Hospice Workers Describe Deathbed Visions Patients Have

By working with the dying, hospice nurses gain an insight into death and the opportunity to witness the signs of a life beyond our own. I had one gentleman, three months after I started working in hospice, I thought, I can’t do this anymore, this is just too much, I’m going to get burned out or it’s just too stressful. And so just as I was really trying to debate whether I was going to leave this field or not, I had an experience that just kind of blew me away. 

One of the LPNs came up to me and said Mr. so -and -so just died and so I took that information and we said all right we’ll call the physician and call the coroner and get all the information that we need and I was walking down the hall making bed checks and sure everybody was okay and this one old fellow was climbing out of bed. He was really out of pain control and I was thinking you know we need to get him settled down and I walked into the room and I said, “Let me help you get taken care of” and he said, “I got to get out of here,” and I said, “I understand,” you know and he said, “I have to die,” and I said, “You know, I would probably want to die too if I had that much pain and let me help you. Let me see what we can do.” He said, “No, you don’t understand,” he said, “I have to die.” And I said, well, I don’t know where it came from and I said, “Well, you have to wait till you get your own invitation. Sometimes just because we want to die doesn’t mean we get to die we have to wait until it’s time.”

Well, that guy down there just got his invitation and he said, “I knew him from Lyman.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, he just shuffled by here.” And I, hair on the back of my neck, stood up and I said, I thought that was a curious term, shuffled by. And he said, “I want you to go get my son.” He said, “I knew him. I knew him from Lyman when we were kids.” And he said, “He just shuffled by.” And he points from his door to the window and how it crossed in front of his bed. And I thought, boy, there’s a lot I don’t know yet.

I had a kid that I lost last week who saw horses. He saw a horse and his dream was about two weeks before he died. He was on this big brown horse and they were going through this field, and it was very smooth It wasn’t like a gallop and but they weren’t flying and he said that all of a sudden they kind of jumped over a barrier and when they landed they landed in a riverbank that had overflowed its beds. And it stopped the horse stopped and turned sideways waiting for this kid to tell him which way to go, whether to go into the woods or out of the woods. And I asked him which way he chose and he said, “Well, we went out,” and I said “What do you think would happen if you’d gone into the woods?” He said “I think I’d have been gone.” And I told him I thought he hit he would too and I told him that that the horse would probably come back for him when it was time for him to go. That horse would be the one to come back. Well, that afternoon his mom was washing dishes and the horse came and she went to talked to him and she asked David if his horse was there and he said yes and she said “I think he’s probably here to get you,” and she said “I think so too.” And within two hours he had gone. He had died on his horse.  

You feel a presence you feel something is in the room you know that there’s something there. One time there was this man and he was really really close to death and he was very, very weak and he looked up and he was looking at something and he looked very, very scared and the nurse said to him, “It’s okay, they’re there to help you, they won’t hurt you.” And he put his hand up and he had his hand up like somebody was holding it and he did this for a few minutes. And there is no way this man had the strength to hold his hand up by himself, and he died just a few minutes later too, so there’s something.

I had one really neat fellow that we were taking to the hospice unit, and he was really close to dying, and his son was nearby. This poor guy went through an incredible bath from the nurse, and he didn’t move at all, didn’t even blink an eye. So we would say he was unresponsive. And as we were walking down the hall, pushing his bed down the hall, he opened his eyes, and he looked straight up, and his little toothless mouth, and he went, and waved, and then just smiled and closed his eyes, and five minutes later he was gone. I don’t know who he was waving at, but that’s not uncommon. As death approaches, patients may have visions of angels or see tunnels of white light. Other people receive angelic comfort from someone they already know.

Patients who are closer to their dying time will see those who have already died, oftentimes. They’ll talk about dead grandparents sitting at their bedside, brothers who have died before. I’m not so certain that we just see spirits running around. I don’t really believe that. I’ve never heard anything that scary, but I have heard of a lot of patients who are very afraid of dying talk about seeing a father-in-law in the kitchen. And that would scare me out of my mind, but they’re not afraid. And it really made me realize about how they’re just sort of drifting to the other side. They have one foot here and one foot somewhere else. And a patient who’s very frightened will tell you that, and yet for some reason it doesn’t bother them. That bothered me.

Mary was a 52-year-old woman. She had Lou Gehrig’s disease and It was getting pretty bad. She was pretty close to death and the muscles in her throat were closing up They weren’t working very well, and she had this fear that she was going to drown, which is essentially was a real possibility for her and one of her last wishes was that her mother not be told. Her mother was 90 years old and her mother liked to be called Grandma Rose. She just said “This is too hard for a mother to go through to watch a child die, especially the way I’m dying I don’t want my mother to know.” Now the family was in conflict with this but it was her last wish, so what could they do?

And then the story as Grandma Rose tells me is she was, she lived in Texas, and one night she went to bed, she was getting into bed and she saw her husband standing there. And her husband had been dead for 20 years. But she says that he was as real to her as I am to you and he said “Rose I’ve come to take Mary home,” and at that point Grandma Rose she just started to scream and said “No, no, please let me go back and hold my baby one more time. Don’t take her until I’ve gone and I’ve held her and I’ve said goodbye and I’ve kissed her please don’t do that.” And so he just kind of smiled and faded away and she knew at that point that he would allow that.

So she got on the next plane she came to Denver and for three days she stayed with her daughter and she told her stories and she combed her hair and she gave her bath and she was holding her daughter when she died. And I was there and she just looked at me and she said “You know I brought her into the world and it’s only right that I’m with when she goes out.” And that would have never happened if Mary’s husband wouldn’t have come to her and told her that he was taking her home.

Like one person said to me, “It’s easy for you to say it’s going to be peaceful. You’re not going to die,” you know. And I, you know, you’re right. All I know is what I see. And all I know is that somewhere along the line, you’re not going to be afraid anymore. Somewhere in that last, those last hours, it’s going to go away. Somebody will throw you a lifeline.