Chapter 11
Sarah had not heard her father say her name in three years. The Alzheimer's had taken his words first, then his recognition, then the small flickers of memory that used to surface when she held his hand. By the last winter, the man in the bed seemed mostly absent — eyes open, sometimes, but elsewhere. The nurses were kind. They told her she was a good daughter for coming. They did not tell her, because they could not, that her father was still her father.
On a Tuesday afternoon in April, she sat by his bed and read Psalm 23 aloud, the way she had every visit for two years, mostly for herself. The room smelled like institutional sheets and warm apple juice. She finished the psalm. She closed the book. She bent down to kiss his forehead.
And he turned his head. He focused his eyes on her, the way he used to when she was nine years old and had something important to tell him. He smiled. And he said, clearly, in his own voice — the voice she had been afraid she would forget — "Sarah. There you are. I love you. I'll see you soon."
Three hours later, he was gone.
Sarah sat in the parking lot afterward and could not stop crying. But the crying was different from any crying she had done in three years. Because for the first time, she knew with her whole heart that her father had not been a husk after all. He had been somewhere, all that time. And he had come back, just for a moment, to tell her so.
Chapter Thesis: Two of the most striking patterns documented in deathbed research — terminal lucidity, the unexpected return of clarity in patients with dementia or other severe brain illness shortly before death; and shared death experiences, when family members at the bedside report sharing aspects of the dying person's experience — speak with quiet eloquence to the dignity of the human person and to the reality of something happening at the threshold that biology alone cannot explain. Both invite us, gently and powerfully, to honor the dying as the persons they still are, all the way to the end.
Researchers who study end-of-life experiences have a name for what happened in Sarah's father's room. They call it terminal lucidity.
Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, two of the most careful researchers of this phenomenon, define terminal lucidity as the unexpected return of mental clarity and memory shortly before death in patients suffering from severe psychiatric and neurologic disorders.1 The patients in question are not the mildly forgetful. They are people whose brains, by any ordinary medical measure, should not be capable of what they suddenly do — patients with advanced Alzheimer's, strokes that took their speech years ago, brain tumors, meningitis, or schizophrenia so severe they have lived in institutions for decades.2 And then, in the last hours or days of life, something happens. The fog lifts. The eyes focus. They speak. They recognize. They say goodbye.
Terminal lucidity is not a new discovery. Physicians from Hippocrates onward have noticed it. The president of Britain's Royal College of Physicians said in 1833, "We have all observed the mind clear in an extraordinary manner in the last hours of life."3 What is new is that careful researchers have begun to gather the cases, count them, and ask what they mean.
Perhaps the most-quoted modern case is the death of a woman named Anna Katharina Ehmer — "Kathe" — in a German mental health institution in the 1920s. Kathe had been profoundly disabled from birth. She had never spoken a word. She had never, in the staff's long observation, given any sign of recognizing her surroundings. She was dying. The chief physician, Dr. Wilhelm Wittneben, was called to her bedside, along with the institution's pastor, Friedrich Happich. What they witnessed is preserved in their own words. Kathe — who had never, in anyone's memory, sung anything, or spoken anything, or given any sign of awareness at all — sat up and began to sing a hymn. She sang it for half an hour, clearly and tenderly. The text she sang was: Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace. Her face, the doctor wrote, was transfigured. And then she lay back and died.4
The doctor wept. The pastor wept. The nurse wept. Wittneben, who was a serious scientist, said simply that he was confronted with a mystery.5
You might think a story like Kathe's must be vanishingly rare. The research suggests otherwise. In a survey of nursing home staff in two facilities, seventy percent reported having personally witnessed terminal lucidity occurring within a few days of death in patients with dementia; a follow-up Gloucestershire study found interviewees from every unit reporting cases.6 A Scottish hospice study (Macleod, 2009) found six clear cases among one hundred consecutive deaths.7 Alexander Batthyany, a philosopher at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, has documented terminal lucidity in roughly ten percent of dementia deaths in his ongoing research, and he believes the real number is higher because the episodes are often short and easily missed.8
Of forty-nine cases that Nahm could pin to an exact time of death, eighty-four percent occurred within the last week of life — and forty-three percent occurred within the last day.9 Terminal lucidity, in other words, is something like a final flare. It comes near the end. It usually does not last long — most episodes last from thirty minutes to two hours. And it carries weight. Patients use the time. They say what needs saying.
The forms vary. Sometimes a long-mute patient speaks. Sometimes a patient who has not recognized her children for years suddenly knows them. Sometimes the recovery is even partly physical — one nurse described a resident with such severe spinal fusion that she had spent years staring at the floor, who in her final days was able to lift her head and look out the window for the first time in memory, delighted.10 The content is almost always meaningful: thank you, I love you, I forgive you, please forgive me, I'll see you again. We will return to terminal lucidity in the context of dementia death in Chapter 17, but the heart of it belongs here, where we are speaking about the dignity of the dying.
I want to walk gently here, because terminal lucidity can be either over-claimed or under-claimed, and pastoral honesty asks for a steady middle path.
Terminal lucidity is a real, observed pattern. It is not a sentimental story. It is documented across centuries and across cultures by physicians, nurses, and pastors who have no incentive to invent it. At the same time, no responsible researcher claims that terminal lucidity by itself proves anything beyond reasonable doubt. Various neurological hypotheses have been proposed, though most strain to explain how a brain that should not be capable of clear thought becomes, briefly, capable of moving and speaking and loving like the person whose brain it once was.11
What I can say is this: terminal lucidity fits comfortably with the view of human nature this book has been laying out from the beginning. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Christian tradition has long taught that a human being is a body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul is not simply a function of the brain. If that is true — if the person is more than her neurons — then the brain is something like an instrument the soul plays. When the instrument is broken, the music is muffled or silenced. But the player has not been destroyed. As the Nobel laureate brain physiologist Sir John Eccles came to argue, the data of brain science do not require us to believe that the mind is the brain; only that, in this life, the mind expresses itself through the brain.12 Wilder Penfield, after a lifetime of pioneering brain surgery, wrote at the close of his career, "I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man's being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one."13
Terminal lucidity is, at the very least, consistent with that older Christian picture. The soul, undamaged by the disease that has wrecked the brain, may surface for a moment as the body's hold weakens — like a swimmer breaking the surface for one last clear breath. One nurse, after witnessing such a death, wrote words I find unforgettable: "I had become fairly cynical about the human vegetables I cared for. Now I understand that I am caring for nurslings of immortality. Dementia can affect the soul but it will not destroy it."14
What the research shows: Terminal lucidity is documented in roughly ten percent of dementia deaths in current studies, with seventy percent of nursing home staff reporting personal witness in surveyed facilities. Episodes typically last thirty minutes to two hours and occur in the last week of life. The content is overwhelmingly meaningful — recognition, blessing, gratitude, goodbye.
If terminal lucidity speaks to what happens inside the dying person, the second phenomenon we will consider speaks to what sometimes happens to the people sitting beside them.
Researchers call them shared death experiences, or SDEs. The term was popularized by Dr. Raymond Moody — the same physician whose book Life After Life first put the phrase "near-death experience" into the English language. Moody dedicated an entire later book, Glimpses of Eternity, to the strange pattern that family members at the deathbed sometimes report sharing aspects of what the dying person seems to be experiencing.15 William Peters, founder of the Shared Crossing Project, has gathered hundreds of cases in At Heaven's Door.16
The features are surprisingly consistent. Family members at the bedside sometimes report seeing an unaccountable bright light in the room. They report a strong sense of an unseen presence, or a feeling of joy and peace that seems to come from outside themselves. Some hear music that no one in the room is playing. A few report briefly seeming to leave their own bodies alongside the dying person — accompanying them, for a moment, to the threshold and then returning.17 Most often, the family member reports the strange certainty, at the moment of death, of having seen the loved one go.
Here is one case, recorded by Moody from an Atlanta family at the death of their mother. Several adult children and a daughter-in-law were in the room. The mother had not spoken in hours. Her breathing was irregular and they all knew the end was near. Suddenly, a bright light appeared in the room — not a reflection, all the witnesses agreed, and not anything explainable from outside the window. One sister gasped. A brother gasped. They saw their mother's last breath. And as she went, the family agreed afterward that they all watched a kind of luminous archway form near the bed and watched their mother rise up and go through it. One brother heard music. The hospice nurse, when they nervously told her, smiled and said she had heard such accounts before.18
What marks SDEs as a different kind of evidence than NDEs is that the people having the experience are not dying. They are healthy. Their brains are not under stress. They have no oxygen deprivation, no surge of dying-brain chemicals, no medical reason to hallucinate. And yet they are reporting something that overlaps in surprising ways with what NDErs in other cases have described from the inside. Peter Fenwick and Sue Brayne, in their British end-of-life research, found that around five percent of dying patients' bedsides involved some form of shared experience reported by witnesses.19 Small statistically — but most pastors who ask their hospice nurse friends will hear at least one such story.
SDEs are emerging research. We do not have centuries of careful documentation. We have decades, a handful of serious researchers, and a growing body of accounts. So I engage them humbly. But I do not dismiss them, because the Bible itself — quietly and unsensationally — gives us a category for what they may be.
Scripture does not treat the world we see as the only world there is. Again and again, it pictures human beings standing in the middle of a richer reality than their senses normally register, and it pictures God, on certain rare occasions, opening their eyes. Think of Elisha and his frightened servant, surrounded at dawn by an enemy army. Elisha prayed simply, "O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see." And the text says: "So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha" (2 Kings 6:17). The chariots had been there the whole time. The servant just couldn't see them. Or think of Stephen, dying under stones outside Jerusalem. Just before the killing blow, his face shines and he cries out, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). His persecutors saw nothing. He saw heaven.
The barrier between the world we know and the world we will one day inhabit is, in Scripture, not a thick concrete wall. It is a veil. And sometimes — at deathbeds especially — the veil seems to thin. Shared death experiences fit, in a non-spectacular way, into that biblical pattern. They suggest that something objectively real happens when a saint of God dies — something that can sometimes be perceived by those nearby. They are not a basis for new doctrine. They are not a replacement for Scripture. They are a quiet confirmation that the picture Scripture has been painting all along is true: there is more in the room than what the camera sees.
A Note on Discernment: Shared death experience research is newer than NDE research and the cases vary in quality. We weigh them by Scripture, not the other way around. We do not seek SDEs as a goal, treat them as required for hope, or build doctrine on them. Where the content of an SDE seems consistent with Christian faith — light, peace, the sense of a loved one safely received — we receive it gratefully. Where any reported experience contradicts Scripture, presses toward the occult, or produces fear rather than peace, we apply the discernment framework explored more fully in Chapter 25.
I have called this chapter "Terminal Lucidity, Shared Death Experiences, and the Dignity of Dying," and the third part of the title is the heart of the matter.
What both phenomena testify to — quietly, separately, in their different ways — is the same uncomfortable, beautiful truth: the dying person is still a person. Not a husk. Not "already gone." A real human being, made in the image of God, present until God Himself receives her.20 Terminal lucidity says it from the inside: the soul is still there, even when the brain seems to have buried it. Shared death experiences say it from the outside: something real is happening, and sometimes those at the bedside are allowed a glimpse.
This has practical consequences. The man in the hospital bed who has not spoken in eight days is not a vacant body. Speak to him. Tell him you love him. Read him Psalm 23 — slowly, the way you would for a person who is listening, because he may be. Hearing is the last sense to fade in dying, and it sometimes outlasts every visible sign of awareness. Sing to him. Pray over him. Do not stand in the corner and discuss the funeral as if he were not there.
Sarah did not know any of this when she walked into her father's room that last Tuesday. She had been told, gently, that her father was "essentially gone." She had been told the kindest thing was to remember him as he was. So she read Psalm 23 because she needed to hear it, not because she believed he could. And then her father — her father — said her name. He had been there all along.
If the research in this chapter does anything for the grieving reader, I hope it does this: I hope it gives you back, in retrospect, the personhood of the loved one whose dying you witnessed. The slack hand you held was the hand of a person. The blank stare you sat under was not the whole of who was in that bed. The God who made your loved one was the God receiving them. And the dignity that began at conception did not lapse before the last breath. It went home with them.
1. Did you witness anything in your loved one's final days or hours that surprised you — a moment of clarity, a remembered phrase, an unexpected recognition? What did you make of it at the time? What might it mean now, in light of this chapter?
2. Have you carried any guilt or sadness from feeling that your loved one was "already gone" before they died? How does the possibility of terminal lucidity, or simply the conviction that the soul outlasts the brain, change what you carry?
3. Did you, or anyone in the room, sense or see anything unusual at the moment of death — a light, a presence, a peace, a knowing? Have you ever told anyone about it? Why or why not?
4. Where in Scripture does the idea of a "thin veil" between this world and the next become real to you? (You might sit for a while with 2 Kings 6:17 or Acts 7:55–60.)
5. If you knew that the dying person could still hear you, what would you want to say or sing to them — words you wish you had said, or words you still want to say to the next person you sit with?
6. How would your church, your family, or your circle of friends be different if everyone treated the dying as fully present until the last breath? What would change in the rooms where people die in your life?
7. Is there a hymn, a psalm, or a prayer you would want sung over you in your last hours? Have you told anyone what it is?
Terminal lucidity is the moment many families wait for and dread missing. They live for weeks or years with the slow grief of a parent or spouse who is "gone but not gone," and a part of them aches for one more clear conversation. Sometimes — not always, but often enough that pastors should know — that conversation is given. The pastor's first and most important job is to prepare the family to receive it without missing it.
What to say to the family of a long-declined patient. "She may surface for a few minutes in the days ahead. Watch for it. Don't be afraid of it. Speak to her any time you are in the room — whether she seems to hear you or not. Hearing is the last thing to go. Many families have been given a final clear word in the last hours, and almost no one regrets staying close." That is the pastoral counsel. It costs nothing if no lucid moment comes. It buys everything if one does.
What not to say. "She's already gone." (You do not know this, and the research suggests you may be wrong.) "There's no point talking — she can't hear you." (False comfort that robs the family of a final ministry.) "He hasn't been himself in years." (He has been himself the whole time. The expression has been muted, not the soul.) Watch for the well-meaning hospital staff member who says these things to a family on autopilot, and gently, after the family has left the room, make a different case to them.
If a shared death experience is reported. A daughter mentions, half-embarrassed, that the room felt "full of light" at the moment of her father's death. A son, weeping, says he felt his mother "leave through the ceiling." Do not roll your eyes. Do not change the subject. Do not say, "That was your imagination" or "That was your grief talking." The right response is, simply: "Tell me everything. I have heard this kind of thing before. It often comes at sacred moments." Listen. Receive it. Confirm that you have read of similar accounts in serious research. Then guard discernment: gently note, if it ever becomes an issue, that we evaluate any such experience by Scripture, not the other way around — and that the test of a real visit from grace is the peace it leaves behind.
The bedside ministry implication. Encourage families to do five things in the dying days, regardless of the patient's apparent awareness: (1) speak to the patient by name; (2) say "I love you," "thank you," "I forgive you," "please forgive me," and "goodbye" — even if not all in one visit; (3) read short Scripture passages aloud, slowly (Psalm 23, Romans 8:38–39, John 14:1–3, Revelation 21:1–4); (4) sing a hymn the patient knew; (5) pray. None of this requires the patient to respond. All of it honors the personhood that is still there. (We will treat bedside ministry more fully in Chapter 27.)
One quiet pastoral note for yourself. Some pastors fear they will say the wrong thing in the room of the dying. The truth is: presence matters more than eloquence. If you walk into the room, sit down, hold a hand, and say a short prayer — you have done the central thing. You will be the one the family remembers came. And if the dying person, in some final lucid moment, hears your voice and is comforted by it, you have done a thing only the grace of God can fully measure.
Glimpses of Eternity by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry — the book that introduced shared death experiences to a wide audience; readable and full of cases.
At Heaven's Door by William Peters — the most recent serious treatment of SDEs, drawing on the research of the Shared Crossing Project; valuable for pastors and serious lay readers.
Death Is But a Dream by Christopher Kerr — a hospice physician's gentle, evidence-rich reflection on end-of-life experiences; pastoral in tone, secular in stance.
Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 by J. Steve Miller — the most comprehensive Christian-scholarly engagement with terminal lucidity, SDEs, and related phenomena.
Michael Nahm's articles on terminal lucidity, especially "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia" (with Bruce Greyson) and "The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer" — the foundational research literature for anyone wanting the primary scholarly sources.
1 Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (December 2009): 942–944. ↩
2 Nahm and Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity," 943; see also Michael Nahm, Wenn die Dunkelheit ein Ende findet: Terminale Geistesklarheit und andere ungewöhnliche Phänomene in Todesnähe [When the Darkness Comes to an End: Terminal Lucidity and Other Phenomena around Death] (Amerang, Germany: Crotona Verlag, 2012), 138–140. For an accessible overview in English, see J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), chap. 8, "Terminal Lucidity." ↩
3 Henry Halford, Essays and Orations Read and Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1833), 90, as cited in Nahm and Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity," 942. ↩
4 Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson, "The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: A Case Study in Terminal Lucidity," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 68, no. 1 (January 2013): 77–87. ↩
5 Nahm and Greyson, "The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer," 84, quoting W. Wittneben, "Erziehung, Behandlung und Pflege Geistesschwacher," Geisteskrankenpflege 38 (1934): 153. ↩
6 S. Brayne, H. Lovelace, and P. Fenwick, "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants," American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine 25, no. 3 (2008): 195–206; see also P. Fenwick, H. Lovelace, and S. Brayne, "Comfort for the Dying: Five Year Retrospective and One Year Prospective Studies of End of Life Experiences," Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 51 (2010): 173–179. Both studies are cited and discussed in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1, chap. 8, "Terminal Lucidity," under "Are These Instances Sporadic, or Quite Common?" ↩
7 A. D. Macleod, "Lightening Up Before Death," Palliative and Supportive Care 7 (2009): 513–516; cited in Nahm and Greyson, "The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer," 85. ↩
8 Alexander Batthyany, "The Light Before the End of the Tunnel: Preliminary Results from the Multi-Phase Terminal Lucidity Study," presented as YouTube video "Alexander Batthyany — Terminal Lucidity: Preliminary Data 2014," posted July 23, 2015; discussed in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1, chap. 8, "Terminal Lucidity." ↩
9 Nahm and Greyson, "Terminal Lucidity," 943. ↩
10 S. Brayne and P. Fenwick, "The Case for Training to Deal with End-of-Life Experiences," European Journal of Palliative Care 15, no. 3 (2008): 118–120. ↩
11 For a careful summary of the explanatory difficulty terminal lucidity poses to strict materialism, see Alexander Moreira-Almeida, "Implications of Spiritual Experiences to the Understanding of Mind–Brain Relationship," Asian Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 6 (December 2013): 585–589; and Miller, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1, chap. 8, "Terminal Lucidity," under "Conclusions: A Dying Brain or Mind-Brain Separation?" ↩
12 Discussed in John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 7, "Holistic Dualism and Modern Knowledge." ↩
13 Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), as quoted in Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7, "Holistic Dualism and Modern Knowledge." ↩
14 Quoted in Batthyany, "The Light Before the End of the Tunnel"; cited in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1, chap. 8, "Terminal Lucidity." ↩
15 Raymond Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from This Life to the Next (New York: Guideposts, 2010). ↩
16 William J. Peters, At Heaven's Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022). ↩
17 For a typology of features, see Peters, At Heaven's Door, especially chaps. 2–4; and G. Howarth and A. Kellehear, "Shared Near-Death and Related Illness Experiences," Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (2001): 71–85. ↩
18 Moody, Glimpses of Eternity, 13–14; case retold and analyzed in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, Volume 1, chap. 9, "Shared Death Experiences." ↩
19 Peter Fenwick and Sue Brayne, "End-of-Life Experiences: Reaching Out for Compassion, Communication, and Connection — Meaning of Deathbed Visions and Coincidences," American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine 28, no. 1 (2011): 7–15. ↩
20 On the dignity of the human person as image-bearer of God, see Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), chap. 4, "The Image of God," especially the discussion of dignity grounded in the image. ↩
Batthyany, Alexander. "The Light Before the End of the Tunnel: Preliminary Results from the Multi-Phase Terminal Lucidity Study." Presented as the YouTube video "Alexander Batthyany — Terminal Lucidity: Preliminary Data 2014," posted July 23, 2015.
Brayne, Sue, and Peter Fenwick. "The Case for Training to Deal with End-of-Life Experiences." European Journal of Palliative Care 15, no. 3 (2008): 118–120.
Brayne, S., H. Lovelace, and P. Fenwick. "End-of-Life Experiences and the Dying Process in a Gloucestershire Nursing Home as Reported by Nurses and Care Assistants." American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine 25, no. 3 (2008): 195–206.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.
Fenwick, Peter, H. Lovelace, and S. Brayne. "Comfort for the Dying: Five Year Retrospective and One Year Prospective Studies of End of Life Experiences." Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 51 (2010): 173–179.
Fenwick, Peter, and Sue Brayne. "End-of-Life Experiences: Reaching Out for Compassion, Communication, and Connection — Meaning of Deathbed Visions and Coincidences." American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine 28, no. 1 (2011): 7–15.
Halford, Henry. Essays and Orations Read and Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1833.
Howarth, G., and A. Kellehear. "Shared Near-Death and Related Illness Experiences." Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (2001): 71–85.
Macleod, A. D. "Lightening Up Before Death." Palliative and Supportive Care 7 (2009): 513–516.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After Death Communications. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Moody, Raymond, with Paul Perry. Glimpses of Eternity: Sharing a Loved One's Passage from This Life to the Next. New York: Guideposts, 2010.
Moreira-Almeida, Alexander. "Implications of Spiritual Experiences to the Understanding of Mind–Brain Relationship." Asian Journal of Psychiatry 6, no. 6 (December 2013): 585–589.
Nahm, Michael. Wenn die Dunkelheit ein Ende findet: Terminale Geistesklarheit und andere ungewöhnliche Phänomene in Todesnähe [When the Darkness Comes to an End: Terminal Lucidity and Other Phenomena around Death]. Amerang, Germany: Crotona Verlag, 2012.
Nahm, Michael, and Bruce Greyson. "The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: A Case Study in Terminal Lucidity." Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 68, no. 1 (January 2013): 77–87.
Nahm, Michael, and Bruce Greyson. "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature." The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (December 2009): 942–944.
Penfield, Wilder. The Mystery of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Peters, William J. At Heaven's Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.