What deathbed visions teach us about life

The lecture received millions of views and thousands of comments, many of them from nurses who were grateful that someone from the medical field confirmed what they had long understood. Others also posted personal stories about seeing the visions of loved ones in their final days. For them, Kerr’s message was a kind of confirmation of something they knew instinctively: that deathbed visions are real, can provide comfort and can even heal past traumas. That in some cases they can feel transcendent. That our mind is able to conjure up images that ultimately help us give meaning to our lives.

Nothing at Kerr’s medical training prepared him for his first shift at Hospice Buffalo on a Saturday morning in the spring of 1999. He had earned a degree from the Medical College of Ohio while working on a Ph.D. in neurobiology. After a residency in internal medicine, Kerr began a fellowship in cardiology in Buffalo. To earn extra money to support his wife and two young daughters, he took a part-time job at Hospice Buffalo. Until then, Kerr had worked in the conventional medical system, focusing on patients who were often tied to machines or heavily medicated. When they told visions, he had no time to listen. But in the silence of Hospice, Kerr found himself in the presence of something he hadn’t seen since his father’s death: patients talking about people and places visible only to them. “So just like with my father, there’s just a sense of reverence, of something that wasn’t understood but definitely felt,” he says.

During one of his shifts, Kerr checked on a 70-year-old woman named Mary, whose adult children had gathered in her room and were drinking wine to lighten the mood. Without warning, Kerr remembers, Mary sat up in her bed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Danny,” she cooed, kissing and cuddling a baby that only she could see. At first, her children were confused. There was no Danny in the family, no baby in their mother’s arms. But they felt that whatever their mother was going through brought her a sense of calm. Kerr later learned that long before her four children were born, Mary lost a baby during childbirth. She never talked about it to her children, but now, through a vision, she was apparently dealing with that loss.

Observing Mary’s final days in Hospice, Kerr found his calling. “I was disillusioned with the assembly line nature of medicine,” Kerr said. “This felt like a more human and dignified model of care.” He quit cardiology to work full-time at the bedside of dying patients. Many of them described visions that emerged from their lives and seemed to have meaning, as opposed to hallucinations that resulted from medication, or delusions, disjointed thinking, which can also occur at the end of life. But Kerr could not convince other doctors, even young residents who visited him at the Hospice, of their value. They wanted scientific proof.

At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and these were largely based on secondhand reports from doctors and other health care providers rather than on accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010 a research colleague, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a relative who experienced visions before his death: a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his brothers.