Humanity has spent its history trying to decipher the secrets of reality, and yet there is still so much that we do not know about it. We wonder what the purpose of life is, but when we look closely at death, it is inevitable to feel fear and uncertainty. What happens after the departure from this sphere? Undoubtedly, it is an answer that we will not be able to resolve in life. All we can know about death is from those in constant contact with it and are constantly experiencing loss. Dreams, as they have noticed, appear and seem to reveal more than our logic can comprehend.
When Dr. Kerr began his task of attending the palliative care section in Buffalo, New York, he noticed a phenomenon to which the nurses seemed accustomed. As he spent more time caring for his patients during their last days, he noticed that as they approached death, many had dreams and visions of deceased loved ones returning to comfort them.
Physicians, with their scientific vision, are trained to understand these visions as delusional hallucinations. Their view is limited to finding the causes of these visions, which most times is associated with various drugs. However, Dr. Kerr decided to momentarily suspend this perspective and began to listen to what his patients had to say. One day in 2005, a terminally ill patient experienced one of these visions. She began to move her arms as if she were rocking a baby, and Kerr realized it was a son the woman had lost decades earlier when the little boy was just a few months old.
Contrary to what his medical logic would say, i.e., appealing to cognitive decline, Dr. Kerr thought this was genuine insight and wondered what would happen if he paid more attention to the stories he saw every day. Thus began his 10-year research that recorded the end-of-life experiences of 1,400 patients and the stories of their families.
Transformative dreams at the verge of death
What he discovered changed his life. More than 80% of his patients, regardless of social class, background, age, or origin, had very similar end-of-life experiences. In almost all cases, the closer they came to death, the more frequent dreams began to occur. Most of them were strange, but they included stories of reconciliation, consolation, and were so vivid, that they were able to transform the patients’ feelings.
They included visions of mothers, fathers, siblings, long-lost loved ones, and even pets that were very close to them. It was about resurrected relationships, about experiencing again a love segregated by death. And often, all these dreams and experiences brought comfort, support, peace, and acceptance to the patients.
Against this backdrop, Dr. Kerr decided to embark on a journey to improve the quality of palliative care patients’ last days. Health systems often isolate terminal patients for many reasons, safety protocols, resources, and other factors. The truth is that they leave aside the human sense and become merely scientific, with the sole purpose of evading death, but not to rescue mental health, sentimental and human dignity.
What happens at death is something we will not understand until the day we leave this plane. For now, we must be satisfied with the stories of those who, day by day, defy the transit to other spheres if they exist.
Text and photos courtesy of Ecoosfera
Translated by María Isabel Carrasco Cara Chards
