Such a long, long time to be gone

About this Video:

Have you ever sat beside someone in their final moments and witnessed something you couldn’t explain? I have—and it happened twice.

In this video, I share what I experienced while sitting with both of my parents as they were dying. They each seemed to speak with loved ones who had passed away years before. That led me down a path of exploring deathbed visions, hospice research, and the possibility that there may be more to our final moments than we understand.

I’m not trying to convince anyone of what to believe. I’m simply asking questions that have become deeply personal as I navigate my own cancer journey. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar. If you have, I’d love to hear your story.

Transcript:

My father spent the last two days of his life talking to people who weren’t in the room. Not confused talk, not the morphine. He looked towards the corner and his face would soften, the way your face does when you recognize someone, and mostly he seemed to be talking to his mother, my grandmother, dead for years.

My mother did the exact same thing right before she died. She also seemed to be talking to her mother. I was in the room for both. Two people, dying years apart, each one at the end turning towards the woman who brought them into the world. Now, I have no idea if this happens with everyone and they talk to their mother or not, but it was true for these two.

And here’s the part I can’t shake. My mother adored her mother. That one fits. My father and his mother, love-hate his whole life. He eventually had to ban her from our house. She was that difficult. And yet, at the door, hers was the face that softened his. If this were just the brain handling our comfort, why hand him the hard one?

You know, the easy thing is to file it under the brain shutting down. That’s the clean explanation, the one that keeps your worldview intact. But I was there. It didn’t feel like a malfunction. It felt like attention, like they were each looking at something real and I was the one who couldn’t see it.

So I started to wonder, what if there’s a space between being alive and being dead?

Not a wall, a space. A room with a door on each end, where for a little while you can talk to whoever’s waiting on the other side. I started calling it the liminal space. And I wanna be clear up front, I’m not an expert on this. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a hospice nurse, and I’m not a researcher. I’m a 73-year-old guy with a cancer diagnosis who sat at two deathbeds and saw the same strange thing happen twice.

That’s my entire credential.

So I went looking. The first book I picked up was Final Gifts, written by two hospice nurses, and it turns out what I saw has a name: deathbed visions. A dying person, awake and lucid, talking with people the rest of us can’t see. Usually people they loved who already died.

It’s common. One study found something like 88% of patients experienced it, and the people who study this don’t think these are hallucinations. Hallucinations are confused and bizarre. These are clear and specific. The dying person knows exactly who they’re talking to, which is exactly what I saw. My father wasn’t disoriented.

He was oriented towards something I couldn’t see.

Now, the man who did the deeper work here isn’t me. He’s Michael Newton, a master hypnotherapist, a skeptic by his own account, and he’s led past life regressions in his practice for years. And when he took clients past a previous life to the space between that death and the next birth, they didn’t go blank.

They described the same place independently, people who never met. He called it life between lives. In his book, Memories of the Afterlife, the cases come from 32 different therapists he trained, all reporting the same kind of thing. And the detail that stood the hair up on my arms, his clients describe being met, greeted by familiar souls, the familiar faces.

His mother showing up to greet him from the corner of the room.

I’m not telling you I believe every piece of it. I’m at the trailhead of this. It’s hypnosis, not a lab. A reasonable person can push back, and they’d be right to.

And let me say it plainly. In as much as I hope this is true, and I hope it more than I can tell you, the jury’s still out for me.

I want it to be real, but wanting it isn’t knowing. But I’m closer to that door than most people watching this. And the question of what’s on the other side has stopped being philosophical for me. It’s gotten practical. These aren’t morbid questions. They’re life-giving ones.

So here’s what I want. A lot of you have a story like mine and have never said it out loud because it sounds just too crazy, because you didn’t want that “that’s just a brain” lecture, open the drawer.

If you’ve watched someone talk to a person who wasn’t there, tell me. If you’ve had your own experience of the space between, tell me that. I’m a beginner here, collecting breadcrumbs, trying to find my way through a wood I’ve never walked, and the company helps.

So drop a comment on what you’ve been experiencing or have experienced, and I’ll see you back here next week.