Vivid visits from loved ones who have already died are among the clearest signs someone is about to die. That is the view of Dr. Christopher Kerr, a hospice physician who has cared for dying patients for 27 years. Kerr made the point in an interview on Oprah Winfrey’s podcast, telling her that such an experience means a person is “very close to the end.”
Many families who have sat with a dying relative will know the scene. A mother talks to a brother who died forty years ago. A grandfather says his late wife was just sitting in the chair by the window. Kerr’s position is that these moments should be taken at face value, not dismissed.
Sleep, then visitors: signs someone is about to die
According to Kerr, the visions usually come with a change most families notice early on: the patient sleeps more and more each day. He explained that this deepening sleep is where people become more and more absorbed in the experiences.
The visits also tend to grow stronger as death gets closer. Patients describe real people and real events from their own lives. Kerr says they remember what they saw with complete clarity afterward.
“They’re not dream-like, and there’s not symbolism, they’re not metaphor,” he told Winfrey.
Why he won’t call them dreams
Kerr avoids the word “dream” on purpose. He draws a firm line between these experiences and the ordinary dreams everyone has at night, and his patients draw the same line. Some are offended when a doctor suggests they were only dreaming, because to them it was a real visitation.
Patients also don’t treat the visions as puzzles to solve. Kerr says there are no hidden messages or symbols to decode. In all his years of hospice work, he said, “I’ve never had a patient ask me, ‘What do you think this means?'”
This matters for anyone sitting at a bedside. A relative who corrects a dying parent, or treats the vision as confusion, may be brushing aside something the patient experiences as real and important.
Children often see a beloved pet
Kerr says the pattern looks different in children with a terminal illness. Many are too young to have lost a grandparent or other close relative. So the figure who appears is often a pet that has died, or sometimes a family friend.
In his account, the animal carries the same meaning for a child that a late parent or spouse carries for an adult. Children also relate to the experience in their own way. “They don’t have language for mortality, finality,” Kerr said. He added that young patients don’t separate the imaginary from the real the way adults do.
Even so, he said, these children often understand very clearly that their lives are coming to an end.
The research behind the bedside stories
Kerr’s comments come from formal research as well as his bedside work. He is chief medical officer at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo in New York. There he and his colleagues have studied end-of-life dreams and visions by interviewing patients directly about what they experience.
He brought that work to a wider audience in his 2020 book, Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life’s End. His appearance with Winfrey has put those findings in front of a much larger audience.
His message to families comes down to two observations from nearly three decades of hospice work. A loved one who sleeps far more than usual and speaks of visits from the dead may be in their final days. And in Kerr’s experience, those visits become clearer, not fainter, as the end approaches.
