WHEN THE DYING BEGIN TO SEE BEYOND OUR WORLD

September 13, 2026

One evening, in the room of a hospice in Buffalo, an eighty-three-year-old woman named Shirley Brydalski began speaking of flowers. Her daughter, Debbie, was sitting beside the hospital bed. Shirley’s eyes were open. “The flowers smell so pretty,” she said. After a while, she told her daughter, “I’m here now. I was on the farm.”

That farm was the place where she had lived with the grandmother who had raised her. She was seeing the grandmother, the farm, the flowers and a life that was now returning to her. (washingtonpost.com)

This is the strange tenderness of deathbed visions. Hospice workers have known this for a long time. A dying father suddenly sees his dead mother. Someone wants to begin packing for a journey. Someone hears music. Someone sees a long-departed spouse waiting quietly in the room.

Recently, The Washington Post invited readers to share their own experiences of such visions. The newspaper later analysed 479 reader-submitted accounts. The patterns were striking. Deceased loved ones appeared again and again. Many included siblings, fathers, spouses etc. Most witnesses described a sense of peace or solace. (washingtonpost.com)

One of the selected accounts concerned a 101-year-old woman named Aline. In her final decline, after weeks of weakness and sleep, she suddenly sat partly upright and called out in a strong voice to Maxine, her beloved elder sister who had died years earlier. “Why are you taking so long?” she asked. After a while she relaxed, closed her eyes and never spoke that way again. (washingtonpost.com)

THE RESEARCH

Dr Christopher Kerr of Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo has done some of the most important modern clinical work on this subject. In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, Kerr and his colleagues studied end-of-life dreams and visions among hospice patients. As death approached, comforting dreams and visions of the deceased became more prevalent. The authors concluded that these are significant, and worthy of clinical attention. (PubMed)

This research is important because modern medicine is often trained to dismiss such accounts only as hallucination.

Sir William Barrett, the physicist and psychical researcher, published Death-bed Visions in 1926. Later, Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson conducted observations from the United States and India, eventually published as At the Hour of Death. These works took seriously what families and nurses had already been seeing: that the dying frequently speak of visitors, departures and another form of presence. (Google Books)

Certainly, some experiences near death may arise from delirium, medication etc. A responsible doctor will examine the possibilities. But it is equally unwise to collapse every final vision into pathology. Delirium is often confused, fragmented and frightening. Many deathbed visions, as recorded in hospice studies, are coherent, meaningful and deeply consoling.

WHAT ANCIENT INDIA SAID

Indian civilisation has regarded death as a passage of consciousness. The Bhagavad Gita gives the unforgettable image: as a person casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so the embodied self casts off worn-out bodies and enters others that are new.

The Gita also says,

“Whatever state of being one remembers when leaving the body, that alone one attains, being ever absorbed in that state”

(Bhagavad Gita 8.6).

The significance of this verse is profound. The impressions gathered over a lifetime, the love, the prayers, the resentment, the attachments, all become part of the inner atmosphere in which one departs.

That is why so many traditions place such importance on the soundscape around the dying. In Indian homes, the final hours are often accompanied by the the Sukhmani Sahib, the Ram Naam, the Gayatri Mantra, the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, or the quiet repetition of Waheguru. These are not social customs. They affect the soul’s journey.

The Katha Upanishad says something profound. Nachiketa, a child, comes face to face with Yama (the God of death) and asks the vital question.

What remains when a person dies?

Yama first offers wealth, long life, pleasures, power and celestial enjoyments. Nachiketa refuses. He knows that possessions cannot answer the terror of mortality.

Yama then teaches

The Self is not born, nor does it die; it is not slain when the body is slain.

Deathbed visions may also be understood in this Upanishadic light. They seem to show that consciousness, at the threshold, often reaches for relationship, memory and meaning. The dying person does not usually see bank balances, disputes, grudges or unfinished arguments. Again and again, what appears is the mother, the spouse, the sibling, the childhood home, the field. It is as if life, before withdrawing, asks one final question: what did you love, and what loved you?

When a dying mother says, “My father is here,” one need not immediately classify the experience as hallucination, or neurochemistry. One may simply ask, “Is he comforting you?”

If the person says a journey is beginning, one may hold the hand and say, “We are here with you.” At that moment, tenderness is truer than debate.

However, if the dying person is agitated, frightened, in pain, or seeing threatening figures, palliative doctors must be informed. Our scriptures advise us that the soul’s journey begins with the arrival of the holy hosts or spirit beings that guide the soul to a different realm. A deep prayer in a congregation is a huge enabler.

A peaceful room, a relieved body, a quiet chant, a loving hand and a listening family can together form the last sanctuary.

Deathbed visions also teach the living how to live. If the final visions are so often of love, reconciliation and belonging, perhaps we should not wait until the last bed to discover their value. We should repair relationships while speech is still strong. We should forgive before memory becomes a corridor of ghosts. We should sit with the old before their last days.

In the Sikh tradition, remembrance is an awakening of the inner consciousness to the Divine Presence. A person who has spent a lifetime in Simran bhakti, gratitude and truthful living has a different inner orientation. The same wisdom flows through the Gita, the Upanishads, Buddhist teachings on mindful dying, and the Christian practice of last prayers.

Death is not only an event that happens to the body.

Perhaps this is why deathbed visions feel sacred even to those who do not know what to believe. They tell us that the deepest impressions of love are not easily erased. The dying often become, in their final days, witnesses to a mystery for which our ordinary language is too poor.

The Isha Upanishad closes with a prayer that seems made for this threshold:

“vyūha raśmīn samūha | tejaḥ yat te rūpaṁ kalyāṇatamaṁ tat te paśyāmi”

Verse 16, Isha Upanishad

(O Pūṣan, O Sun, withdraw your rays so that I may behold your most blessed form)

This verse is part of a sequence of final prayers offered by a dying seeker. The seeker asks symbolically, the divine light of the Sun to stop blinding them with its material brilliance. By withdrawing the external glare, the seeker can look past the physical universe and realize their true identity with the Supreme Spirit (Purusha) hidden within. The verse ultimately concludes with the declaration:

“Yo ‘sāv asau puruṣaḥ so ‘ham asmi”

(Whoever is that Being in the sun, I am He)

Perhaps, in some deathbed visions, a small part of that covering is withdrawn. The dying person sees something that softens the passage.

What do these visions do?

Their importance lies not merely in whether they prove an afterlife. Their more immediate significance is that they seem to perform a function at the edge of life. They provide peace.

And we, who remain, are left with a humbling lesson. At the end, life may only ask what we became capable of loving.

Parneet Sachdev, IRS is the Chairman of Real Estate Regulatory Authority and a leading author.