What It's Like to Die, According to an ICU Nurse
May 25, 2015 aleteia
After working with the terminally ill for over 20 years, Penny Satori attempts to explain the inexplicable
Palliative and intensive care units at hospitals have a
close relationship with death, giving rise to many experiences that defy any
rational explanation. Patients who foresee the exact time when they will die;
others who seem to decide for themselves the day and the hour, moving their
death forward or delaying it; family members' prophetic dreams or presentiments
on the part of third parties who, without even knowing that someone has been
brought to the hospital or has suffered an accident, are certain that he has
died.
Only healthcare professionals who work closely with terminally ill patients
know first-hand the extent and variety of these strange experiences. Science
has not been able to offer any kind of answer, and so these experiences are
usually described as paranormal or supernatural. This label is "too vague
for the significance of these experiences," explains the British nurse
Penny Sartori, who has worked for nearly 20 years in ICU.
Such a career is sufficiently solid for her to have seen everything, recognize
patterns and come up with a hypothesis regarding these phenomena. So much so,
that she has a doctorate on these questions, whose principle conclusions were
published in the book The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences (Watkins
Publishing).
"Visions"
shared with family members
Throughout her career, Sartori has interviewed patients who have had near-death
experiences (NDE), as well as family members who have had shared death
experiences (SDE). The number of these experiences and the repetition of
patterns make her discard the hypothesis of chance, or of it being impossible
to find a logical reason for this widespread phenomenon.
Her main thesis is centered on the idea that "our brains are separate from
our consciousness. In other words, the brain may be channeling what some people
call the soul, rather than responsible for creating it." This idea would
explain, she adds, why "the soul and enhanced consciousness can be
experienced separately from the body," as in NDEs or in Buddhist
meditation. The examples that Sartori uses in her book are numerous, but they
all tend to coincide in that the patients who have these NDEs are always those
who end up embracing death most peacefully and happily, as do family members
who have a premonition of the death of their loved ones. Why? According to
interviews with these family members, it is because they are convinced that
death is only the end of their earthly life.
Independent of whether they are believers, agnostics, or atheists, all of them
have a dream or a vision about how their family member leaves this world guided
by someone — spouses who have already died, anonymous beings or angels
— and with a clear sensation of "peace and love." At first,
Sartori says, "it struck me as odd that some family members of the
deceased didn't feel sad after foretelling the death of their love one, but
when I interviewed them I realized that they were peaceful because they had
experienced this sensation of life's transcendence."
Choosing
the "most appropriate" moment to die
This is the case of the people who, knowing when they will die, ask to be alone
for a few minutes, or die exactly when a family member, who stays at their side
constantly, leaves them for just a moment to go to the bathroom. Other equally
noteworthy cases are those of people who die just after seeing a family member
who has been delayed in arriving to see them because he or she was out of the
country, or when all of the paperwork for inheritances and life insurance is
finished. "They appear to be waiting for a specific event to take place
before they can permit themselves to die," the nurse says.
John Lerma, director of the Tucson Medical Center and
specialist in palliative care, has gathered examples very similar to those
cited by Sartori, in Into the Light: Real Life Stories about Angelic
Visits, Visions of the Afterlife, and Other Pre-Death Experiences (New
Page Books). According to his reports, "70 to 80 per cent of his patients
waited for their loved ones to leave the room before dying."
Sartori refuses to believe that these
experiences are based on hallucinations. "It's not possible for several
people to see the same thing and to be capable of describing it exactly the
same way if it's really just a distorted perception of reality," she
points out. Some theses are based on the famous theories of Prof. Raymond
Moody, who coined the concept of near-death experiences at the end of the
1970's.
Her most novel studies center on experiences
shared by people who accompany those who are dying. "They open an entirely
new path of rational enlightenment regarding the question of life after death,
because the people who talk about these experiences are healthy. They are
usually seated next to the death bed of a loved one when they are overcome by
one of these marvelous and mysterious experiences. And the very fact that these
people are not near death rules out the usual explanations. Since their
experiences cannot be attributed to brain chemistry disorders, we will have to
go beyond this argument," she assures.
New Paths of Investigation
The way some people try to explain this
phenomenon based on brain dysfunction, which Sartori calls "cynical,"
doesn't hold up with the examples of people who enter the hospital with
late-stage Alzheimer's disease who suddenly become coherent.
"These are terminally ill patients who are
incapable of articulating a single word, who surprisingly begin to talk
completely coherently, interacting with people who are not in the room and who
are often deceased family members," the author explains. Besides, she
adds, "it often happens that after this experience they stop being
agitated and end up dying with a smile on their face, usually one or two days
later."
The argument that these visions are drug-induced
isn't accepted by the author either because, she says, hallucinations due to
medication "cause anxiety, the exact opposite of what these patients feel.
“In her book, the author defends the idea that these kinds of experiences can
be key for demonstrating the existence of life after death and that they should
at least open a new direction of research (like some that are based on quantum
physics) for scientific studies. She is definitely convinced that
"death is not as fearful as we imagine."