Thomas had been driving to his father's house every evening that last week. The hospice bed stood in the living room now, where the piano used to be, and the piano had been pushed against the far wall and covered with a sheet, which made the room feel strange, as if a small rearrangement of furniture were the only way a family could admit that everything was about to change. His father Henry was eighty-seven years old. He had been a reserved man all his life — a quiet engineer, a faithful husband, a believing Christian who had read his Bible every morning for sixty years but who had almost never spoken about faith out loud. His handshake was firm. His words were few. Now, in these last days, even those were running out.
Thomas sat in the armchair by the bed. It was a Tuesday evening in November. A steady wind moved the bare branches outside the window, and the clock on the mantel ticked the way clocks do in quiet rooms — loud, and a little embarrassed by its loudness. Thomas had brought a book, which he had not opened. He was forty-six years old. His father was dying. He did not know what he was supposed to do except sit there.
Around a quarter past eight, Henry's eyes opened. Not fluttered — opened. He looked past Thomas toward the far corner of the ceiling, and a slow, soft smile spread across his face. It was a smile Thomas had not seen in years. Henry said one word, clearly and steadily: "Eleanor."
Eleanor was Thomas's mother. She had died of pancreatic cancer fourteen years earlier. Her death had quietly unmade Henry for almost a year, and it had left him smaller and gentler and even quieter than before. Thomas's throat closed. A crowd of possibilities rushed through his mind — It's the morphine. He's hallucinating. Should I say something. Should I correct him. Should I call the nurse. But what came out of his mouth took him by surprise.
"Mom is here, Dad. Go with her. It's okay."
His father smiled again, turned his face slightly to the right as if listening to a voice none but he could hear, and closed his eyes. He was gone within the hour.
That was four years ago. Thomas has never told his pastor. He has never told his wife exactly what his father said — only that "Dad passed peacefully." He has turned that moment over and over in his mind on long drives, in empty pews, at the kitchen table at two in the morning. He does not know what to make of it. He does not want to make too much of it, in case that is unfaithful. He does not want to make too little of it, in case that is worse. He wonders whether what he saw was only the last firing of a tired brain, or whether, for one minute at the end of his father's long, quiet life, a door opened that neither of them had ever walked through before.
Thomas is not alone. What he experienced is one of the oldest, most widely witnessed, and least talked-about events in the Christian family. Generation after generation of sons and daughters, husbands and wives, nurses and pastors have stood at the foot of a dying loved one's bed and watched that loved one speak to someone not visible in the room. They have gone home not knowing what to do with the memory. They have learned, often, not to mention it at church. This chapter is written for them, and for you, if you were there when it happened.
Chapter Thesis: When a dying family member reports seeing a deceased loved one — a husband long buried, a mother gone for decades, a brother the family had almost stopped speaking of — the best reading of the research and of Scripture together is that the dying person is being met. These moments are not the medication, not sentimentality, not wish-fulfillment. They are, in the vast majority of well-documented cases, exactly what the dying person says they are. This chapter is about how to receive them — in the moment, and in the long years afterward.
If you are reading this chapter because you saw something at a bedside that you have carried, unspoken, for months or years, you need to know something right at the start: you are not the only one. You are not even close to being the only one.
Hospice nurses see this all the time. Most of them have seen it so many times that they no longer flinch or even pause. Some, when a new family member bursts out of the room stammering, "She just said Grandma is here, but Grandma's been dead since 1998" — simply smile, nod, and say, "Yes. That happens."1 The nurses know. The chaplains know. The doctors who spend long enough at bedsides know. The problem is that almost nobody in the pews knows, because almost nobody in the pulpit has been told, and so a pastoral experience that has been quietly repeating itself in Christian families for two thousand years has been left to hospice staff and to silence.
The research is now clear enough that the silence is no longer defensible. Dr. Christopher Kerr, the medical director of Hospice Buffalo in western New York, and his team studied end-of-life dreams and visions in more than a thousand hospice patients over many years. They published their findings in peer-reviewed medical journals — the Journal of Palliative Medicine and the American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine — and what they found was striking. Around eighty-eight percent of their patients reported meaningful end-of-life dreams or visions in their final days. Far and away the most common content was seeing a deceased loved one — a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a grandparent — come to meet them.2
That figure is not a fluke. In the 1960s and 1970s, the parapsychologist Karlis Osis and his colleague Erlendur Haraldsson ran the first large-scale cross-cultural study of deathbed visions. They surveyed thousands of doctors and nurses in the United States and India, who reported on more than thirty-five thousand dying patients between them. Their conclusion — published in At the Hour of Death — was that visions of deceased loved ones are the single most common feature of the dying process, appearing in remarkably similar forms across two very different cultures and two very different religions.3 When the dying see someone, they almost always see someone who has died before them.
The point is not that every dying Christian has such a vision. Many do. Some do not. Some cannot report the experience because they are already beyond speech. But the point is that these are not isolated, one-in-a-thousand curiosities. They are part of how most people die. They have been part of how most people die for as long as anyone has been paying attention. If you saw what Thomas saw, you did not see something rare. You saw something common. Most of Christian history would have simply known what to call it.
Before we go any further, it will help to name the several different shapes these experiences take, because families often do not realize that their quiet, strange, half-remembered event belongs to a well-documented family of events. You may have witnessed one form. Your neighbor may have witnessed another. Both are real. Both are common.
The most dramatic and most easily recognized form is the spoken report. The dying person says the name of a deceased loved one out loud. Sometimes the name is whispered. Sometimes it is called clearly — "Mama!" — the way a child calls out to a mother in a crowd. Sometimes it is addressed as if to the person present in the room: "You're here. I knew you'd come." The content is almost always simple. The tone is almost always peaceful or glad. The dying person often does not seem surprised, as if they have been expecting this visit.
A second common form is silent. The dying person does not name anyone. But their eyes open and focus on a spot in the room where no one is standing. Their face changes. They smile in a way the family has not seen in months. They may reach up with one or both hands, sometimes with astonishing strength for a body that has not moved much in days. Sometimes they nod as if listening. The nurse standing nearby will often recognize this pattern on sight.4
A third form is only reported after the fact. The dying person wakes briefly, looks at the family, and says something like, "Your grandfather was just here. He told me he was ready." The family members, standing or sitting in the same room, saw nothing. The dying person is calm, not afraid. Often they lapse back into sleep and die hours or days later, noticeably more at peace than they had been before.
A fourth form is especially poignant. It occurs during what researchers now call terminal lucidity — the sudden return to clarity, often in patients with severe dementia or other brain disease, shortly before death.5 A mother who has not recognized her daughter in three years looks at her suddenly and says her name. A father whose Alzheimer's had left him almost silent speaks a full sentence. And often — remarkably often — what the lucid moment includes is a mention of a deceased relative. A wife dead for twenty years. A brother who drowned when the dying person was nine. A mother they have not named in decades. The disease lifts, briefly, and when it does, the first thing they speak of is someone waiting. We will take this up more fully in Chapter 11, on terminal lucidity and shared death experiences, and in Chapter 17, on death after dementia. For now, it is enough to notice that the disease did not erase your loved one. Beneath it all, they were still there. And they saw someone.
I want to slow down here, because if the only ground for the hope this chapter offers is sentiment, then it is not hope. It is only wishing. A grieving Christian deserves to know that what we are discussing is not folklore. It is careful, cross-cultural, peer-reviewed research going back more than a hundred years.
Modern study of deathbed visions begins, as so many things do, with a dying woman named Doris. In 1924, a London obstetrician named Florence Barrett was at the bedside of a young mother named Doris who had just given birth to a healthy baby but was herself dying from complications of the delivery. As Doris lay dying, she began to describe a beautiful place, and she recognized her dead father in the vision — and then, to everyone's shock, she recognized her sister Vida. Vida had died three weeks earlier. The family had deliberately kept the news from Doris so she would not be distressed during her pregnancy. Doris did not know Vida was dead. When Doris saw her in the vision, she cried out in surprise: Vida is with them. She died not long after.6
Florence Barrett went home and told her husband, Sir William Barrett, a distinguished physicist. He was shaken enough by the story that he began systematically collecting others. In 1926 he published Death Bed Visions, the first modern scientific catalog of the phenomenon. His central observation was the one that would haunt the literature ever since: the dying were not merely seeing what they wished to see. They were sometimes seeing things that could not be explained that way — including, as with Doris, deceased relatives they had no way of knowing were dead.7
In the 1960s and 1970s, Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson carried out what remains one of the largest and most carefully designed studies of the dying ever conducted. They surveyed doctors and nurses in both the United States and India, collecting detailed accounts of more than thirty-five thousand deaths. They were specifically testing whether the content of deathbed visions fit the "expectation hypothesis" — that patients simply see what their culture has told them to expect. They found that it did not. American Christians sometimes saw figures that fit Hindu iconography; Indian Hindus sometimes saw figures that fit Christian iconography. Both populations, across thousands of cases, saw deceased loved ones come to them, in strikingly similar ways, with strikingly similar effects.8 The core pattern appeared to be human, not cultural.
The best recent work has been done by Dr. Christopher Kerr, whose team at Hospice Buffalo has interviewed well over a thousand dying patients at the end of their lives. His studies, published in respected peer-reviewed medical journals, found that around eighty-eight percent of patients reported end-of-life dreams or visions, that the most common content involved seeing deceased loved ones, and — crucially — that patients and clinicians could reliably distinguish these experiences from medication-induced delirium on standardized measures.9 Kerr's patients repeatedly described the experiences as "more real than real." They did not call them dreams, even when they occurred during sleep.10
But perhaps the most evidentially striking line of research concerns what are now called Peak in Darien cases — named, a little oddly, for a line in a John Keats poem.11 In these cases, a dying person sees and identifies a deceased relative whom they did not know was dead. The death is only verified afterward, and the family realizes that the dying person could not possibly have known.
Dr. Bruce Greyson, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has published a careful study of dozens of such cases. He organizes them into three categories: cases where the deceased person seen had died some time before but the dying person had not been told; cases where the deceased person had died just before the vision, too recently for any normal communication to have reached the dying person; and cases where the deceased person was someone the dying person had never known in life.12
One of Greyson's cases is heartbreakingly plain. Two childhood friends, Edith and Jennie, were sick with diphtheria in the late 1800s. Jennie died first, on a Wednesday. The family carefully hid the news from Edith so as not to frighten her. The next Saturday, Edith was choosing photographs to send to Jennie as a gift, still believing her friend to be alive. Later that same evening, she drifted into and out of unconsciousness, and when she surfaced, she began speaking to several deceased friends. Then suddenly she looked at her father with real surprise and said, "Why, papa, I am going to take Jennie with me!" She reached out her arms in delight — Jennie is here — and within moments of that recognition, Edith died.13
The case is more than a century old. But it is representative of a pattern that contemporary hospice staff continue to see in their own wards. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who spent a lifetime with the dying, observed that in all the years she quietly collected accounts from dying children, every child who mentioned someone waiting for them named a person who had in fact preceded them in death — sometimes by only minutes. The children had not been told.14
A Quick Summary of the Research. Modern studies of deathbed visions — Barrett (1926), Osis and Haraldsson (1977), Fenwick (ongoing), Kerr (2014 onward), Greyson and the University of Virginia group, and the comprehensive compilation by J. Steve Miller — converge on the same picture. These visions are (1) common, often affecting the majority of dying patients; (2) cross-culturally consistent in core features; (3) distinguished from delirium on standardized clinical measures; (4) sometimes veridical, meaning they include information the dying person had no normal way of knowing; and (5) overwhelmingly peaceful rather than frightening. This is not a fringe literature. It is a large and growing body of carefully conducted work.
Almost every grieving family who has witnessed one of these experiences eventually asks, out loud or silently: Was it just the medications? Was it just a hallucination of a shutting-down brain? It is an honest question, and honest questions deserve honest answers. So here is the honest answer: you can be a cautious, careful, sober Christian, and you can still know — for a number of convergent reasons — that deathbed visions of deceased relatives are not adequately explained as hallucinations.
Consider the differences. Medication-induced hallucinations and delirium are typically disorganized. They shift and jump. They are often unpleasant, confusing, and frightening. Patients flail, pull at their gowns, try to get out of bed, see insects or strangers or threats. Their speech is fragmented. They do not recognize the people in the room with them. By contrast, deathbed visions of deceased loved ones are almost always organized, coherent, calm, and comforting. The dying person recognizes both the figure in the vision and the people in the room. They are more at peace after the experience, not less. The nurses who have watched both kinds of event for decades learn to tell the difference almost at a glance.15
Kerr's team confirmed this clinically. Using standardized measures of delirium, they were able to show that the patients reporting end-of-life dreams and visions were not delirious. They were, if anything, strikingly lucid.16 The dying person is often more present than they have been in days, not less.
Second, hallucinations cannot tell you things you do not already know. A hallucinating brain can only rearrange the contents of its own memory. That is precisely what makes Peak in Darien cases so stubborn. When a dying woman greets the sister she believes is alive, and the sister has, unbeknownst to her, died three weeks earlier in another country — no neural shuffling can account for that. The content has to come from somewhere.
Third, hallucinations and brain-generated experiences do not show cross-cultural consistency of this specific shape. People hallucinate in culturally shaped ways. But deathbed visions of deceased loved ones as welcomers appear with essentially the same core content in American Christians, Indian Hindus, hospice patients in Moldova, and terminally ill children in Yale pediatric oncology wards.17 That consistency is not what a purely neurological story would predict.
Fourth, in some cases other people in the room share parts of the experience. Family members at the bedside sometimes see a light, feel an unusual presence, or sense the arrival of the loved one — often before any word has been spoken. These shared death experiences will be taken up in detail in Chapter 11. For our purposes now, they matter because a purely internal hallucination cannot be shared by people with healthy brains who happen to be in the same room.18
Fifth, terminal lucidity makes the brain-only story harder still. How does an Alzheimer's patient whose cortex is severely damaged suddenly recognize her daughter, speak her name, and calmly report seeing her deceased husband in the corner of the room — and then die an hour later? Whatever is going on in those moments, it cannot be adequately described as "the sicker the brain, the better the vision."
None of this proves the afterlife the way a mathematician proves a theorem. It is not meant to. But the careful Christian reader can put down the worry that they have been naïve. These experiences withstand scrutiny. The honest skeptic has more work to do than a waving hand and the word hallucination.
The Bible does not give us a textbook on deathbed visions. It does not need to. It does something better: it describes the reality of the next world in enough detail that, when you read the research alongside the text, the two fit together with a quiet and uninsisted consistency.
In Genesis 49:33, after the dying Jacob has blessed his sons, Scripture says:26
"When Jacob finished commanding his sons, he drew up his feet into the bed and breathed his last and was gathered to his people."
The phrase "gathered to his people" is a Hebrew idiom used many times in the Old Testament — for Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Aaron, Moses, David, and others.19 It cannot simply mean "buried with his people," because Jacob was "gathered to his people" (Genesis 49:33) before his body was ever carried to the family burial cave at Machpelah, which did not happen until chapters later. Whatever the phrase means, it means something more than the lowering of a body into the ground. It is the old, patient Hebrew way of saying: when you die, you join the ones who went before.
That is not a small thing. It is the first whisper of a theology of reunion, buried deep in the earliest books of Scripture — and it is given without argument or explanation, as if it were simply obvious. You die, and your people are waiting.
Now turn to the New Testament. In Acts 7, Stephen is being stoned to death for his testimony about Jesus. Luke describes his dying vision:
"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).
Every schooled reader of the New Testament knows that Jesus is elsewhere described as seated at the Father's right hand — in Hebrews, in the creed, everywhere. But here He is standing. Generations of pastors have noticed this and taken it to mean what it plainly looks like: Jesus has risen to meet His dying servant. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is on his way. The Lord is on His feet.20
I find this one of the tenderest sentences in the Bible. It is a window onto what the dying moment looks like from the other side. The Lord does not watch the deaths of His saints from a distance. He rises.
In Luke 16, in Jesus' account of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man in Hades is still himself. He remembers his name. He remembers his brothers — "for I have five brothers" (Luke 16:28) — and he begs that someone go warn them. He recognizes Abraham. He recognizes Lazarus. He knows who he is, he knows who they are, and he is still capable of love and concern for people still alive on the earth (Chapter 2 takes this passage up in more depth).21 Whatever else this passage teaches, it teaches that the dead are not blank. They are themselves. They still know.
Finally, Hebrews 12:1:
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us."
The passage follows the roll call of the saints in Hebrews 11 — Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab, David, and many more. The picture is of the great Christian dead gathered as witnesses, watching the race still being run. The Greek word translated "witnesses" (martyron, μαρτύρων) suggests not passive onlookers but something more like attentive spectators — a cloud of people who know and care what is happening to you.22 Scholars differ on exactly how much Hebrews 12:1 warrants a robust doctrine of the conscious dead's awareness of the living. I lean toward a robust reading, but I hold it loosely. Either way, the passage is not consistent with the idea that the Christian dead are simply asleep, oblivious, or absent from our story.
Put all four passages together — Jacob gathered to his people, Jesus standing for Stephen, the rich man still remembering his brothers, and the cloud of witnesses — and the biblical picture is this: the Christian dead are alive, conscious, themselves, and not indifferent to us. None of this proves that a particular dying father actually saw his actually present wife at 8:15 on a Tuesday evening in November. But it means that the Christian reader of Scripture has no reason to be surprised if that is exactly what happened.
You might think the research findings described above are new. They are not. Careful modern documentation of deathbed visions is only about a hundred years old, but the Christian Church has been recording and reflecting on them for much, much longer. The silence of most modern pulpits on this topic is not because the Church has never spoken of it. It is because we have mostly stopped listening to what the Church already said.
Pope Gregory the Great's Dialogues (late sixth century) contain careful, sober accounts of dying Christians meeting departed saints at the end of life.27 Bede, writing in early eighth-century England, includes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People detailed accounts of saintly deaths that involve encounters with deceased brothers and sisters in Christ. The medieval ars moriendi tradition — the "art of dying" literature that shaped five hundred years of Western Christian piety — assumed that the dying Christian would be visited, comforted, and often accompanied by the company of the redeemed. The Puritans, who are not exactly famous for sentimentality, documented deathbed scenes that would not surprise a modern hospice nurse. John Wesley's last words — "The best of all is, God is with us" — are well known; less known is that Wesley and many of his Methodist successors openly taught that dying believers are often met by those who have gone ahead.
Closer to our own time, the evangelist D. L. Moody, on his deathbed in 1899, cried out that he could see his two grandchildren, who had died before him, coming to meet him. The New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, dying of pneumonia in a North Dakota hospital in 1937, dictated a final telegram to his friend John Murray: "So thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it." Walter Hooper's account of C. S. Lewis's death in 1963 reports Lewis gazing intently across the room at someone unseen and murmuring, "Oh — I never imagined, I never imagined." Audrey Wetherell Johnson, the founder of Bible Study Fellowship, told her nurse on the morning of her 1984 death, "The Lord is coming for me today. He's at the foot of my bed now."28 Each of these deaths is careful, sober, Protestant, Christian — and remarkably consistent with what the modern research literature has since confirmed is the norm.
My point is not that we can argue for the reality of deathbed visions from the great names of church history, as if piety were proof. My point is that when a modern hospice chaplain describes to you what she has seen at bedsides every month for twenty years, she is not describing a New Age fashion. She is describing, with different vocabulary, exactly what Gregory, Bede, Wesley, Moody, and Machen would have expected her to describe. The experience is old. The silence around it is new. You are not being asked to believe something novel. You are being invited to remember something the Church has always known.
Let me tell you about one family, because sometimes the research and the Scripture only come alive when you watch them land in a single bedroom.
This account is drawn from the kind of case that Callanan and Kelley, the hospice nurses who wrote Final Gifts, have seen again and again in their work, and that Kerr's team has quietly documented in Buffalo. I will call the family the Morales family, because every hospice worker I have ever asked has told me some version of this story, and there is no single Morales family — they are every family.23
Maria Morales was seventy-nine years old and dying of pancreatic cancer. She had been a devout Catholic her whole life. She had raised four children, buried one of them — a son named Miguel, who had died at twenty-three in a car accident nearly thirty years earlier — and had grieved for him every day since. Miguel's photograph sat on her dresser next to a small crucifix. She had never really stopped looking at it.
Maria's husband Arturo had died six years before her own illness. Her remaining three children — two daughters and a son — rotated through the hospice room in shifts during her last week, so that she would not be alone. Her younger daughter, Carmen, was a labor-and-delivery nurse and had been around dying patients before, but she had never watched her own mother die.
On the second-to-last day, Maria's eyes, which had been half closed for hours, opened fully. She was looking toward the foot of the bed. She smiled a slow, quiet smile. She said, in Spanish, "Arturo. Ay, mi amor, llegaste." Arturo. Oh, my love, you came.
Carmen's older sister Sofia, sitting in the corner, began to cry. Carmen stood up and put her hand gently on her mother's shoulder and said, "Mamá, is Papá here?" Her mother nodded slightly, still looking toward the foot of the bed. Her lips were moving. Sofia said, through tears, "Papi, estoy aquí" — Papa, I'm here — and Carmen was not sure whether her sister was addressing her dead father or whether she was simply saying what she needed to say. She thought, for the first time in her professional life, that perhaps the two things were not as different as she had always assumed.
Maria drifted back into sleep. The family sat in the room, stunned, holding each other. Carmen had been trained to document what patients said at the end of life. She took out her phone and wrote down her mother's words on a note so she would not forget them. Her hand was shaking.
The next day, around four in the afternoon, Maria opened her eyes again. This time she was not looking at the foot of the bed. She was looking higher, up and to the right, at the blank space of wall where a small wooden cross hung. She spoke clearly, in English this time, as if Carmen were the one she wanted to hear: "Miguel is with your father." She said it like she was reporting the weather. Then, more quietly: "He's not a little boy anymore. He's all grown."
Miguel had died at twenty-three. He had not been a little boy in decades. And yet the way Maria said it was a mother's observation — the surprise of a woman who had been carrying a mental image of her son from some earlier age and had just now realized that he had kept growing without her. Sofia whispered, "Mamá, is Miguel okay?" Maria answered, "He's more than okay. He's been waiting."
Within two hours, Maria's breathing slowed. Carmen and Sofia held her hands on either side of the bed. Their brother Luis was on the phone from his car, ten minutes away, crying, asking them to tell Mamá he loved her. Carmen held the phone to Maria's ear. Maria's eyes did not open again, but her lips moved. Then she took one last long breath, and she did not take another.
I want you to sit with that story for a moment. Notice what it did. It gave Carmen and Sofia and Luis an image of their father they had never had. An image of their brother they had never had. It gave them, in one brief hour at the foot of their mother's hospice bed, a theological vocabulary — waiting, still himself, already home — that thirty years of faithful mass attendance had somehow never quite given them so directly. It did not answer every question. It did not prove heaven. But it let three grown children drive home from the hospice at one in the morning, four days later, and say to each other, quietly, "Mamá was met."
When Carmen went back to her labor-and-delivery work the following month, she kept thinking about something she had said to her mother during labor: Mamá, someone is coming for you. She had meant her father. She had meant Miguel. But she found herself, now, thinking that the sentence she had spoken at birth and the sentence hospice workers spoke at death were almost the same sentence. Someone is coming. Someone is here. Welcome.
Every detail in the Morales story — the name spoken in the native language, the sense of recognition, the report about the deceased son still growing, the final surge of lucidity, the peace that settled on the family — is a detail that shows up over and over again in the published research.24 This is not extraordinary. This is what the end of many lives looks like, if we will only be there to see it.
If you are sitting at a bedside right now, or if you someday will be, here is what the pastoral tradition and the research literature together suggest. None of this is complicated. All of it can be done by someone who has never been to seminary.
When your loved one speaks a name, or reaches up, or speaks to someone you cannot see — do not correct them. Do not say, "Mom, Grandma's been dead for twenty years." Do not say, "You're seeing things. It's the medication." Do not reach for the call button to ask the nurse to adjust the drip. Your loved one is not confused. They are doing one of the most important things a human being does. Receive it.
Say back what they said. "Grandma is here, Mom? That's wonderful." "Papa is here? Thank God." If it helps you to respond directly to the person they named, that is not forbidden and it is not necromancy. You are not conjuring anyone. You are honoring a reality your loved one has reported. You can say, softly, "Hi, Dad. Take care of Mom. We love you. Thank you for coming." Nurses and chaplains who have been at many bedsides do this all the time.
Deathbed visions very often come at a particular point in the dying process. The loved ones who have gone ahead arrive, and the dying person seems to need, next, only one thing: permission. Permission to go. Sometimes the dying person is waiting for a specific family member to say it. Sometimes they are waiting for the family who has been begging them not to leave to finally say, "It's okay."
If you can, give that permission. Out loud. "Dad, it's okay. We'll be okay. You can go be with Mom." "Mamá, we love you. We'll take care of each other. You can rest." The words are simple. They are often harder to say than anything you will ever say. But if the person coming for your loved one has arrived, the last gift you can give your loved one is to help them go.
Sometimes the room does not call for any words at all. Sometimes your loved one's face is so luminous, so distant, so rapt, that the only holy response is to stop talking. Breathe. Hold their hand. Watch. Let it be. The moment does not need narration. These are thin places, in the old Celtic Christian phrase — places where the veil between this world and the next is worn almost through. Stand quietly. You do not need to say anything.
The strange thing about deathbed visions is that they are often harder on the living afterward than they were in the moment. In the moment, there is instinct. There is the dying person to focus on. Afterward, there is nothing but you and the memory, and your memory keeps going over it like a tongue touching a missing tooth.
Write it down. Not for anyone else — for you. Write down what your loved one said. Write down the time. Write down who was in the room, and what the light was like, and what your own heart did. You will forget details faster than you expect. You will not forget the feeling. Keep the memory the way an old Christian family kept a family Bible: as something holy, not to be paraded, but not to be lost. Tell it to at least one person you trust. The memory needs to be allowed to live out loud, at least once.
Many family members feel, later, quietly ashamed that in the moment they were skeptical. They thought, It's the morphine. They wondered if they should call the nurse. They felt silly responding. They almost said something corrective. Please hear me: that is not a failure. That is a faithful mind doing its job. Honest caution is not unbelief. Even the disciples, when the risen Jesus stood in front of them, initially thought He was a ghost (Luke 24:37). Thomas asked for evidence. Jesus did not shame him for asking; He gave him the evidence. Your caution in the moment did not diminish the reality of what happened. Your loved one was met. You were there. That is enough.
Here is a quiet wound that pastors sometimes hear months after the funeral. "Mom spoke her husband's name. She did not speak mine." "Dad reached for his mother. He did not reach for me."
This wound is real. And here is what I have learned to say about it. The deceased come as welcomers. They come because they are making the passage, and your loved one is making the passage with them. Your mother's face lighting up at seeing her husband was not a verdict on whether she loved him more than she loved you. She lived with you for decades. She loved you every single day of those decades. What she is doing now is being welcomed across a threshold that only one of the two of you is crossing. You are on the other side of the door, still alive, still hers. She is not saying goodbye to you forever. She is being received on the other side, and you will come through that door in your own time, and she will be one of the faces you see. In the meantime, she loved you. Every day, she loved you.
Let me be honest with you about what we know and what we don't. Scripture describes the dead as conscious (Luke 16; Revelation 6:9–11), as aware of earthly realities to some degree (Hebrews 12:1), as personally themselves (Matthew 17:3, where Moses and Elijah appear recognizably). The research describes dying persons seeing specific, identifiable deceased loved ones who behave like agents. Those two streams fit together easily on a conscious-agent reading: your mother really was there, by God's gracious arrangement, to meet your father.
There is also a more cautious reading, held by some careful Christian thinkers, on which these experiences are real and God-given but are not literally the presence of the deceased — rather, they are a kind of heavenly picture-gift, in which God shows the dying what they need to see so that they can cross over without fear.25 On this reading, the vision is real; the deceased person, however, is not in that hospice room, but waiting on the other side.
The book you are reading leans toward the first reading. I think Scripture permits it, and I think the research fits it most naturally. But I hold it with a light hand. Either way, the pastoral point stands: your loved one was met. By God, by His saints, by His mercy — met. They did not cross a dark and empty hallway by themselves.
Sometimes the dying person names someone the family cannot place. A name no one knows. A face they describe that no one remembers. Families can become anxious about this. Was it a demon impersonating a loved one? Was it just a hallucination after all?
Almost always, a quieter explanation is available. The dying person has lived eighty or ninety years, and in those years they have loved people the living family members do not know about — a Sunday school teacher from 1940, a great-aunt who died when they were eight, a friend from the army, a baby sister who died before any of their children were born. The family tree is wider than the family album. A name you do not recognize is not a red flag. It is usually a clue to how much longer and wider your loved one's life was than you ever knew. Accept that you do not need to identify everyone they saw. You are not the auditor. God, who knows all of them, is.
Sometimes the dying person does not see a relative. They see Jesus. A mother on her deathbed whispers, "The Lord is here." A father, who has been restless for days, quiets suddenly and says, "I see Him. I see my Savior." A child dying of leukemia tells the parents, with the matter-of-fact certainty that children so often bring to these things, "Jesus is in the room, and He is smiling."
This is a specific and particularly common form of deathbed experience among Christians. In fact, the research is clear that among dying Christians worldwide, the figure seen at the bedside is very often not only a deceased relative but the Lord Himself — often recognized immediately, sometimes with the marks of His crucifixion visible, always with overwhelming love.29 Among dying non-Christians, encounters with Jesus also occur, sometimes leading to a peaceful confession of faith in the final minutes of life.
Because this is such a substantial and pastorally important topic in its own right, the whole of Chapter 9 is devoted to it. For the purposes of this chapter, three things are worth saying now. First, if your loved one saw Jesus rather than — or in addition to — a deceased relative, that is not a lesser experience. It is the deepest possible mercy: the Shepherd at the end of the long walk, the Lord who died for them coming in person to carry them home. Second, an encounter with Jesus at the end of life is not incompatible with also being met by deceased loved ones. Many well-documented accounts include both. Jesus comes as the Shepherd, and the saints who have gone before accompany Him. Third, for the Christian, the two reports — "Mom saw Grandpa" and "Mom saw Jesus" — ultimately point to the same underlying reality. The dying believer is on her way to be with Christ, and the whole company of heaven is on its feet to welcome her.
I want to come back to Thomas. He is still carrying what he saw at his father's bedside four years ago. He has not known what to do with it.
Thomas, if any part of this chapter has reached you: here is what I would say to you as a pastor. Your father, a reserved Christian of eighty-seven, said his wife's name one minute before he began to die. Eleanor. She had been gone fourteen years. By every line of research we have — Barrett, Osis, Haraldsson, Kerr, Callanan, Kelley, Miller, Fenwick, Greyson, Kübler-Ross — and by every Scripture that bears on the question — Genesis 49, Acts 7, Luke 16, Hebrews 12 — the most faithful reading of what you saw is that Eleanor, in whatever form God permits, was there. Your father was not alone. He did not cross that Tuesday evening by himself. He was met.
That memory is one of the greatest gifts your father ever gave you. Do not lock it in a drawer. Tell your pastor. Tell your wife. Tell your children when they are old enough to hear it. It is not embarrassing. It is not a private oddity. It is the ordinary grace at the end of an ordinary Christian life — the grace God has been giving faithful dying believers in hospice rooms and farmhouses and hospital wards for two thousand years.
Your father said her name. She was there. She has been there all along. And by God's grace, through Jesus Christ and by no merit of your own, one day you will be there too. And on that day, Eleanor will be looking for someone else to welcome — and your father will be standing just behind her, smiling, waiting to say your name.
A Note on Discernment. The overwhelming pattern of deathbed visions of deceased relatives fits easily and comfortably within Christian faith: they are peaceful, they produce readiness rather than fear, they are consistent with the biblical picture of the conscious dead, and they leave families better equipped, not worse, for the hope of the gospel. A few cases are more ambiguous, and a very small number are frightening or distressing. For those, the questions to ask are simple: (1) Was the experience peaceful, or frightening? (2) Was its content consistent with the faith once delivered to the saints, or did it push the dying person or the family toward teachings that contradict Scripture? (3) Did it produce readiness and hope, or confusion and dread? The overwhelming majority of cases pass all three. For the rare exceptions — including distressing deathbed experiences and occult-flavored reports — see Chapter 20 and the pastoral discernment framework in Chapter 25.
Settle in with these quietly. They are not a test. They are an invitation.
1. Were you present when your loved one died? If so, did anything happen — a word, a reach, a smile, a moment of clarity — that you have carried silently since? What has it felt like to carry it alone?
2. Have you been afraid to tell anyone what you witnessed because you were worried it would sound foolish, or because no one in your church has ever spoken of such things? What would it feel like to name it out loud, gently, once?
3. If your loved one named a deceased relative at the end, who was it? What do you know about that person — and what do you wish you knew?
4. If your loved one did not have a witnessed deathbed vision, are you tempted to read that absence as bad news? How do you hear the assurance that the Lord Himself is always the surest welcomer, whether or not a specific family member was named?
5. When you imagine your loved one being met on the other side, whose face would you most want to see first meeting them? Does naming that face to God, in prayer, change anything about how you are carrying the grief?
6. Is there any hurt in you because someone else was named at the bedside, and not you? What would it mean to lay that hurt down, trusting that your loved one's welcomers are a beginning, not a ranking?
7. As you look forward to the day when you yourself cross this threshold, who among your own people has gone ahead? In what sense does the hope of this chapter quietly change how you live the days between now and then?
If you are a pastor, hospice chaplain, hospital visitor, deacon, Stephen minister, parish nurse, or bereavement leader, this section is for you. The central pastoral fact to absorb is this: most families who have witnessed a deathbed vision of a deceased relative have never told anyone from their church about it. They are waiting for a minister who will not flinch. You need to become that minister.
Key pastoral observations. First, families keep these experiences private out of fear. They fear being told they are being fanciful. They fear being told the deceased relative's presence is demonic or occult. They fear being told that their loved one was simply hallucinating, and that the most meaningful moment of the dying process was pharmacological noise. When you handle the topic without flinching — when, in a funeral visit, you say, "Sometimes at the end of life, the dying see someone who has gone ahead; did anything like that happen for your mom?" — you open a door that most of them have been standing outside of. Second, hospice staff see this constantly. Befriend the hospice chaplains in your town. They have more experience with these phenomena than most pastors acquire in a lifetime, and they will train you without charging you tuition. Third, terminal lucidity and visions of the deceased frequently happen together. Prepare families in advance: "If your mother is mostly silent now, she may have a moment of surprising clarity in the last hours. It may be your best goodbye. Don't miss it."
What to say. Concrete, usable sentences for the pastoral visit:
• "What you witnessed is something the Church has recognized for centuries, and modern medical research has confirmed that it's very common at the end of life. You are not making it up, and it was not the medicine."
• "Tell me what she said, if you want to. I'd be honored to hear it."
• "Your husband was not alone at the end. The research is striking on how common it is for deceased loved ones to come to welcome the dying — and the Christian faith has always taught that Jesus Himself meets His people at that door."
• "I think your mother was given a beautiful gift. And in giving her that gift, God gave you one too: a memory of her face lighting up. You can keep that memory the rest of your life."
• "It is okay that you were skeptical in the moment. That does not diminish what happened. Thomas wanted to touch the wounds, and Jesus did not scold him for it."
What NOT to say. Watch yourself out of these, because they do real harm:
• "That was probably just the medications." This is the single most common, and most damaging, thing pastors say when families mention a deathbed vision. It dismisses a sacred memory. It aligns you with the most reductive reading available. It tells a family, in effect, that their loved one's last words do not count. Do not say it. If you are unsure, say, "What an unusual experience — tell me more" and let them keep talking.
• "You can't really know what she saw." Technically true, pastorally unhelpful. It confirms a family's private fear that the moment means nothing. Replace it with, "We can't know every detail, but the research and Scripture both suggest strongly that your mother was being met."
• "Let's not read too much into it." This is the pastoral equivalent of turning out the light. It dishonors the dying person's last communication. Instead: "Let's sit with this awhile. What do you think your father was seeing?"
• "Your mom is now reunited with everyone she ever loved." This is well-meant but overreaches. We do not know the spiritual state of every relative. Replace with something cleaner: "Your mom is with the Lord, and the biblical picture is that the saints who have gone before are together in His presence."
• "Some Christians believe that, but I'm not sure we should speculate." If you truly believe this, study the research and the biblical passages in this chapter until you no longer feel that it is speculation. It is not. Do not abandon a grieving family to vague nervousness when the church has actual resources to offer.
Questions to ask. These draw the family out and usually open the doors that matter:
• "Was anyone with her when she died? What happened in those last hours?"
• "Did your father ever speak anyone's name, or reach up, or smile at something none of you could see?"
• "Some families experience very powerful moments in the last days. Did anything happen that you have not known how to talk about?"
• "Was there a moment of unexpected clarity near the end?"
• "If something did happen that you're not sure what to do with, I'd consider it a sacred trust to hear it."
Watch-outs and cautions. First, handle estrangement carefully. If the dying person names an estranged family member or a difficult relative, do not make quick theological claims about reconciliation in the intermediate state. Simply receive the report and pray for mercy. Second, do not turn deathbed visions into evangelistic leverage. Families have a right to grieve without being preached at. The chapter's gospel hope will preach itself if you present it gently. Third, guard against creating expectations. If a family did not witness a deathbed vision, do not let them feel that their loved one died less loved or less met. Many faithful Christians die without a witnessed vision. Jesus is the surest welcomer; He does not always send prior company, and when He does not, He Himself is still there. Fourth, some religious traditions or family cultures are more open to sharing these experiences than others. Pay attention. Let them lead.
Next steps. In the first pastoral visit after a death — ideally within 48 hours — invite the story. In the funeral homily, if the family has shared a specific bedside moment and given you permission to mention it, you can weave it in gently: "In his last hour, Henry named Eleanor and smiled. The saints who have gone ahead remember us, and I suspect Eleanor had been waiting a long time." Pass the family a copy of Christopher Kerr's Death Is But a Dream or Callanan and Kelley's Final Gifts. Bring them up in a bereavement group when appropriate; you will often discover that three or four other grieving members in the room have a story they have never told. Consider preaching, once a year — perhaps on All Saints' Day or around Easter — a sermon on the biblical picture of the saints who have gone ahead. Your congregation will remember that sermon for years. It will give them permission to talk about what the silence of the pulpit has been making them carry alone.
A word to the pastor about your own soul. Sitting with the dying — and hearing, afterward, family members tell you what they witnessed at the bedside — is sacred, demanding work. It will change you, and it should change you. Many pastors walk into hospice rooms as younger men and women and walk out, over the years, with gentler faces and a deeper settledness about the gospel they preach. But the cumulative weight of this ministry is real, and the stories are often ones you will not be able to tell in full from the pulpit. Find a brother or sister pastor — someone outside your own church — to whom you can report what you have seen, without dramatizing and without showing off. Pray regularly for the families you have sat with, by name, for years after the death. Keep a small notebook, if it helps, of the moments you do not want to forget. And allow what you have witnessed to strengthen your own grip on the hope you proclaim. The Lord of Stephen is not only in their rooms. He is in yours. He is coming for you too. He is standing.
Finally: when your own father or mother or spouse is dying, and this moment comes for you — and it may — remember what you have given to others. Receive what is said. Speak gently to the one who has come. Give release. Be silent if silence is what the moment wants. You are standing on holy ground. The Lord of Stephen, who rose to meet His servant, is in that room.
Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (Bantam, 1997). The warm, irreplaceable pastoral classic by two hospice nurses. Most of the vocabulary we now have for "nearing-death awareness" and the language of the dying comes from this book.
Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End (Avery, 2020). The accessible summary of Kerr's Hospice Buffalo research. Both deeply moving and carefully clinical. A superb gift for a grieving family member or a pastor.
J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (Wisdom Creek, 2023). The most comprehensive Christian-scholarly treatment of the research. Ideal for the pastor, Bible teacher, or researcher who wants to go deeper.
Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying (Continuum, 2008). A thoughtful British overview of end-of-life experiences, drawing on Peter Fenwick's decades of research.
Raymond Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from This Life to the Next (Guideposts, 2010). The introduction to shared death experiences by the researcher who pioneered modern study of the topic. Useful companion reading for Chapter 11 of this book.
John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Baker, 2015). Pastorally accessible, evangelically grounded survey of NDEs and related phenomena, with many specific case studies and biblical correlations.
1 Cf. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (New York: Bantam, 1997), chaps. 3–5, on hospice nurses' reception of these experiences as ordinary. ↩
2 Christopher W. Kerr, James P. Donnelly, Scott T. Wright, Sarah M. Kuszczak, Anne Banas, Pei C. Grant, and Debra L. Luczkiewicz, "End-of-Life Dreams and Visions: A Longitudinal Study of Hospice Patients' Experiences," Journal of Palliative Medicine 17, no. 3 (March 2014): 296–303; see also Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End (New York: Avery, 2020), esp. chaps. 1–3. On the 88.1 percent figure, see also J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), chap. 1, "Introducing the Evidence," and references therein. ↩
3 Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death, 3rd ed. (Mamaroneck, NY: Hastings House, 1997). Their conclusion that cross-cultural DBV content converges on deceased loved ones and religious figures is discussed at length in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence, chap. 1, and more fully in Miller's Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 1, sec. "Three Studies by Osis and Haraldsson." ↩
4 Callanan and Kelley, Final Gifts, esp. chaps. on "Seeing a Place Unseen by Others" and "Seeing Someone Not Alive"; see also Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chaps. 4–5. ↩
5 On terminal lucidity generally, see Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (2009): 942–44; full treatment in Chapter 11 of the present book. ↩
6 The account of Doris and her sister Vida is carefully retold in Miller, Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 4, sec. "If DBEs Are Either Normal Dreams or Hallucinations . . ."; cf. William Barrett, Death Bed Visions (London: Methuen, 1926; repr., Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 2011). ↩
7 Barrett, Death Bed Visions; discussion in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence, chap. 1, sec. "A Brief History of Deathbed Research." ↩
8 Osis and Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death; summary in Miller, Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 1. The surveys reportedly covered more than 35,000 dying patients through responses from 640 physicians and nurses. ↩
9 Kerr et al., "End-of-Life Dreams and Visions"; L. Nosek, Christopher W. Kerr, et al., "End-of-Life Dreams and Visions: A Qualitative Perspective from Hospice Patients," American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine 32, no. 3 (May 2015): 269–74. The distinction from delirium on standardized measures is one of the most important findings of the Kerr program and is discussed in Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chap. 3. ↩
10 Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chap. 3, on the "realer than real" character of patient reports. ↩
11 John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," 1817. The association of Keats's phrase with deathbed visions dates to the nineteenth century and was popularized in Frances Power Cobbe's "The Peak in Darien" (1877, 1882); see Miller, Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 4, for the full history. ↩
12 Bruce Greyson, "Seeing Deceased Persons Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences," Anthropology and Humanism 35, no. 2 (2010): 159–71. ↩
13 The Edith and Jennie case is recounted in Greyson, "Seeing Deceased Persons Not Known to Have Died," 162, drawing on earlier work by James Hyslop; retold in Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence, chap. 1, sec. "Collections of 'Peak in Darien' Experiences," and Miller, Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 4. ↩
14 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Children and Death (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 208; cited in Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 163–64, and in Miller, Deathbed Experiences Dissertation, chap. 4. ↩
15 On the clinical phenomenology of delirium versus deathbed visions, see Angela M. Ethier, "Death-Related Sensory Experiences," Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 22, no. 2 (March–April 2005): 104–11; Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chap. 3; and Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence, chap. 1, on distinguishing features. ↩
16 Kerr et al., "End-of-Life Dreams and Visions"; Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chap. 3. ↩
17 On cross-cultural work, see Allan Kellehear et al., "Deathbed Visions from the Republic of Moldova: A Content Analysis of Family Observations," OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 64, no. 4 (2011–12): 303–17; Abhajit Kanti Dam, "Significance of End-of-Life Dreams and Visions Experienced by the Terminally Ill in Rural and Urban India," Indian Journal of Palliative Care 22, no. 2 (April–June 2016): 130–34; Diane M. Komp, A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). ↩
18 On shared death experiences generally, see Raymond Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from This Life to the Next (New York: Guideposts, 2010); William J. Peters, At Heaven's Door (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022); discussion in Chapter 11 of the present book. ↩
19 E.g., Gen. 25:8 (Abraham); Gen. 35:29 (Isaac); Gen. 25:17 (Ishmael); Num. 20:26 (Aaron); Deut. 32:50 (Moses). On the idiom more generally, see the standard lexica and the discussion in John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 3, "The Old Testament Dead." ↩
20 The pastoral tradition on the standing Christ of Acts 7:56 is ancient; for a recent treatment, see the commentaries on Acts ad loc. by F. F. Bruce and Darrell Bock. Discussion of Stephen's vision as a biblical precedent for the deathbed pattern appears in J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022), chap. 2, "Biblical Resonances with Deathbed Experience." ↩
21 Luke 16:19–31; see full treatment in Chapter 2 of the present book and in Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. ↩
22 The older commentary tradition, e.g., William Lane, Hebrews 9–13, Word Biblical Commentary 47B (Dallas: Word, 1991), discusses the force of nephos martyron (νέφος μαρτύρων) in Heb. 12:1; on the broader theme of the conscious dead see Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. ↩
23 The Morales account is a pastoral composite drawn from patterns repeatedly documented in Callanan and Kelley, Final Gifts, and Kerr, Death Is But a Dream. It is not a single case but a representative one; every element has been independently reported many times. ↩
24 For parallel accounts of nearing-death awareness in the native language of the dying, post-vision peace in the family, and reports of deceased children seen "grown," see Callanan and Kelley, Final Gifts, chaps. on "Seeing Someone Not Alive" and "Readiness"; Kerr, Death Is But a Dream, chaps. 4–6; and Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence, chap. 1. ↩
25 For a cautious reading on which deathbed visions are theologically real but not necessarily the literal presence of the deceased in the room, see the discussion in Miller, Is Christianity Compatible, chap. 3, sec. on "How Should We Think About What Dying Christians See?"; cf. the more robust conscious-agent reading in John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015), chaps. on reunion and welcomers. ↩
26 All Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted. ↩
27 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, bk. 4; for a modern discussion of Gregory's deathbed narratives and their continuity with later Christian reception of dying visions, see Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. chap. 3. ↩
28 Accounts of Moody's, Machen's, Lewis's, and Johnson's deaths are gathered and discussed in J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, chap. 3, sec. "Deathbeds of Notable Christians"; and in the broader surveys of Christian deathbeds in Rob Moll, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010). On C. S. Lewis's death, see Walter Hooper's memoir material collected in C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life & Works (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). ↩
29 See the extensive treatment in J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, chap. 4, "The Surprising Presence of Jesus," and chaps. 5–6, on cross-cultural Christological elements in deathbed reports; also Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), chaps. on Jesus across cultures. Full treatment in Chapter 9 of the present book. ↩
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Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015.
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Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Children and Death. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
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Nahm, Michael, and Bruce Greyson. "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature." Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (2009): 942–44.
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