Taking Life's Final Exit- Patients nearing death often speak of traveling

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-journeys14jun14.story

Taking Life's Final Exit
Patients nearing death often speak of traveling, even asking for maps. A hospice nurse says they 'experience something we can't describe.'


By Valerie Reitman, Times Staff Writer


PHILADELPHIA — My brother took more trains, planes and automobiles in the last week of his life than he had taken in months, perhaps years. Those journeys were all the more surprising because they occurred in an intensive-care unit at the end of his three-year battle with bone marrow cancer. <snip>

There seemed to be a pattern. A nearby bookstore turned up a 1992 title that offered some clues: "Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs and Communications of the Dying."

Its chapter titles were uncanny: "Where's the Map?" and "I'm Getting Ready To Leave." Authors Patricia Kelley and Maggie Callanan, longtime Washington, D.C.-area hospice nurses, had heard similar talk so often from their dying patients — conveying this sense of moving from one place to another, of being in transition — that they concluded it must be a special language the dying have to communicate what is happening to them. <snip>

It has some similarities with the more widely known near-death experiences reported by some patients who are resuscitated on operating tables or at the scenes of accidents. They report seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel, with people and events of their lives flashing as if in a kaleidoscope.

In contrast, however, those dying slowly often talk of preparing for a trip or of trying to finish something, Kelley and Callanan found, perhaps using language pertaining to their professions or hobbies. One dying man who liked to sail, for instance, talked about the ebbing of the tides; a watchmaker mentioned that the clock was not ticking fast enough; a carpenter described details of completing an imaginary house. The observations built on an earlier four-year study by physicians Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, in which hundreds of physicians and nurses observed 50,000 dying patients from India and the U.S. In both cultures, patients commonly reported deathbed visions of movement toward something and of being greeted by deceased loved ones who were helping them to "cross over" in their last moments.<snip>

A very long story - but I liked it :-)




The author can be reached at [e-mail].

[TNDemo]

1. Is this different from their book Final Gifts?

That was a really good book.

[papau]

2. It is Just a bit of science that confirms the book.- plus a first person

account.

[papau]

3. four-year study by physicians Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson

is the bit of science that seems to confirm the book.

"four-year study by physicians Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, in which hundreds of physicians and nurses observed 50,000 dying patients from India and the U.S. In both cultures, patients commonly reported deathbed visions of movement toward something and of being greeted by deceased loved ones who were helping them to "cross over" in their last moments."

Plus a lot of interviews (albeit not "science")

NOT NEW - but interesting

[Bdog]

4. I like Rumi

He wrote in the 12th century. However, the human condition has not changed.


All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, siting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. In the last couple of weeks of his life,

my father kept talking about "going home."