A nurse and a man in hospice care.
Death is the final mystery that we all must face and it’s natural to be scared about going through the process. However, a new video by a hospice nurse shows an excellent reason for people to feel comfortable facing the unknown.
Julie McFadden, aka Hospice Nurse Julie on YouTube, has witnessed over a hundred deaths, says that people are often comforted by friends and relatives who have passed away in their final days. She says that when people begin experiencing these visions, it’s a sign that they will be passing away within a few weeks.
McFadden is also the author of the bestseller, “Nothing to Fear.”
"Here's one sign that someone is close to death that most people don't believe happens,” Julie began the video.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
"Usually a few weeks to a month before someone dies, if they're on hospice, they will start seeing dead loved ones, dead relatives, dead pets. This happens so often that we actually put it in our educational packets that we give to patients and their families when they come on hospice so they aren't surprised or scared when it happens,” she continues.
The experience is called visioning; although no one knows how or why it happens, it’s common among all her patients.
"We don't know why it happens, but we see it in definitely more than half of our patients," she continues.
People often believe that the visions are caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. However, Juie says that isn’t true. “Because when it does happen, most people are alert and oriented and are at least a month from death, so they don't have low oxygen," she said.
The good news is that the visioning experience is always comforting for those who are nearing the end. It often involves relatives who come from the other side to let them know everything will be okay and encourage them to let go and pass away. People also experience being taken on journeys with loved ones or having sensory experiences from the past, such as smelling their grandmother's perfume or father’s cigar.
Christopher Kerr, a CEO of Hospice & Palliative Care, an organization that provides palliative care in Buffalo, New York, says that the relatives that often appear in these visions are people who protected and comforted the dying parent when they were alive. So, they may see a parent who nurtured them but not one they feared.
Kerr has extensively studied the mysterious phenomena that happen when people die but has no real explanation for why the visioning experience happens. “I have witnessed cases where what I was seeing was so profound, and the meaning for the patient was so clear and precise, that I almost felt like an intruder,” he told BBC Brazil. “And trying to decipher the etiology, the cause, seemed futile. I concluded that it was simply important to have reverence, that the fact that I could not explain the origin and process did not invalidate the experience for the patient.”
It's comforting to know that for many, the final days of life may not be filled with pain and fear but instead with a sense of peace and joy. While we may never fully understand the reasons behind these mysterious visions, if they bring calm during such a daunting time, we can simply be grateful for their presence. They’re kind of like life, in general. In the end, we may not really know what it was all about, but we can be happy that it happened.