I’m an End-of-Care Physician Who’s Examined a Thousand People on Their Deathbeds—Here’s What Patients See Before They Die

Faced with death, what would be the first thing that comes to mind?

According to one end-of-life doctor, patients usually have visions that help them find peace with their life decisions — either through a poignant memory or a totally fantastic vision.

Palliative care physician Dr. Christopher Kerr, of Buffalo, New York, has been studying end-of-life events for years.

He said patients often have dreams and visions that give them a feeling of “love, of getting back together, of getting reacquainted with their loved one.”

“It’s fascinating,” he said.

And children have very different experiences than adults because they have less insight into death, meaning their comfort is often achieved through imagination.

For people with colorful pasts who may have committed crimes in their lives, they seem to have visions associated with the people they affected.

Speaking on the podcast Next level soulDr. Kerr said: “We had a man in his 40s who had spent most of his life in prison. He had drug addictions and he had neck cancer.

“He was dreaming, he was joking, he was very jovial… and then he starts crying because he’s having terrible dreams (of) being stabbed by all the people he’s hurt… and he breaks down.”

“But when he came out, he asked to see a daughter for whom he wanted to express his love and apologize,” Dr. Kerr said.

“And then he died peacefully.”

According to Dr. Kerr, patients “don’t deny the bad and painful things that happen, but they address them and use them in ways that are very interesting.”

The research team at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, where Dr. Kerr works, has published multiple studies on this topic and documented more than 1,500 end-of-life events, many of which were videotaped.

He told me about another patient who had been involved in the invasion of Normandy when he was a teenager. He suffered from PTSD all his life and never received help.

“He came to our department at the end of his life… he had such horrific experiences where he saw body parts and bloody water and screamed and he couldn’t rest.”

Patients have to be relaxed to some extent and accept their situation in order to die, Dr. Kerr said.

‘You can’t really die unless you can sleep. It’s quite difficult to do because you just fall asleep,” he explained.

But one day the patient managed to sleep briefly, and Dr. Kerr asked him what he was dreaming about.

“He says, ‘I had a wonderful dream where I relived the best day of my life,’ the day he got his discharge papers.”

“And I had a really good dream, probably in Normandy, and a soldier he didn’t know came to him and said, ‘No, we’re coming for you.’

The man then slept peacefully and died in his sleep, Dr Kerr said.

“So the feeling that he had let people down came full circle,” the doctor added.

The overall theme is that patients come to peace with the decisions they have made in their lives.

It is at the end of life that you may see what Dr. Kerr called ‘post-traumatic growth’, where positive elements of previous hardships come to light.

Children have a different experience at the end of life, Dr. Kerr said, because they may have no concept of finality or mortality.

They also may not have known anyone who has died as a point of reference or someone they can imagine meeting in some form of afterlife.

Dr. Kerr said children will often see animals that give them the message “that they are loved and not alone.”

“Children are creative and imaginative and they have access to that part of them,” he said.

One girl imagined an entire scene surrounding her as she lay in her hospital bed.

“She made a castle for herself… there was a swimming pool, the animals were brought back, there’s a piano, there was a window with warm light coming through,” Dr Kerr said.

‘When I asked, “What does the castle represent?” she said, “A safe place.”