Washington Post
Reporting on Deathbed Visions Changed How I Think about the End of Life
By Caitlin Gibson
Late one night, about a week before my mother died of cancer, she lay awake and restless in a hospital bed that we’d placed on the first floor of my parents’ house. She and my dad were the only ones home, but she suddenly saw other people in the room: her parents and my father’s parents, all four of whom had died many years earlier. It felt so astoundingly real to her that she woke my father at 2 a.m. to tell him what had happened. She wasn’t sure what to make of it, and — as someone who was both intensely frightened of death and determined not to speak of its imminence — she found the encounter unsettling.
When my father shared this with me the following morning, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, either. Our family is not religious, and I’ve always approached unexplained phenomena with a blend of openness and skepticism. At the time, consumed by dread and anticipatory grief, I did not find my mother’s vision comforting. What had she experienced? I didn’t know, and not knowing scared me.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of this sort of vision. Over the years, similar stories accumulated from friends and acquaintances, including those who worked in hospitals or hospice settings. I noticed the way these accounts were often shared in hushed tones, preceded by hesitant disclaimers: I know how this sounds, but …
American culture does not generally embrace discussion of our own mortality, or of the complexity of loss, even though these are the fundamental truths of our existence. We are uncomfortable with accounts of experiences that lack a concrete explanation or scientific consensus — and much about life’s end remains unknowable.
But as both a journalist and someone well acquainted with loss, I was fascinated by accounts of end-of-life visions and convinced that the phenomenon raised certain questions that could be meaningfully answered. Specifically: how these visions shaped the experience of dying, both for the person departing and for their caregivers and loved ones.
My interest in the topic led me to Chris Kerr, a veteran physician and the chief medical officer for the nonprofit organization Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. Kerr’s groundbreaking research and decades-long experience caring for dying patients were central to the project I reported on end-of-life dreams and visions, or ELDVs. At Hospice Buffalo, staff members and researchers take special note of “dreamers” — their informal term for patients who are actively experiencing ELDVs — and Kerr and his staff agreed to let me know about anyone who might be open to sharing their story.
Later, he called to tell me about one person in particular: 83-year-old Shirley Brydalski, who had arrived at Hospice Buffalo’s inpatient unit accompanied by her devoted daughter, Debbie Eichensehr. In dreams and visions, Shirley was consistently seeing the beloved grandmother who raised her as a young girl and the idyllic farm where they’d lived together. But that cherished chapter of her childhood ended in a trauma she’d long kept secret — one she was only now disclosing to her daughter.
It is an exceedingly delicate thing to approach a dying person and their family to ask if they might be willing to let a perfect stranger spend time with them, particularly when time itself feels painfully finite. But Kerr explained that the vast majority of his patients were eager to share what they were experiencing — they often conveyed that they felt a sense of validation and connection in doing so — and this proved true of Shirley and Debbie. When I first spoke to Debbie, I emphasized that her family’s well-being would come first, that I understood how vulnerable the final stage of life is, and that I intended to prioritize their needs.
I arrived in Buffalo just in time to share some of Shirley’s last lucid hours. It was extraordinary to be present at her bedside as she described visions of the farm and her grandmother with clear, unwavering certainty. Shirley never used religious or mystical terms to explain what was happening; she never tried to explain it at all. It simply was. Whether anyone else understood it, whether anyone else believed it — that had no bearing on the very real way this experience was defining the final chapter of her life.
When The Washington Post published Shirley and Debbie’s story, we also invited readers to share their own experiences with deathbed dreams and visions. I felt optimistic that we might receive a few dozen submissions. We wound up with nearly 500.
I read them all. Each offered its own intimate, fleeting glimpse into the final weeks, days or hours of a life, with distinctive details — yet there were also commonalities that bound many of these stories together, and it was impossible to absorb them in their totality and not feel deeply moved. (I cried at my desk more than once.)
The submissions came from mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, friends, spouses, nurses and doctors. They came from all kinds of people and from places all over the world. They came from those who felt that end-of-life visions affirmed their religious or spiritual beliefs, and from those who emphasized that they held no such beliefs. Some of the accounts were recent, and others were decades old, the details still vivid in memory.
This collection of accounts is not a scientifically relevant or representative sample. Still, many aligned with themes identified by Hospice Buffalo’s research . A Post analysis of the submissions found that deceased loved ones featured prominently in the visions: roughly a quarter of the entries included a dying person who saw their deceased mother; about one-fifth saw a sibling. Slightly fewer people reported visions of deceased fathers and spouses. Pets made appearances, too: Among the visions that included animals, dogs were most common; one man reached out from his hospital bed to stroke the fur of the dog he’d lost years ago. Another elderly woman saw her father guiding her favorite childhood horse, saddled up and ready to ride.
I noticed numerous accounts of people who spoke of celebratory events — insisting that they were on their way to a party or that they could hear loved ones gathered nearby. One woman told the relatives at her bedside to move out of the way because they were blocking her view of a parade.
In my reporting, Kerr told me that researchers often heard patients describe themes related to travel and transportation, a commonality reflected in submissions to The Post. About a quarter referenced some form of travel: There were people who tried to pack suitcases; who had visions of buses, trains or rowboats; who said that a loved one told them they would be arriving soon to take them on a trip. Numerous submissions also described dying people who appeared wholly immersed in visions of routine activities that were once part of their daily lives, behaving as if they were somewhere else entirely as they physically acted out familiar motions — making soup, leading a horse to a barn, playing an organ at church, painting, casting a fishing line.
Not everyone was comforted by their dreams or visions. Some people wrote of relatives or patients who appeared frightened or distressed; one woman (who is included among 10 selected stories published by The Post) shouted furiously the first time she seemed to converse with a vision of her long-dead mother.
But the majority of the accounts we received did seem to convey a sense of peace or solace. Over and over, people described the enduring impact of witnessing a dying person appear to interact with people they’d loved and lost. There was the elderly woman whose last words were a single, repeated refrain, spoken to someone only she could see: “I need you, Mama.” There was the man who looked at his daughter just before he stopped breathing, his voice brightening as he told her: “Everyone’s waiting.”
What to make of all this? Anyone who encounters this phenomenon will surely have their own interpretation; death is deeply personal to every one of us, because every one of us is going to die, and many of us have lost people we’ve loved.
When I asked Kerr what he makes of this, he told me that his years of caring for and studying “dreamers” have convinced him that we are never as far as we might feel from the people, places and moments that meant the most to us. Through their dreams and visions, his patients have processed long-buried traumas and reconnected with those they’d been missing; Kerr has seen hospice patients experience profound emotional growth as well as clinically significant relief from mental and physical suffering. Through this experience at the end of their lives, he said, it feels “like they are being put back together.”
Maybe this results from the rapidly firing synapses of a brain shutting down. Maybe it is caused by something else entirely. There is no universally agreed-upon explanation for why the phenomenon occurs. The dying tell us only that it does, articulating as best they can — within the limitations of language — what they are perceiving and feeling.
In the end, I found myself once again wondering: What exactly did my mother experience?
I still don’t know. But something has shifted, over months spent immersed in these stories. The unanswerable questions remain, but I feel more equipped to hold them with a sense of awe and possibility, rather than fear. There may be elements of the mystery we never understand — and others that grow clearer, someday, should we find ourselves among the dreamers.
(Kevin Crowe contributed to this report.
The Post analyzed 479 reader-submitted narratives about end-of-life visions experienced by their loved ones or people for whom they were caring. The artificial intelligence model ChatGPT 4.1-mini was used to identify the kinds of people and themes present in the visions, with a backstop of manual checking for accuracy by reporters. The Washington Post)
