Visitors at the End of Life : Finding Meaning and Purpose in Near-Death Phenomena

About 30 percent of hospice patients report a "visitation" by someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions—from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New Guinea—report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the historical record. But in recent years, we have tended to explain them in either the fantastical terms of the supernatural or the reductive terms of neuroscience. This book is about how, when, and why our dead visit us. Allan Kellehear—a medical sociologist and expert on death, dying, and palliative care—has gathered data and conducted studies on these experiences across cultures. He also draws on the long-neglected work of early anthropologists who developed cultural explanations about why the dead visit. Deathbed visions conform to the rituals that underpin basic social relations and expectations—customs of greeting, support, exchange, gift-giving, and vigils—because the dead must communicate with us in a social language that we recognize. Kellehear emphasizes the personal consequences for those who encounter these visions, revealing their significance for how the dying person makes meaning of their experiences. Providing vital understanding of a widespread yet mysterious phenomenon, Visitors at the End of Life offers insights for palliative care professionals, researchers, and the bereaved. "About 30 percent of hospice patients report to their palliative caretakers a "visitation" by someone who is not there: a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a death-bed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members, and typically occur on average three days before death. Most interestingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions all report similar visions. Allan Kellehear, a medical anthropologist and expert on death and dying, has gathered data and conducted studies on these experiences across cultures, and found analogs between places as diverse as New York and Melanesia. (The visitations Kellehear will discuss are not the same as what are commonly called near-death experiences. NDEs usually contain life review, out-of-body sensations, and tunnel vision and occur when the percipient directly risks death.) Kellehear proposes an examination of these experiences across categorical types (types of visitations, from dead friends, family members, and even strangers) and in their analogs across cultures (from Westerners to countries like Papua New Guinea)"-- Provided by publisher