Chapter 20
Distressing NDEs and Frightening Deathbed Experiences — What They May (and May Not) Mean

Daniel's Secret

Daniel came to see me on a Thursday afternoon in early October.¹ He was in his mid-forties — a father of two, an engineer at a firm downtown, a man who wore flannel shirts tucked into jeans and carried the tired kindness of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time. He sat down in the chair across from my desk and did not speak for nearly a full minute. I waited. His hands were shaking a little. Then he said, quietly, "I've never told anyone this before."

When he was twenty-three, Daniel had tried to take his own life. He had been drinking for two days. He had mixed two prescriptions his doctor had warned him never to mix. He had done it on a Sunday night, alone in his apartment, with the curtains closed. His roommate found him early Monday morning and called 911. The paramedics brought him back in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

He survived. Physically, he recovered. He got help. He met the woman who would become his wife. He went back to church. He built a good life, one brick at a time, over twenty-one years.

But there was something he had never told his wife, never told his pastor, never told the Christian counselor he had seen in his twenties. Something he had never even told his closest friend.

In the moments his heart stopped in the back of that ambulance, Daniel had an experience.

It was not the one you read about in the books. There was no warm light. There were no loving beings. There was no tunnel with music playing on the other end. What Daniel experienced, in those minutes before the paramedics brought him back, was something he could only describe as a descent — into a darkness thick as oil, under a weight he could not lift, in a place where voices without bodies whispered to him that he belonged there. He saw shapes in the dark that seemed to feed on his fear. He felt himself being pulled deeper, as if something had closed its hand around him and was not going to let go.

He told me all of this in pieces, with long silences between. When he finished, he looked at his shoes.

"I'm afraid to tell you what I'm afraid of," he said.

I asked him, gently, what he was afraid of.

"I'm afraid you're going to tell me I saw hell for a moment. That my soul is damaged. That whatever happened in those two minutes is still on me, still marking me, and that when I die, I'll go back there and stay. I'm afraid to tell anyone because I think if I'm wrong about Jesus forgiving me, I won't be able to live through the answer. I've been afraid to ask for twenty-one years."

I did not answer him right away. Some questions are too heavy to answer quickly.

I simply said, "Daniel, thank you for trusting me with this. I do not think your soul is damaged. I think you have been carrying something alone for a very long time, and you do not have to carry it alone anymore. Let's walk through it."

This chapter is for Daniel. And it is for everyone — the experiencer, the family member, the pastor, the friend — who has stood at the edge of a story like his and not known what to say.

Naming the Shadow

Most popular Christian books about near-death experiences focus on the beautiful ones. You have read them, or at least heard about them. A grandmother dies of a stroke and comes back with a story of a tunnel filled with warm light and a man in white who told her, without a word, that she was loved. A ten-year-old boy has a cardiac arrest and wakes up describing Jesus. A widow in her last hours sits up in bed and asks the whole room if they see her husband, dead for twenty years, standing at the foot of her bed. We love these stories, and I love them too. This book is full of them. They are real, they are good, and they testify to a real, good God.

But there is another kind of story. And if we refuse to tell it, we fail the Daniels of this world.

A minority of near-death experiences are not peaceful at all. A minority of deathbed experiences are not gentle. Some people — not many, but enough that the research is unmistakable — report descents into darkness, encounters with beings that seemed hostile or mocking, landscapes that resembled traditional pictures of hell, or a profound emptiness that felt more terrible than any pain they had ever known. These are called, in the research literature, distressing near-death experiences, or sometimes hellish or frightening NDEs.²

The numbers vary by study and by methodology. In the large NDERF online database, which draws primarily from people self-reporting online, Jeffrey Long has estimated that about one percent of reported NDEs are frankly hellish in content, while a larger group — around three to four percent in that dataset — were described as frightening overall.³ Dr. Barbara Rommer, a physician who specifically studied distressing NDEs, found that roughly eighteen percent of her interviewees reported distressing experiences.⁴ Penny Sartori's study of intensive care patients put the figure at 13.3 percent.⁵ Nancy Evans Bush, one of the most careful researchers of this phenomenon, summarizes a range of studies with numbers from around 12 percent up to 23 percent.⁶ And when Christopher Kerr studied hundreds of dying patients in his hospice in Buffalo, he found that up to 18 percent of end-of-life dreams and visions were distressing.⁷

Those numbers are not small. If you pastor a church of any size, or work in hospice, or have walked with enough grieving families over the years, you have already met people whose experiences did not fit the glossy book covers. You may not have known it, because they have not told you. Shame keeps them silent. Fear keeps them silent. The well-meaning but too-neat testimonies they have heard from the pulpit or on Christian radio have told them, without meaning to, that their story does not belong in the Church.

We must do better. Scripture is not afraid of darkness. The Bible opens with a formless void and the Spirit brooding over dark waters (Genesis 1:2). The Psalms include cries from the pit (Psalm 88) as well as songs from the mountaintop. The prophets saw visions of both glory and terror. The apostle Paul himself spoke of a struggle "against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). A faith that cannot name the shadow cannot comfort those who have walked through it. So let us name it. And let us name it without flinching, because the God we trust is not afraid of it either.

What the Research Says

The most comprehensive treatment of distressing NDEs in the scholarly literature is Nancy Evans Bush's book Dancing Past the Dark (2012).⁸ Bush herself had a distressing NDE in 1962, and spent her working life quietly carrying the experience before she began to study it systematically. She is not a Christian theologian; her framework is more psychological and mythic than biblical. But her research is careful, her heart is kind, and her work opened a door that the field had mostly kept closed.

Working with the psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, Bush classified distressing NDEs into three broad types in a 1992 article published in the journal Psychiatry.⁹ These three types remain the working categories in the field today.

Many distressing NDEs do not stay distressing for the whole experience. In fact, one of the most hopeful patterns in the research is that mixed NDEs — those that begin with a distressing phase but transition into a peaceful one — are quite common.¹⁰ Jeffrey Long observes that when an NDE contains both distressing and peaceful elements, the distressing part usually comes first and the peaceful part comes later, often lasting longer.¹¹ It is as though something that began as a descent became, in the middle of the experience, a rescue.

That pattern will matter a great deal later in this chapter. Hold it.

The research is careful to distinguish true distressing NDEs from a number of experiences that are sometimes confused with them. A person recovering from surgery who has a terrifying dream while coming out of anesthesia has not necessarily had an NDE. A person in the intensive care unit who hallucinates while critically ill — what doctors call ICU psychosis — has not necessarily had an NDE. A person under the influence of certain drugs who has a frightening drug trip has not had an NDE. All of these experiences can be frightening, but they have different phenomenological profiles than real NDEs.¹²

This is actually pastorally useful. If the experience turns out, on careful reflection, not to have been a true NDE at all, that is itself a relief for some sufferers. Long remarks that "it may be reassuring to many individuals who had a frightening experience to discover that their experience was not an NDE."¹³ The careful pastor and the careful researcher can help the experiencer see the difference — not to deny what happened, but to understand it accurately.

Who Has Distressing NDEs?

Here is the part that bothers people. It bothered me when I first read it. It will probably bother you.

Distressing near-death experiences do not land neatly on the people who, by our intuitive moral bookkeeping, "deserve" them.

Very devout Christians — people who have walked with Jesus for decades, people who have pastored churches, people who have taught Sunday school and fed the poor — have sometimes had distressing NDEs. And atheists, agnostics, and people living in open, unrepentant sin have sometimes had profoundly peaceful ones. As Long puts it in God and the Afterlife, "it is wrong to assume that 'good people' have pleasant NDEs and 'bad people' have hellish NDEs."¹⁴ The phenomenology of distressing NDEs, across large samples, does not line up with our expectations about who deserves what.

This is uncomfortable for two opposite reasons. It is uncomfortable for the Christian who wants to use distressing NDEs as a tidy apologetic proof of hell: "See? This atheist had a hellish NDE — proof that unbelievers go to hell." The data do not support such a clean story, because many atheists have peaceful NDEs and some Christians have distressing ones. It is equally uncomfortable for the secular observer who wants to dismiss distressing NDEs as simply the product of guilt-laden religious upbringing: "It is only the fundamentalists who have hell trips because that is what they were raised to fear." The data do not support that story either, because plenty of experiencers who have distressing NDEs had no particular fear of hell going in, and plenty of people raised on fire-and-brimstone preaching have had beautiful encounters with Christ.

So what, if anything, correlates with distressing NDEs? A few patterns have emerged in the research, but they are tendencies rather than rules.

First, suicide attempts appear somewhat more likely to produce distressing NDEs than other kinds of near-death events, though peaceful NDEs during suicide attempts are also documented.¹⁵ In The Atlanta Study, Michael Sabom found that two of the three cases of suicide-induced NDEs in his data contained hellish elements, though a third did not.¹⁶ Sabom tentatively suggests that during suicide attempts, the experiencer's confrontation with God's moral order may be especially sharp. Whatever the explanation, the pattern matters pastorally: when a suicide attempt survivor like Daniel reports a distressing experience, he is not an outlier. He is part of a small but real group for whom we must have pastoral language and theological care.

Second, some studies have suggested that experiencers with a lower level of consciousness or alertness at the beginning of the NDE are more likely to report the experience as frightening.¹⁷ This is not an explanation of distressing NDEs, but it may be a contributing factor in some cases.

Third, and most important: the pattern does not support an assumption that distressing NDEs are divine sentences. A person who has a distressing NDE is not more morally culpable than a person who has a peaceful one. What follows after the experience — the life lived, the cries made to God, the relationships entered — matters far more than the phenomenological content of two or three minutes in the dark. We will see that claim vindicated when we come to Howard Storm.

Four Ways People Live After a Distressing Experience

When I am sitting with an experiencer like Daniel, I have learned to listen for where they are on the long road after the event. Bush and others have noted that there are roughly four ways people respond to a distressing NDE in the years afterward.¹⁸ Each calls for different pastoral care.

The terrorized and transformed. Some experiencers come out of a distressing NDE radically, dramatically, and permanently changed. The experience becomes the fulcrum of their life. They leave old ways behind. They find their way to Jesus. They pour their lives into helping others. Howard Storm is the paradigm case, and we will look carefully at his story in a later section. But he is not alone. Ian McCormack, a young New Zealander who was stung by box jellyfish in 1982 and had a distressing NDE before a rescue encounter with Christ, followed the same pattern.¹⁹ So have many others. For this group, the distressing NDE functions almost like a bone-breaking accident that sets a crooked life straight. It was terrible in the moment. It was also, in retrospect, grace.

The confused and shaken. Some experiencers come out of a distressing NDE simply disturbed. They do not know what to make of it. They do not know whether to tell anyone. They have questions nobody in their immediate circle seems equipped to answer. They may go on living more or less the way they lived before, but the memory keeps surfacing. It resurfaces at two in the morning. It resurfaces at funerals. It resurfaces when a verse of Scripture is read in church. They need a guide and a hearer, and many never find one.

The reframed over time. Some experiencers, with years of reflection and processing, come to see their distressing NDE as spiritually meaningful — not in a punitive sense, but in a purgatorial or purifying sense. They came to understand that the darkness they encountered was, somehow, being used by God to show them something they needed to see about themselves, their need of Christ, or the reality of spiritual warfare. This group often testifies, years after the event, that they would not trade the experience away. Rommer, who called her book Blessing in Disguise, found exactly this pattern among many of her interviewees. Frightening NDEs, she found, "often result in substantial positive life changes, including a greatly reduced fear of death. Some individuals experiencing a frightening NDE even came to view it as a gift and perhaps the most important experience of their life."²⁰

The traumatized and undealt-with. And then there are those who carry the experience as pure trauma, for decades, without help. Pim van Lommel observes that terrifying NDEs "usually produce long-lasting emotional trauma," and that "shame and guilt prohibit people from sharing about these terrifying experiences."²¹ This is the Daniel of our opening pages: twenty-one years of silent weight, afraid to ask the questions, afraid of the answers, isolated from the community that could help.

If you are a pastor, a caregiver, or a friend, your first job is to figure out which of these four roads the person in front of you has been walking. Then you can meet them where they are. The transformed experiencer needs you to celebrate with them and not treat their NDE as fragile. The confused experiencer needs you to listen and slowly help them sort the true from the uncertain. The reframed experiencer needs your honest theological conversation as they integrate what they came to believe. And the traumatized experiencer — the Daniel — needs, first of all, to be told that they are safe to speak, that their story is welcome, and that the God who hears will not recoil from what they saw.

How Christians Have Interpreted Distressing NDEs

Serious Christians have offered five broad interpretations of distressing NDEs over the years. I want to lay them out fairly, because each has something to teach us, and no single interpretation covers every case. Responsible pastoral ministry requires holding several of these at once.

1. A Glimpse of Hell

Some Christians — notably the cardiologist Maurice Rawlings in Beyond Death's Door (1978) and To Hell and Back (1993) — have read distressing NDEs as literal warnings about the reality of hell.²² Rawlings claimed, based on his own experience resuscitating patients, that when people were interviewed immediately upon being brought back, as many as half of them reported hellish content — though the numbers shifted rapidly afterward because most experiencers suppressed the memory. Rawlings was a faithful Christian who took Scripture seriously and felt that his fellow physicians were suppressing the frightening accounts in favor of the beautiful ones.

The "glimpse of hell" reading has a real strength. It takes Scripture's warnings about eternal danger with full seriousness. Jesus said more about hell than anyone else in the Bible. He warned of "outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 22:13). He warned of a place of fire and torment. If God allows a few people, in certain circumstances, to see something of that reality and come back, Scripture gives us no grounds to say it is impossible.

The pastoral difficulty is this: the vast majority of people who have distressing NDEs are not, in fact, dead. They are revived. They live. Many go on to become serious, faithful, fruitful Christians. If the distressing NDE was a literal sentence of damnation, their subsequent life of faith would be impossible. So at best, a "glimpse of hell" reading must be held as a warning rather than a verdict — a sign of what might be, not a pronouncement of what will be. And the line between warning and verdict must be held firmly if we are going to tell Daniel the truth without crushing him.

2. A Confrontation with the State of the Soul

A second Christian interpretation — one I find especially useful pastorally — reads the distressing NDE as a kind of spiritual X-ray. In the experience, the person is confronted with the reality of sin, brokenness, or resistance to God that they had been able to hide from themselves in ordinary life. The darkness is real; but it is not the darkness of a final destination. It is the darkness of the soul's actual condition apart from grace, briefly made visible.

This reading fits the Christian pattern of metanoia — a Greek word (μετάνοια) meaning "a change of mind" or "turning," usually translated in English Bibles as "repentance." In the New Testament, conversion often begins with a confrontation: Saul on the road to Damascus, struck down and asked, "Why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4); the prodigal son "coming to himself" in the pigpen and seeing his life for what it was (Luke 15:17); the tax collector Zacchaeus seeing Jesus seeing him (Luke 19:5). Confrontation precedes transformation. On this reading, the distressing NDE is simply a compressed, acute version of what happens to many sinners in slow motion over years.

The gospel never ends in confrontation. It begins there. It always moves, when received, toward rescue.

3. Purgatorial or Purifying

A third reading, held especially by those drawn to Jerry Walls's work on what he calls "Protestant purgatory," sees distressing NDEs as a purifying process rather than a final destiny.²³ In this reading, the distressing NDE is not hell — hell being understood as the final, settled state of those who finally and irrevocably reject God — but a purifying encounter that does not determine the experiencer's eternal destination.

I have my own commitments on eternal matters. I believe in an intermediate state between death and the final judgment in which God continues to love, pursue, and offer Himself to souls (a topic I explore carefully in Chapter 13). Within that framework, a distressing NDE can easily be understood as a moment of encounter with what must be faced and purged, rather than as a sentence already pronounced. It fits the God Scripture reveals — a God whose love is a refining fire (1 Corinthians 3:13–15), a God who disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:6), a God whose judgments are always in the service of mercy where mercy can still reach.

4. A Demonic Encounter

A fourth Christian interpretation takes seriously the biblical witness that hostile spiritual beings exist. Scripture does not allow us to deny this. Paul writes that "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). Peter warns that "your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8). Paul also teaches that "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14).

If hostile spiritual beings exist, and if they are opportunistic — and Scripture teaches that both are true — it is not surprising that the vulnerable, the dying, and those who have just tried to take their own lives might occasionally encounter them. This does not mean every distressing NDE is a direct demonic attack. It does mean that some may be. The careful pastor neither reflexively attributes every dark experience to demons (that way lies paranoia) nor reflexively denies that demons ever appear in such experiences (that way lies blindness to Scripture). Distressing NDEs that include mocking, pressure away from Christ, or persistent oppression after the event deserve discernment within this framework. We will return to the discernment markers later in the chapter.

5. A Natural Brain Phenomenon

A fifth reading — usually held more by secular researchers than Christians, but sometimes by Christians who prefer naturalistic explanations — holds that distressing NDEs reflect the dying brain's response under certain kinds of stress. On this view, the distressing phenomenology is essentially neurological: a trick of hypoxia, anesthesia, or biochemical flood.

I hold this view loosely, for reasons explored in the earlier chapters of this book. The broader NDE research — especially the evidence of veridical perception during clinical death — does not fit a purely neurological account.²⁴ Nor does the distressing NDE literature. When a person emerges from a frightening NDE with a radically changed life, a reduced fear of death, and a new relationship with God, it is hard to believe the experience was only a biochemical hiccup. Nonetheless, we should hold open the possibility that some particular distressing experiences — especially those connected with drugs, anesthesia, or ICU psychosis — may be better understood as natural rather than spiritual events. The careful pastor is not obligated to assign spiritual meaning to every frightening moment.

No single interpretation fits every case. The pastor's job is not to pick one and wield it like a hammer. The pastor's job is to listen carefully, pray carefully, and help the experiencer discern — with Scripture, with prayer, with the company of mature Christians — what a particular experience means for them.

My Pastoral Position

After many years of reading this literature, of sitting with experiencers, of praying with families, and of wrestling with Scripture, I have come to a set of convictions about distressing NDEs that I want to state plainly. These are not the only Christian convictions possible. But they are mine, and they have held up under pastoral pressure.

These convictions do not answer every question. They do not tell Daniel whether his experience was primarily a confrontation with his own soul, a spiritual warfare encounter, or some mixture. They do tell him that his experience was not a sentence. They tell him that the Jesus who received the thief on the cross in his final hour (Luke 23:43) is the same Jesus who receives the Daniels of this world twenty-one years after their worst moment.

The deepest pastoral truth about distressing NDEs is this: Jesus is available in them. Not only after them. In them. That is what the Howard Storm pattern shows us, and it is to Howard Storm that we must now turn.

The Howard Storm Pattern: When Terror Becomes Metanoia

Howard Storm was an atheist art professor at Northern Kentucky University in 1985. He was thirty-eight years old. He had a wife, two children, a career he was proud of, and a settled conviction that God did not exist. He had no patience for religion.

While on a student trip to Paris, Storm suffered a sudden perforated duodenum. He was in agony. He was rushed to a Paris hospital. He was told he needed emergency surgery and that there was a real chance he would not survive. As he lay in the bed waiting, he said a kind of grim farewell to his wife. Then something happened that he had no framework for.²⁵

Storm found himself standing beside his body in the hospital room. He could see himself. Then he heard voices calling him out of the room — voices he described as companionable at first. He followed them. The light dimmed. The voices grew more aggressive. He could see less and less. Then he realized he was in the dark, surrounded by beings he could not see clearly but could feel — beings that began to mock him, taunt him, and then tear at him. The attacks were physical in every way that mattered. He fought. He could not win. He could not escape.

At the lowest point, something in Storm — the atheist professor who had rejected every Sunday school lesson he had ever been taught — remembered a song from his childhood. A song his grandmother had sung to him. The song was Jesus Loves Me.

From the pit, Storm cried out the only word he could think of:

Jesus, please save me.

What happened next is the center of Storm's account, and the reason his story matters for this chapter. A light appeared — small at first, like a distant star — and came toward him. It grew as it came. The beings in the dark fled from it. The light resolved into a Figure — the person Storm would later, without the slightest hesitation, identify as Jesus Christ. The Figure came to him and held him the way a father holds a wounded child.

"I don't know how I knew," Storm said later, "but I knew that he loved me very much, just the way I was. Jesus does love me. I had called out to Jesus and he came to rescue me. I cried and cried. Joy upon joy billowed through me."²⁶

Storm survived his surgery. He came back. He eventually left his career as an art professor and became a pastor of a small United Church of Christ congregation in Ohio. He spent the rest of his working life telling his story, writing about it, and loving people he had once considered beneath his notice. His book My Descent into Death is a straightforward, unembellished account of what he experienced.²⁷

What matters for us is not only the content of Storm's story but its shape. The shape is this: distressing experience → crying out to Christ → rescue → transformation.

This shape appears over and over in the distressing NDE literature. It is not unique to Storm. The New Zealander Ian McCormack, dying from jellyfish stings, remembered his mother's prayer and asked God to forgive him — and was rescued by a light he later identified as Jesus.²⁸ Cathleen C., in the case reported by Jeffrey Long, descended into what she called hell, cried out in her spirit, and was rescued by beings she later described as angels introducing her to God.²⁹ The pattern is so consistent that it is hard to read these accounts honestly and not see in them the very shape of the gospel itself.

The Christian tradition has a word for what happens in this shape. It is metanoia — a change of mind, a turning. The turning often begins when the sinner sees what he or she actually is apart from God. The turning is consummated when Christ, called upon, comes. Every conversion in Scripture has this shape, though the degree of drama varies. The Philippian jailer, trembling before Paul and Silas in the shaken prison, cried, "What must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30). The tax collector at the temple, not daring to lift his eyes, beat his chest and said, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). Both men were, in that moment, in their own kind of darkness. Both men were met.

What the Howard Storm pattern suggests, with remarkable clarity, is that the distressing NDE itself can be inside the structure of salvation. Jesus is not banished from the dark. Jesus goes into the dark to find us. If that was true for Storm — a professor who had spent his adult life mocking faith — it is true for Daniel. It is true for the Christian who has had a distressing experience and feared it was their damnation. It is true for the non-believer who had a frightening NDE years ago and has been afraid to examine it ever since. The darkness is not the final word. The darkness is sometimes the place where the last word is spoken: Come with me.

Distressing Deathbed Experiences

Most of the research and most of the discussion in this chapter has focused on near-death experiences — the experiences of people who went to the edge and came back. But the distressing phenomenon extends also to deathbed experiences — the visions and inner experiences of dying people, often in their final hours or days.

Most deathbed experiences are peaceful. The standard picture in Chapter 5 of this book holds: dying patients commonly see deceased loved ones, experience peace, speak of leaving. But a minority of deathbed experiences are not peaceful. Some dying patients become restless, frightened, or deeply disturbed. They may cry out. They may see things that terrify them. Their last days may be shadowed in a way that grieves their loved ones almost beyond bearing.

The most careful recent work on distressing deathbed experiences is Christopher Kerr's study at Hospice Buffalo in New York.³⁰ Kerr's team interviewed hundreds of dying patients about their end-of-life dreams and visions over a period of years. They found that the vast majority — around 88 percent — were deeply peaceful and meaningful, often involving visits from deceased loved ones. But a minority, up to 18 percent, were distressing. Kerr also noted an important pattern: the distressing dreams were often connected to unresolved life issues — a relationship never mended, a trauma never processed, a regret never confessed.

This detail matters. It means that a distressing deathbed experience is often not, in the first place, a verdict. It is frequently an invitation — an invitation to the family, the chaplain, and the dying person themselves to address whatever is unfinished. Kerr's team found that when pastoral and spiritual care was offered with skill — when a chaplain sat with the dying person, when unresolved relationships were gently named, when confession and prayer were made available — many of the distressing dying experiences transformed. The patient moved into peace. The last hours were no longer dark.

This is the most important pastoral truth about distressing deathbed experiences: they are usually not verdicts; they are frequently calls for ministry. They tell us that the dying person is wrestling with something that still can be addressed in the hours or days remaining. They tell the family that the person needs prayer, presence, and specific pastoral attention. They tell the Church that its work at the bedside is not a formality. It is sometimes the very means by which God meets a struggling soul.

I have sat at several bedsides where this happened in real time. A man in his seventies, dying of pancreatic cancer, became increasingly agitated in the last two days of his life. He cried out in his sleep. He grabbed his wife's hand and asked her to forgive him for something he had done long ago. The family prayed. A pastor came. The man confessed, received assurance of forgiveness, and quieted. He died two hours later with a soft smile on his face. The distressing hours had been real. They had not been final. They had been, as it turned out, the last chapter of a longer story that needed to be told and absolved before he could go.

Not every distressing deathbed experience resolves this way. Some patients die still in distress, and their families are left with grief compounded by fear for the person's soul. I have walked with these families too. A daughter sits in my office six weeks after her mother's death and cannot stop seeing her mother's last hours — the wide-eyed terror, the incoherent crying out, the sense that her mother was fighting something no one else could see. "Pastor," she asks me, "did my mother go to hell? Is that what I watched?"

To those families, this chapter offers the same word it offers to Daniel: the distressing final hours do not determine the final destination. God is the judge, not the last few minutes. A pastoral theology grounded in Scripture will always trust God with what we could not resolve at the bedside. He sees what we could not see. He knows what we could not hear. He receives what we could not finish. The daughter did not watch her mother enter eternity; she watched her mother's body cross the threshold. What happened to her mother's soul was — and is — in the hands of a God whose mercy is wider than the last agitated hour of any human life.

There is also this. Some distressing deathbed scenes are not spiritual in content at all. They reflect terminal delirium — a neurological condition caused by medication interactions, untreated pain, dehydration, or the body's final shutdown. Terminal delirium looks like spiritual distress to grieving family members who have never seen it before, but to a trained hospice nurse it is often recognizable as a medical condition, treatable with better pain management and sedation. If you are sitting with a family whose loved one is dying in visible distress, the first question to ask is not theological but medical: is this patient's pain adequately controlled? Has the medical team been asked about terminal restlessness protocols? The comfort care of the body is also the comfort care of the family's later grief. A dying patient whose pain is well-managed almost always crosses peacefully, even when the underlying spiritual story has been difficult. When a family remembers the death as agitated and frightening, they carry that memory for the rest of their lives. A little more morphine, a little more compassion, a little more skilled nursing can change everything for the survivors.

What This Chapter Is Not Teaching

Before we return to Daniel, I want to be crystal clear about what this chapter is not teaching. In a field where bad theology is often built on misread research, clarity matters.

This chapter is not teaching that distressing NDEs prove the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. They do not. A distressing experience lasting minutes, followed by return to life, is not evidence about the eternal state of anyone.

This chapter is not teaching that everyone who has a distressing NDE is damned. Almost everyone who has one returns. Many become devout Christians. Their lives after the experience are often marked by deeper faith, not absence of faith.

This chapter is not teaching that all NDEs — peaceful or distressing — are trustworthy guides to the afterlife. We must always read experience in the light of Scripture, not the other way around. An NDE, whether beautiful or distressing, is not a second Bible. Every experience must be weighed.

This chapter is not teaching that the Church should make distressing NDEs into a tool for evangelism or apologetics. To use Daniel's worst memory as a sermon illustration is to betray him. The distressing NDE is, first and always, a pastoral matter — a real person's real wound.

And this chapter is not teaching that distressing deathbed experiences are unanswerable. They are very often answerable — through presence, prayer, confession, and pastoral care. When they are not resolved in time, they are entrusted to a just and merciful God.

What this chapter is teaching is that distressing experiences are real, that they matter, that they often carry meaning worth attending to, and that they should be received with care — never buried, never weaponized.

Back to Daniel

I want to come back now to the man in my office on that Thursday afternoon, because somewhere, someone reading this book is Daniel, or loves someone like him. Daniel needs to hear what I said to him, and what I will say to him again as many times as he needs to hear it.

Daniel, your experience twenty-one years ago was real. I am not going to tell you it was a hallucination, because I do not know that, and neither do you. I am also not going to tell you it was a glimpse of your final, eternal damnation, because I do not believe that is what it was, and you have carried that fear long enough. Whatever happened in those two minutes in the back of the ambulance, you are here. You survived. And in the twenty-one years since, Jesus has been walking with you, holding you, and remaking you. That cannot be undone by two minutes in the dark.

I cannot tell you with certainty whether your experience was a confrontation with the state of your soul in the moment of your attempt, a brush with real spiritual darkness that prowled near a vulnerable man, or some mixture of the two. I am not God. I do not know. What I know is this: the same Jesus who reached into Howard Storm's dark and pulled him out is reaching for you now. The same Jesus who heard the thief on the cross says to you, "You will be with me" (Luke 23:43). The same Jesus who bore the sins of the world bore yours. The same Jesus who says, "Whoever comes to me I will never cast out" (John 6:37) will not cast you out.

Scripture has given us specific words for this moment. If you have been carrying something dark alone, sit with Psalm 139. "Where shall I go from your Spirit?" the psalmist asks. "Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!" (Psalm 139:7–8). That "if" is not rhetorical for you, Daniel. You have, in your way, made a bed in Sheol. You have been into a dark you cannot explain and have not been able to speak of. What the psalmist is telling you is that even there, God was there. "If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you" (Psalm 139:11–12). Whatever you saw, God was not absent from it. God saw you in it. God did not flinch. God did not turn away.

And sit with Psalm 88, the one Psalm in the whole Psalter that ends in darkness. The psalmist cries, "My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol" (Psalm 88:3). He complains to God. He tells God he feels forgotten. He ends the psalm without resolution, without a happy turn, without a closing doxology: "You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness" (Psalm 88:18). God placed this psalm in the Bible. He did not edit it. He let the psalmist finish in the dark and still counted him faithful. If you are in that psalm tonight, you are still inside the canon. You are still in the community of God's people. You are not outside. You are not too far gone. You are in good company, and He has promised to bring morning even when you cannot see its first light.

Your soul is not damaged. Your soul is held. Your memory of the darkness is real, but the darkness is not your destination. You do not belong to it. You never did. And every time you find yourself at 3 a.m. with that old fear rising, I want you to know what you may say. You may say:

Jesus, please save me.

That prayer worked in a Paris hospital in 1985. It worked in the Pacific Ocean for a young New Zealander in 1982. It worked on a Roman cross two thousand years ago for a man whose name we do not even know. It will work for you tonight. It has already worked. The Jesus who meets us in the dark never stops being in the business of rescue.

This is the end of a long chapter, and I am aware that many readers have been holding their breath. Exhale now. If this chapter has been about you, or about someone you love, hear the truest thing I know how to say: the Lord Jesus is the final word over every soul, and His word is not wrath. His word is His own blood, given for you, received when called upon, and sufficient to cover every darkness you have walked through. Until we meet again on the other side of all our fears, we rest in Him.

For Your Reflection

These questions are not a test. They are an invitation. You may sit with one for many days before you move on. You may not answer any of them out loud. You may simply let them rest in your heart in the quiet.

1. Have you, or someone you love, had an experience that felt distressing — an NDE, a dream near death, a dying vision, or a memory you have not been able to speak about? If so, what has kept you silent until now?

2. What have you feared a pastor or Christian friend would say if you told them? What would it mean to you to be received without judgment?

3. Of the five Christian interpretations of distressing experiences discussed in this chapter — glimpse of hell, confrontation with the soul, purgatorial, demonic encounter, natural phenomenon — which one does the experience you carry seem most to fit? Which one would you most like to understand better?

4. Howard Storm cried out the name of Jesus from inside the darkness. Is there something in your life or memory that you have never named to Jesus — never cried out to Him about, in plain words? What would it look like to do that now?

5. If the loved one you are grieving had a distressing deathbed experience — hours that were not peaceful — how has that memory sat with you? What would it mean to entrust those hours to a God who is merciful, and to trust that the last breath is not the final verdict?

6. Where in Scripture have you found comfort for darkness? Consider Psalm 88, Psalm 139:7–12, Luke 23:39–43, Ephesians 6:10–18. Which one is the one you most need right now?

7. Who in your life is safe enough to hear your story — even the part of it you have not told? What would be a small first step toward telling it?

For Pastors and Caregivers

If a grieving family member or an experiencer ever trusts you with a story like Daniel's, the conversation you are about to have may be the most important pastoral conversation of their life. Treat it that way. This section offers specific guidance for what to observe, what to say, what not to say, what to ask, what to watch for, and where to go next.

Key Pastoral Observations

Distressing NDE experiencers are almost always silent about their experience — often for decades. They fear three things above all: that you will tell them they saw hell and are condemned; that you will tell them it was a hallucination and their memory is worthless; and that you will treat them as spiritually suspect from the moment they open their mouth. Your first task is to disprove all three fears by how you listen.

Silence is your most powerful tool. The experiencer will often take long pauses. Let the pauses be long. Do not fill them. Do not rush to theology. Do not diagnose. Sit with them in the silence the way Job's friends did in their first seven days — before they opened their mouths and ruined everything (Job 2:13; 3:1ff).

Take seriously that a distressing NDE or a distressing deathbed memory is, for the person holding it, a form of spiritual trauma. It carries some of the markers of post-traumatic stress: intrusive memories, avoidance, hyperarousal, fear of sleep, shame. Ministry to the experiencer is as much trauma care as it is spiritual care. The two are not enemies. They are the same work.

What to Say

Here are five sentences you can actually use. Memorize them. Say them in your own words, but say them.

• "Thank you for trusting me with this. I know how long you have carried it." This sentence honors the courage it took to speak. Do not skip it.

• "I do not believe your experience means you are condemned, and I do not believe your soul is damaged." Say this early. The experiencer cannot hear anything else until they know you are not going to pronounce them damned.

• "What happened to you was real. I want to hear all of it. Take your time." The experiencer has often rehearsed the worst version in private. Let them tell it out loud.

• "Jesus meets people in the dark. He is not afraid of your memory, and neither am I." This is the heart of the gospel applied to this specific pain. Deliver it slowly.

• "We can walk through this as long as you need. You do not have to sort it out today." Many experiencers need many conversations. Signal that you are not a drive-through.

What NOT to Say

• "You must have seen hell." Never say this, even if you privately believe it. It pronounces a verdict you have no authority to pronounce and crushes the person you are trying to help. If someone did see something of hell, they do not need you to confirm it; they need you to show them the door out.

• "That was just your brain dying. Don't think about it anymore." This condescends to the experiencer and dismisses a real memory. It also cuts off a spiritual conversation that may be the most important one of their life.

• "Well, we don't really know what happens in those experiences." True, but in this moment, abandoning. The experiencer did not come to you for an agnostic shrug. They came because they are drowning and need someone to throw a rope, not a disclaimer.

• "Have you been in any sin that might explain this?" Never start here. Even if the experience followed a terrible choice — like a suicide attempt — leading with sin makes the experiencer feel accused. The gospel begins with Jesus, not with the catalog of their failures.

• "We need to do a deliverance." Do not jump to deliverance ministry as a first move, especially if you are not trained in it. Most distressing experiences do not require it, and ordering one wrongly can retraumatize the person. Deliverance may be appropriate in rare cases — Chapter 25 treats this carefully — but it is almost never the first step.

Questions to Ask

• "What was the worst part for you?" Let them name the heart of it. It is not always what you expect.

• "Was there any part of the experience that felt different — a moment of hope, a light, a voice, a turning?" Many distressing NDEs are mixed. Help the experiencer notice the rescue pattern, if it was there.

• "Did you cry out to God or to Jesus at any point?" If so, this is a moment of enormous spiritual significance. Name it. Honor it. It may be the defining moment of their whole story.

• "What have you been most afraid someone would say to you about this?" This lets you disprove that fear directly.

• "How has this experience shaped your faith, your fears, your relationships, over the years since?" This opens the long work of integration.

Watch-Outs and Cautions

Three landmines are specific to this chapter's subject.

The first is the temptation to pronounce. Pastors are trained to speak. But in these conversations, speech is often the enemy. The experiencer needs you to hear before they need you to tell. Resist the urge to deliver your theological conclusions in the first visit. Deliver presence first. Truth will follow, received.

The second is confusing categories. Not every distressing dream, hallucination, or frightening memory near a medical event is an NDE. Some are clearly caused by medication, anesthesia, ICU psychosis, or the dying brain. Help the experiencer, gently, distinguish categories. Sometimes the freedom comes when they realize their frightening memory was not a genuine NDE at all but a medication-induced hallucination. That recognition can lift years of unnecessary dread.

The third is missing the markers that require specialized help. Occasionally — not often, but occasionally — a distressing NDE carries real markers of demonic activity that do not resolve with ordinary pastoral care. The experiencer is still being oppressed. Nightmares recur. A sense of a presence persists. In these cases, mature Christian deliverance ministry, under the supervision of a competent pastor or bishop, may be appropriate. Chapter 25 treats this in detail. If you are not trained for it, say so, and refer. There is no shame in knowing the limits of your own training.

Next Steps

First, plan to meet again. A single conversation is not enough. Schedule the second meeting before the first one ends.

Second, put the experiencer in touch with one trusted resource besides yourself — a Christian counselor, a spiritual director, a small pastoral group. Isolation is often the wound; community is part of the healing.

Third, do your own reading. Nancy Evans Bush's Dancing Past the Dark, Howard Storm's My Descent into Death, Barbara Rommer's Blessing in Disguise, and Jeffrey Long's chapter on hellish encounters in God and the Afterlife will give you the factual grounding you need. Do not speak about distressing NDEs from the pulpit or in counseling until you have read at least one of these.

Fourth, pray. Before the visit, pray for the experiencer specifically. During the visit, offer to pray with them, gently, if they would welcome it. After the visit, keep praying. These experiences do not resolve in a day.

Fifth, know when to call for help. If the experience shows the markers in the amber callout above — ongoing oppression, anti-Christian content in the experience, pressure toward occult practice — bring in a mature Christian leader who knows this territory. If the experiencer is in acute suicidal distress (remembering that suicide attempt survivors carry elevated lifetime risk³¹), do not wait. Connect them immediately with professional mental-health support and, in the United States, with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Spiritual ministry and mental-health care are partners, not competitors.

The Daniels of this world have been waiting a long time for someone to listen and to tell them the truth. You may be the first person who does. Be worthy of that trust.

For Further Reading

Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (Parson's Porch, 2012). The most thorough single volume on this topic. Written by a careful, compassionate researcher who had her own distressing NDE. Not Christian in framework, but honest and useful.

Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (Doubleday, 2005). The first-person account of the atheist professor who became a pastor after his distressing-to-peaceful NDE. Readable, moving, pastorally essential.

Barbara Rommer, Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near-Death Experience (Llewellyn, 2000). A physician's study of distressing NDEs. Documents the pattern of deep positive life change after initially frightening experiences.

Christopher Kerr with Carine Mardorossian, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End (Avery, 2020). Includes careful treatment of distressing as well as peaceful dying experiences, drawn from the Hospice Buffalo research.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2016), chapter 9 ("Hellish Encounters"). A careful overview of what NDERF data show about distressing and hellish NDEs.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek, 2022). Includes careful Christian engagement with distressing NDEs in the context of a broader apologetic for NDE compatibility with Scripture.