Posted on 09/09/2025 9:49:28 AM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
After years at the bedside of dying patients, a hospice doctor noticed a striking pattern – when the end comes, people don’t cling to fear. In its place come final words that are quiet, powerful, and often shockingly unexpected.
While death is one of the most feared and least discussed parts of life, it is a moment of deep psychological transformation for many. Dr. Christopher Kerr, a palliative care physician with over two decades of experience at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, has studied more than 1,500 end-of-life events. His findings challenge our traditional understanding of dying – not as a void, but as a “unique vantage point” that “changes one’s perspective and perception.”
“It naturally draws you inward. There’s reflection, and often people focus on the best points of having lived and having mattered. And that’s usually our relationships,” said Dr. Kerr, who heads the research team on dreams and visions at the end of life.
Contrary to what many expect, the final days of life are not always filled with fear.
“We’ve all been harmed in one way or another for having lived, and we seem to get put back together through these experiences,” he told the Sun. “And so, the life you live gets validated, and inversely, the fear of death seems to lessen.”
Kerr’s research shows that most dying patients experience powerful dreams or visions – sometimes involving meetings with long-lost loved ones or recalling significant life events – that provide emotional closure......
According to Kerr, children experience death differently – often because they don’t fully grasp its finality.
Instead of fear, many terminally ill children see comforting visions, like animals that assure them they’re “loved and not alone.”
“Children are creative and imaginative and can access that part of them,” Kerr said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Great timing on comic relief, even if he was serious.
I love the gems we heard from our parents as they were in their passing days. Sometimes sweet, sometimes funny, always loving.
My father mentored me on dying. He had been a US Army combat veteran who was involved with two amphibious landings on two Japanese held island in the Pacific during WW2. He had faced death before, so he had a different perspective. He had relished and enjoyed life after surviving WW2. He had no regrets.
One of the things he said shortly before his death, was that “It is time for me to experience this next step.”
In my last visit with him before his death, I told him about all the wonderful things we had done in my childhood, some of the great things he had done with my children (his grandchildren) and how proud I was of his accomplishments.
The elderly man (who my dad knew) who shared the nursing home room told my mom, when she collected Dad’s final possessions told her that dad had been so happy and peaceful when he passed just after I left that final day.
Posting this story is valuable, as it will hopefully help some who read it to mentor their children and spouses on both living a good life and dying a good death.
It's on my bucket list.
Not me...they'll never take me alive.
For a couple days before Mom died at home in 2024, she would have long clear conversations with her sister who had died in 2019. My brother’s family lived with her at the homestead.
Our nephews told us that Mom would say variations of, “No, Lucy. You can’t come here; I have to go there!” “I forgive you.” (We think that had to do with my aunt totaling Mom’s car when she was 90.) She was quite talkative for those few days. Nobody knows exactly what her last words were.
You surely digitized your father's war record - so which two islands were they?
Regards,
Back in 1998, my Dad suffered a fall that caused significant brain bleed. His last words to me as he took my hand and pulled me closer to him were, “I can still break your damned arm!”
Certainly not the Abrahamic blessing I would have liked. I’ll have a talk with him in a few years when I get there.
Since we’re on the topic, I think some of you may find this article thought provoking as written by a great mind, Gordon Duff.
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2025/07/10/proof-of-eternal-life-and-the-war-against-satans-ai-army/
My mom’s final sound was a gasp of utter joy! It’s good on the other side.
Is this the same guy who says ‘Jews belong in Germany, not Israel’? And that the Jewish population of NYC are ‘“Jewish” in name but primarily Russian slavs’?
What does he think ‘Jewish’ means?
thanks
Satanist Anton LaVey’s last words: “Oh my, oh my, what have I done! There’s something very wrong, there’s something very wrong, there’s something very wrong!”
My husband’s cousin told this while preaching a funeral:
One of their aunts was in the hospital, near death. She told the relative at the bedside, “There are my people on the other side of that river. They’re all motioning for we to come across. I’m coming! Wait. Now they’re motioning for me to go back!” She did in fact stay on this side, and recovered!
For me to come across, not we.
Monty Python reference! Well done! Those chapters of the movie (The Meaning of Life) are superlative.
LOL! Funny story. Thanks.
Great story.
That’s funny!
Ok, here is my most amazing “death” story.
My mom died of ALS. Her final moments SHOULD have been in her bedroom with me singing Amazing Grace with her. She stopped breathing and it was very peaceful. But unaware of her DNR, my siblings called 911 and the EMTs had to resuscitate her (against her stated wishes). All the way to the hospital, in the ambulance she kept saying, “Let me go! They are waiting for me!”
She died 2 days later at the hospital. And it was the very moment I sang Amazing Grace to her again!
That is not even the most amazing thing, for a week after she passed. When I’d go up to pray with my 3 year old son at night, he kept telling me that memaw was there with us. He talked to her just as if she were there. I only got his side of the conversation, but it was for sure like he was talking to someone! According to him, she was getting on her knees and praying with us. And he told me she’d sit on the end of the bed and talk to him for a bit.
He described her as a young woman, and I know he had never seen photos of her like that. He did see a young photo of her a few months later when going through her estate, and he identified her immediately.
Anyway, this went on a week and then one night I went in to say good night and pray and he said memaw was gone to be with Jesus and that she’d said all she was supposed to to him.
I cannot explain this from a doctrinal point of view, but I know something happened there. It makes me teary eyed to this day!
My sister said she felt like she was eavesdropping on mom’s conversations.
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