medication. In some hospitals, the reflex to a DBE is to adjust the pain medication, on the assumption that a sedated patient will stop saying alarming things. This is sometimes medically appropriate. Often it is not. Talk to the hospice team before asking anyone to change the drug regimen simply to end a vision. A peaceful DBE is not a medical problem to be solved. It is, most often, a mercy to be received.

Do not dismiss what the nurses say they have seen for decades. Hospice nurses — the ones who are actually in those rooms at 3 a.m. — have been saying for a hundred years that these experiences are common, that they are peaceful, and that they matter. You do not have to take their word as gospel. But you should at least take their experience seriously. They have been to more deathbeds than the rest of us ever will.⁴³

For Your Reflection

Before you read the pastors' section that follows, I want to offer you some gentle questions. These are not a quiz. You do not have to answer them in order. You may sit with just one for a week and let the rest wait. Grief has its own timing.

1. Has anyone in your family — a grandparent, a parent, a spouse, a child — ever said something unusual on their deathbed? What did they say? What do you remember about their face when they said it?

2. When you were first told about their words, how were they framed — as a beautiful moment? A strange one? A sign the person was confused? Does that framing still feel right to you now?

3. Is there someone — a nurse, a pastor, a relative — who has been carrying a story like this for years without a safe place to tell it? Could you be that place, if they wanted to tell it now?

4. Read slowly the passage from 2 Kings 6:16–17. What does it mean to you that, in Scripture's own picture of the world, the unseen reality was already there — and the only thing that changed was the servant's eyes?

5. If you have prayed about a specific loved one, asking whether they were met as they died — what has brought you comfort? What still aches? What would it feel like to let God hold the parts you cannot resolve?

6. Is there any part of you that has been afraid to bring these questions to God, or to another believer, for fear of being thought strange? What would it take to bring that fear to light?

7. If your loved one is still alive and near death, is there a conversation you want to have while there is still time? Not a heavy conversation. Maybe just a small one. What would you want to say?

For Pastors and Caregivers

This next section is for those of you who will be walking alongside others through a death. You may be a pastor. You may be an elder, a hospice chaplain, a deacon, a hospice nurse, a friend who keeps showing up. Everything below is earned from hospice rooms and pastoral study, refined by years of listening to families who wished someone had given this to them earlier.

Key Pastoral Observations

Most of the families you will minister to have never heard of the DBE literature. When something unusual happens at the bedside, they are almost always blindsided. Their instinct will be to either over-react ("Mom just saw heaven!") or under-react ("Mom is hallucinating; let's not talk about it"). Your job is to help them hold it steadily — neither sensationalizing nor dismissing. A calm, informed pastor at this moment is one of the most valuable human beings in the room.

Notice also that many DBEs are first reported to nurses, not to family. Nursing staff hear things the family never will. Build a working relationship with your hospice team. Ask them what they are seeing. You will learn more from one hour with a twenty-year hospice nurse than from most books.

And watch the family's body language after a DBE. Some members will be moved to tears and faith. Others will be disturbed — especially Christian family members who have been taught that anything "supernatural" must be either miraculous or demonic, with no categories in between. You will sometimes need to pastor three or four different reactions in the same room.

Pay special attention to the person in the family who is not crying. Sometimes it is the son who was closest to the dying mother, and the experience has hit him so hard he has gone still. Sometimes it is the daughter-in-law who feels she has no right to grieve in front of the blood relatives. Sometimes it is the skeptical brother who is sitting silently in the corner, having just watched something that has unsettled forty years of his worldview. Do not miss these quiet ones. A hand on the shoulder, a glass of water, a soft "this is a lot, isn't it?" — these small things are often the bridge by which grief begins to move.

What to Say

Try these, gently and without rushing.

"What your mother described is very common at the end of life. It has a name — deathbed experiences — and the research on it is quite strong. You are not alone in what you are seeing."

"Scripture takes for granted that there is a larger reality always pressing in on us. Do you remember Elisha's servant, who suddenly saw the hills full of chariots? Sometimes God opens human eyes at the threshold of death. That is not strange to the Bible."

"When your father said 'Daddy,' he was doing something dying people have done for centuries. It is, in my experience, a good sign. It is often how the Lord brings peace to someone who is tired."

"You do not have to understand every detail. You just have to receive it. You can write down what he said, and we can talk about the meaning later."

"If the experience is peaceful, we rejoice with it. If any part of it seems to contradict Scripture or to bring fear, we can pray through that together. You don't have to sort it all out tonight."

What NOT to Say

"It was probably just the morphine." This is the single most common well-meant pastoral phrase, and it may be the most damaging. Say instead: "There are a number of possible explanations, but the research is clear that most DBEs are not caused by medication. Let's take the experience seriously first and ask the other questions later."

"Don't pay attention to what she says; she's not herself." This sentence communicates to the family that their mother's final gift is noise. Say instead: "Her words matter. Let's listen carefully."

"We can't know if she really saw anything." Technically true, but pastorally hollow at the bedside. Say instead: "We don't know every detail, but we do know that what she described is consistent with what Christians have reported for centuries, and that her peace is real."

"That's not really biblical." This is almost always spoken by a well-meaning believer who has not read carefully. Say instead: "Actually, the Bible describes this sort of experience more often than most of us have been taught. Let me show you Elisha's servant sometime, when you are ready."

"She's gone now, so whatever she saw doesn't really matter." It does matter. It matters because the family will carry the memory for forty years. Say instead: "What she saw is part of how God brought her home. We'll talk about it as long as you need to."

Questions to Ask

Use these to draw the family out gently, on their own timeline.

"Can you tell me, as best you remember, exactly what she said?"

"Did her face change when she said it? What did she look like?"

"Was there a moment when you felt the room shift — either with peace or with fear?"

"Who was she speaking to? Did you recognize the name?"

"How have you been carrying this story since the funeral? Have you told anyone? How did they respond?"

Watch-outs and Cautions

A few landmines specific to this chapter's terrain.

First, do not pressure a family to produce a DBE. Many Christians die without one — they die quietly, peacefully, without visible visitation. This does not mean they were not met. Jesus himself is the surest welcomer, and he does not always work visibly at the bedside. We will say more about this in Chapter 10. Do not let DBEs become a bar the dying have to clear to prove they were received.

Second, avoid over-interpreting specific content. "She saw Aunt Edna, so Aunt Edna must be in heaven" is pastorally risky, especially if Aunt Edna's spiritual state was unclear in life. Hold the content lightly. A DBE is most often a general comfort, not a specific theological pronouncement.

Third, be careful with families where there has been estrangement or unresolved hurt among the dead. If a dying woman sees her abusive father "coming to fetch her," the family may need pastoral help understanding what to do with that — not dismissing the experience, but also not forcing on her a reunion she did not want in life.

Fourth, be gentle with skeptical family members. Do not try to convince them. Let the experience be what it was. Offer resources (the Kerr book, the Miller book, this handbook) for those who want to explore; let those who do not want to explore remain where they are.

Fifth, protect the patient's dignity. Do not turn the deathbed into a documentary. No video recording. No inviting extended relatives in to "witness." A DBE is a sacred conversation between the dying and whoever has come to meet them. The room should stay small and quiet.

Next Steps

If you are the family's pastor, plan a follow-up visit about three weeks after the death. That is often when the significance of what happened at the bedside begins to settle, and the survivors have no one to tell it to. Bring a notebook. Ask again. Write down what they tell you. Families have thanked me for that notebook for years.

Recommend resources at an appropriate pace. For many families, Christopher Kerr's Death Is But a Dream is a gentle first step — it is written by a physician for general readers and lets them see the research for themselves. Callanan and Kelley's Final Gifts is the classic on nearing-death awareness and is accessible to most readers. J. Steve Miller's Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 is heavier, and best saved for the reader who wants the scholarship.

Build a small practice of asking hospice nurses on your hospital rounds what they have been seeing. Over years, you will build up a ministry's worth of wisdom. And consider, where appropriate, naming DBEs from the pulpit — not sensationally, but once or twice a year, in a sermon on hope or on the communion of saints. Your congregation is carrying stories they have not been given permission to tell.

For Further Reading

Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End (Avery, 2020). The most approachable starting point for most readers. Written by a practicing physician with a decade of clinical data. Warm, specific, readable in an afternoon.

Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (Bantam, 1997). The classic on nearing-death awareness. Indispensable for anyone who spends time at bedsides.

J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (Wisdom Creek Press, 2023). The most comprehensive Christian-scholarly treatment of the DBE literature currently available. A working pastor's reference book.

Raymond Moody and Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from This Life to the Next (Guideposts, 2010). The accessible introduction to shared death experiences. Some readers will find Moody's own worldview looser than their own; engage thoughtfully.

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying: A Journey to Elsewhere (Continuum, 2008). Written by a British neuropsychiatrist and his wife, drawing on hundreds of hospice interviews. More clinical in tone, valuable for pastors wanting a broader international view of the research.

Sir William Barrett, Deathbed Visions: How the Dead Talk to the Dying (White Crow Books, 2011; originally 1926). The hundred-year-old book that started the modern study. A slim historical classic worth having on the shelf.