SOMETHING THAT BREAKS THE MOLD: NEARING-DEATH AWARENESS
When I started my work in hospice, almost 15 years ago now, the phenomena of Near Death Awareness (NDA) fascinated me. Not because I didn’t believe it happened. I certainly did. But to work in a field where it happens repeatedly and across all boundaries of identity had me convinced early on that this was a universal human phenomena and symptom of dying like pain or shortness of breath. It was a part of the constellation of healthcare issues a person could have at the end of life.
I started to notice, however, that families often had a hard time wrapping their heads around it. Especially if that family was religious, and even more especially if that family’s religion was hostile to the idea of spirits. As one example, within Protestant Christianity, the only accepted spirits are the Trinity, a few angels and Jesus. Everyone else is pretty much a demon or an agent of the Devil. So in that spiritual framework, there is no room for the Dead coming back to guide anyone to their next life, whatever they believe that to be. Over the years, I started doing work as a chaplain to help families understand the difference between religious belief and doctrine, and what is a human, spiritual condition that exists and occurs independent of religion.
This became so pressing for me that I decided to get my doctorate in counseling and focused on this in my dissertation. NDAs are understood to be a part of the larger phenomena of Near Death Experiences, like people seeing lights at the end of the tunnel and then being thrust back into their bodies in the ER. I studied scientific research and theories on these things as well, and discovered that science as a discipline is deeply challenged by these NDAs and NDEs because science and medicine INSIST that brain function is the only measure of aliveness. There is a subtle fundamentalism in certain areas of science that refuse to consider that human consciousness may be more than synapses firing in the brain. Stories about of individuals who were certifiably dead, often for several minutes beyond what is considered humanly possible to live, coming back. Not only do people come back, but they recall minute details of things going on around them that are not logically possible.
Do I think a day will come where we will understand NDAs and NDEs fully? Yes, I do. But I think when that happens, both science/medicine and religion will have to re-evaluate their assumptions and what they know to be true. They will come to understand that both of them cannot completely capture the complexities of the spirituality of being human without having a dialogue to grasp the pieces of the puzzle they both hold.
What I have been taught by dying patients and their families is that NDAs give patients the opportunity to prepare themselves for what’s next. But also, sometimes, the NDAs also give that dying person the opportunity for healing and resolution. I had an African American patient who was cared for by her daughter. I had visited them several times. In what I did not know would be our last visit, I walked in the sounds of the patient arguing with someone. I asked the daughter who her mom was yelling at. The daughter told me that her mom was arguing with her deceased mother, who had been coming to the patient over a few days. She said that her mother was molested as a girl and her mother knew but did nothing about it. So when her mother came in the spirit, she came to not only apologize to her daughter for failing her as a mother, but also to help her daughter let go of everything she had been carrying in her life related to that, so the patient would be lighter when she left this world.
I was stunned! I had known many people with NDAs. But this was the first one I heard of where it was clear that working was being done between the living and the dead to ease the emotional burdens of the dying process. This family taught me that sometimes it’s never too late, and our ancestors can play a huge role in making sure we die a good death. This is something I hope we all experience when our time comes too.
