Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (20 page)

I gently helped him settle back into bed. “Dad, I don’t think I’m going on the trip with you. I’ll miss you while you’re gone, but I’ll be okay.”

“You’re right, honey. I can’t take you with me, but I promise we’ll see each other again.”

During the predawn hours, my father was lying in bed with both arms extended toward the ceiling; it was as if he were reaching for something. I wondered what or whom he was seeing. Was it my grandmother, his mother? Could it be my own mother, his wife, who had died several years earlier? Had they come to take him on this “trip”?

Dad passed later that same morning at 9:50 A.M. at the age of 95. I believe that’s when he began his trip into forever.

After listening to these stories, I was even more convinced that
we cross a threshold when we die: a symbolic journey is completed,
and the body comes to an end. Yet who we are seems to live on and
continue traveling.

In my first book,
The Needs of the Dying
, I talked about the
days when we used to be able to walk someone right up to his or
her gate at the airport. Seeing our friends and family members off
safely was an act of love, even if we were sad to see them go.

Similarly, we can walk beside our loved ones as they reach the
end of their lives, but then we must let go. Yet do they ultimately
die alone? Are there family and friends at their destination—the
“gate” on the other side—just as anxious to greet them? Do they
ever let us get a glimpse of who they are before we die? The stories
in the following chapter provide us with some answers.

CHAPTER EIGHT

C
ROWDED
R
OOMS
AT THE
E
ND OF
L
IFE

“I believe we should adjourn this meeting to another place.”
— final words of Adam Smith

The third type of deathbed experience I often hear about refers to
“crowded rooms.” As I’ve listened to these stories, I’ve been intrigued
by the use of the words
crowd
and
crowded
.
When I started compiling
examples to include in this book, I was surprised by how similar
they were. In fact, it was hard to pick which ones to use because they
were all so much alike. Now I realize that the very thing that makes
them repetitious is also what makes them unique.

Perhaps we don’t have a full grasp of how many people we’ve
touched in our lives. We don’t remember everyone we’ve met, and
we certainly can’t recall all of the individuals who crossed our
paths when we were children. In the tapestry of life and death, we
may not always think about those who have come before us; we
just know where we as individuals are positioned in the family tree.
In dying, however, perhaps we’re able to make the connections to
the past that we’d missed earlier in life.

I often say that when someone is dying, it may be a “standing-room
only” experience. And as I’ve stated previously, I firmly
believe that just as loving hands greet us when we’re born, loving
arms will embrace us when we die.

Here’s one of my own stories about a patient I had named
Alice:

One afternoon I stopped by to visit Alice and her husband, Sal. The nurse told me that Sal had just left for the airport to pick up their son, who was flying in to be with his dying mother. As I entered the room, I found my patient, who was 79 years old, dozing. Not wanting to disturb her, I sat in the chair by her bed. When I got up to leave after a few minutes, I heard a soft voice ask, “Who are all these people?”

“It’s only me, Alice,” I said. “Were you having a dream?”

“No, I’m not dreaming. Just look at everyone.”

“Who do you see?”

Instead of replying, she scooted up in the bed and asked me, “Why is it so crowded in here?”

I was perplexed when I first heard about the crowded-rooms
perception from a dying patient, but I’d soon understand how
common it was and perhaps what it meant. Over and over again,
I’d hear dying patients talk about seeing a large group of people
even when their rooms were empty. In some cases, those who had
the crowded-room visions could tell me who each and every person
was, but at other times they only recognized a few individuals.

I’d like to share another story from my first book, which is a
good example of the crowded-room vision. A colleague once asked
me to visit a patient of his who was a science professor. He’d said
that Mr. Hill was dying and had a lot of questions that I might be
able to help him with. Here’s what happened:

As I approached Mr. Hill’s hospital room, I wondered what kind of questions this 80-year-old would have. We chatted for a bit, and I learned that he’d been a widower for ten years and was retired. Then he got right to the point, requesting that I tell him how his body would “wind down.”

I could see that the teacher in him wanted to understand all aspects of what he was going through, so I explained that dying is like shutting down a large factory filled with engines, assembly lines, and giant boilers. Everything doesn’t suddenly go quiet when the “off” switch is pushed. Instead, the machinery creaks and moans as it slows to a halt.

We’d been talking for about 20 minutes when he looked away and glanced out his window.

“What is it?”

“I saw something last night that doesn’t make sense. In the middle of the night, I woke up and my room was filled with people. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I knew that doctors weren’t making rounds with their students at that hour. I looked at the faces I saw—they went on and on. While I only knew some of them, they all seemed familiar. Then I had this realization that all of these individuals were dead. I even noticed a colleague from work who’d died five years ago from cancer.”

We talked about the vision, and then I asked him to start naming the people in his life who had died.

“My wife.”

“That’s one.”

“My parents and my in-laws.”

“You also mentioned your colleague who had died as well as a student who had been killed in a car accident 20 years ago. That’s seven people. Did you know your grandparents?”

“Yes, of course, but they died long ago.”

“Where were they from?”

“Poland,” Mr. Hill said. “My grandparents and their siblings—all nine of them—came to America within five years of each other. Some of them died before I was born, and they all died by the time I was ten.” He paused to soak in the memories, and then he pointed out, “People passed away much younger in those days.”

“That’s true, but we’re still talking about 18 or so people. That’s certainly a large group, but let’s not stop there. How many years did you teach?”

“I retired after 40 years.”

He knew where I was going when I said, “I bet some of those students have died and you don’t know about it. Most of their parents you’d interacted with are probably gone, too. I bet it
is
a crowded room.”

He nodded and lay back contentedly on his pillow as if a complex question had finally been answered.

If we can accept that one person might greet us at the end of
life, then couldn’t
more than
one person be there? Let’s go back to
the other end of the spectrum: when a child is born, the waiting
room in the maternity ward is usually overflowing with family
and friends ready to welcome the newborn. Is it that much of a
stretch, then, to assume that a crowd of well-wishers may be there
to welcome us at death?

Crowded-room visions are nothing new to the dying and many
of their caretakers. I’m excited to conclude this book with tales of
this last type of deathbed phenomena.

T
HE
G
OLDEN
D
OOR

by Teri

I’m a chaplain at a hospital, and I work with a wonderful administrative assistant named Martha, who’s in her early 60s. One day she told me that her daughter, Dorothy, had a troubled life. She’d been a “difficult” child and had experienced a tumultuous adolescence.

Now as an adult, Dorothy was divorced and losing her battle with ovarian cancer. Because she was no longer able to work, she had to give up her apartment and move back in with her mother.

Martha welcomed her home and even painted the bedroom light blue, which was her daughter’s favorite color. I’d visit them from time to time, and although Dorothy wasn’t a regular churchgoer, she did believe in God.

Dorothy’s condition worsened and her health rapidly deteriorated to the point that she was confined to her bed. Not long after, her mother noticed that she began looking up toward the corner of her room and would stare at a particular area on the wall.

One day when Dorothy was once again staring at the spot, she also blurted out, “Oh, it’s a door. A lovely golden door.”

Her mother thought that her comment was especially unusual because Dorothy seemed so nonchalant about it, as if a golden door appearing out of nowhere was commonplace. Curious, Martha asked, “Do you know why it’s there?”