While most people tend to shy away from contemplating death, Dr. Christopher Kerr from Buffalo, New York, has chosen to focus his career on this subject. Following his father's path, he pursued a career in medicine.
According to the physician, patients nearing the end of life often experience visions or dreams that enable them to come to terms with their life choices. These can manifest as either poignant memories or entirely fantastical images. These experiences frequently convey feelings of "love, reunion, and reacquaintance with a loved one," Kerr observes.
He shares a particularly poignant example: a forty-year-old former inmate, long imprisoned and battling drug addiction and neck cancer, describes finding peace in dreams, only to awaken crying from nightmares of the people he wronged attacking him. This man expressed a final wish to declare his love and apologize to his daughter before dying peacefully, an account Kerr revealed on the Next Level Soul podcast.
Dr. Kerr notes that patients do not shy away from their lives' darker, painful moments. Instead, they often reflect on these moments in surprisingly positive ways.
Another story he shares involves a patient haunted by PTSD after participating in the Normandy invasion as a teenager. The man, who never sought treatment for his PTSD, dreamt one day of the "best day of his life" – the day he was discharged from the hospital. In the dream, he lay in a clinic in Normandy when an anonymous soldier assured him, "it's not time yet, we will come for you," before the man passed away peacefully in his sleep.
The research team at the Hospice and Palliative Care Center in Buffalo, where Dr. Kerr is employed, has published numerous studies on these end-of-life experiences, documenting over 1500 such stories, many captured on video.
Children's experiences differ at life's end
Dr. Kerr points out that children's end-of-life experiences significantly differ from adults', largely due to their limited understanding of death's finality. Their visions and dreams often include animals reassuring them of love and companionship.
"Children have a rich imagination," the doctor stresses.
He recounts the imaginative world of a young girl who transformed her hospital room into a castle complete with a pool, piano, animals, and a window letting in warm light. When asked what the castle meant, she said it symbolized a safe place.
