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Hi.
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been on a journey to prove the existence of life after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so will we Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. There is a term that I have never used before on Shades of the Afterlife? Can you believe it? Over one hundred and forty episodes, this term has been appearing quite a bit in conversations and Internet searches. All of a sudden,
there it is. The term is terminal lucidity. I know that we've spoken about just before someone passes or the weeks they can be alert, see loved ones that are right there in the room with them, and they appear just like the real people, the doctors, the nurses and families. But there's a closely related phenomena, and that's this terminal lucidity, which may involve loved ones coming to visit or it may not. I remember the very first story I had ever heard heard of this, and I just kind of
put it in the realm of deathbed visions. I had a wonderful conversation with a hospice chaplain named Steve Kearney, who I knew when I was cooking for the race teams. He knew I was interested in life after death, and he wanted to tell me the extraordinary story of when
his father died. He told me that his father had been in a coma for months, and shortly before his death, he became alive, awake, swung his legs over the bed, and of course everybody's trying to stop him because he's hooked up to all these tubes and he's looking as if looking into heaven, and he's saying it's so beautiful there, And they said, Dad, what do you see? And he started telling them people that he saw that were deceased, and then he said he saw a certain woman who
had died during this man's coma. So he was never told that this lady died, but he could see her there. What else can you see? And he felt like he heard Jesus saying that he only has a short time to live to do the things he wants to do because he wouldn't have his body too much longer. What did he want? He wanted an apple pie, he wanted his family together watching a football game, and he wanted
a chocolate milkshake. With having all of those, the man was crystal clear lucid alive, giving the family the feeling like he was back, and just a couple of nights later, he passed away. So terminal lucidity is when someone doesn't have proper brain or body function and comes alive shortly before death. The more I researched this today, the more hospice nurses and doctors and people putting comments under YouTube
videos have experienced this with their loved ones. There have been cases of Alzheimer's patients who really have lost use of their mind, who haven't spoke, and again they rally. They come back to life for just a very short time, but can have a conversation for an hour or two that makes sense. That's talking about life. They have memories. Now, how is this possible in a brain with very little
brain function? There's something extraordinary going on here. This article comes from the Scientific American magazine, written by Jesse Baring. When my mother died in early two thousand, we had a final farewell that some researchers might consider paranormal. At the time, it did strike me as remarkable, and after all that these years, I still can't talk about it without getting emotional. The night before mom died at the age of fifty four after a long battle with ovarian cancer,
I was sleeping in my mother's bedroom alongside her. The truth was that I'd already grieved her loss a few days earlier, from the moment she lapsed into what the hospice nurses had assured us was an irretrievable coma. So at this point, waiting for her body to expire as a physical machine wasn't as difficult as the loss of
her beforehand, which is when I'd completely broken down. It had all happened so quickly, and I suppose, being young and in denial about how imminent her death really was, I hadn't actually gotten around to telling her how very grateful I was to have had her as my mom and just how much I loved her. But then around three a m. I awoke to find her reaching her hand out to me, and she seemed very much aware. She was too weak to talk, but her eyes communicated all.
We spent about five minutes holding hands, me sobbing, kissing her cheeks, telling her everything I'd meant to say before but hadn't. Soon she closed her eyes again, this time for good. She died the next day. I didn't quite see the experience as supernatural when it happened, and I'm not sure I do today either, But I also didn't have a name for the experience then. In fact, one didn't even exist. It does now, called terminal lucidity. The
term was coined by German biologist Michael Nahm. He was the first to review in an article on the curious subject of cognitively impaired people becoming clear headed as their death approaches. According to him, and of terminal lucidity. They have been recorded for millennia, from accounts by classical scholars such as Hippocrates and Cicero to the nineteenth century medical luminaries like Benjamin Rush, who wrote the first American paper
on mental illness. Here's Hownam defined terminal lucidity in that original article the reemergence of normal or unusually enhanced mental abilities in dull, unconscious, or mentally ill patients shortly before their death, including considerable elevation of mood and spiritual affectation, or the ability to speak in a previously unusual, spiritualized and elated manner. The author characterizes terminal lucidity as one of the more common but lesser known end of life experiences.
On his list include deathbed visions, apparitions, near death or out of body experiences, telepathic impressions, and so on. But terminal lucidity is a vague concept, needless to say. First of all, what exactly should qualify as the time period shortly before death minutes, hours, days, maybe months. One man who'd been completely catatonic for nearly two decades became almost normal and lucid just before he passed away. And the
second subtype of terminal lucidity. The author tells us full mental clarity can appear quite abruptly and unexpectedly, just hours or days before death, and one study, seventy percent of caretakers in a British nursing home said they'd personally observed
people with dementia becoming lucid shortly before the deaths. A ninety two year old woman with advanced Alzheimer's disease, for instance, hadn't recognized her family for years, but the day before her death, she had a pleasantly bright conversation with them, recalling everyone's name. She was even aware of her own age and where she'd been living all of this time.
Such incidents happened regularly. I'm going to pause reading this article right now because I found an excellent conversation between two researchers of life after death talking about terminal lucidity. So after the break we will hear from them. I'd like to read you one more example. This woman says, in the mid nineties, with her eyesight rapidly going, in her memory diminishing, my maternal grandmother, Kitty Lewis, moved into a care home after suffering a series of mini strokes
and being diagnosed with vascular dementia. From there, her behavior began to change. This prim proper, polite and warm woman for decades, a stalwart of whichever community she was in, had her personality twisted and transformed by dementia, and she became paranoid, aggressive, and verbally abusive. Her short term memory was shot and the rest of it was patchy. She would rarely know who we were as her family, and in the last couple of years she was just angry, depressed,
and confused, and she didn't want to see people. We visited anyway, sitting with her while she wanted to die. Then in October, she was admitted into the hospital having collapsed with a urinary track infection. For a week she was barely conscious, but on the Sunday when my parents, cousin and I visited, she was sitting up in bed smiling as we walked in. For the next two hours,
she laughed and joked, completely cognitive coherent, lucid. A lifetime of memory had returned, and we took full advantage of it as she regaled us with escapades from her past. My mom, who knew many of them, quietly verified everything she said. Her funny, eloquent, vibrant mother had returned. It all came back to her in one rush. It was like a bolt of lightning. The clouds cleared. After we
left that afternoon. My grandma slipped into a semi conscious state, soon not knowing who my mother was, and died within days. We live in what I call a human energy vehicle. We are the driver of the car. The car is our body. The driver is us, our soul, and this energy vehicle. Our body is so intelligent we don't need to tell it when to breathe. We get a little signal when it's time to sleep, when it's time to eat.
Do we know that there are trillions of cells in our body, each doing different things, and how our heart, our liver, our kidneys, all of that functions without us having to be in control. I think for the dying process, whether it's terminal lucidity, or whether it's seeing our loved ones appear helping us cross that finish line, that the body and the mind and our consciousness has a plan
for us. It's all regulated, and it's all controlled, and it's all just one more way of saying, you are a miraculous being, and you do not die, So let's go to the break and we'll be back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal podcast Network.
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Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and we are talking about terminal lucidity. Here's a name that you should know, an amazing author that I really respect is Jeffrey Mishlov. He's the author of such books as New Thinking Aloud, is Their Life after Death and the Roots of Consciousness. He has fascinating conversations and really digs about life after death, consciousness, and so much more. In fact, if you go to YouTube, just look up
New Thinking Aloud with Jeffrey Mishlov. But here's another good reason to listen to him. You may have heard of the Bigelow Institute's recent contest giving away a total of a million dollars for proof of the afterlife that our consciousness survives death. Jeffrey Mishlov is the first place winner and The title of his entry is called Beyond on the Brain, The Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent bodily Death.
You can read it at Bigelowinstitute dot org. So what we're going to do is evesdrop on a conversation he had with doctor Stafford Betty on this topic of terminal lucidity. Now. Doctor Betty is a professor of religious studies at California State University and is the author of the books The Afterlife Unveiled. What the Dead are telling us about their world? When did you ever become less by dying? Afterlife? The evidence?
And more so, let's listen terminal lucidity. It's you know, I think it's only been maybe in the last ten years that I've even heard the term.
That's right. It wasn't invented until twenty nine, two thousand and nine. Can you believe that? And yet there have been cases of terminal lucidity and the literature for the last one hundred and twenty years. Yes, but there had never been a term used to baptize the phenomena.
Well know, I suppose many people are just normally very lucid as they get ill and as they die. It's not unusual for a person to be lucid unless they've suffered from some sort of a brain injury.
Exactly, or illness. And that's what terminal lucidity is looking at. It's particularly looking at Alzheimer's patients. Take a woman who has lost all ability to communicate with her visitors, with her loved ones, and they come. She doesn't recognize them, she doesn't know their name, she doesn't speak, she doesn't seem to be even aware of her world. She's just what we sometimes call a human vegetable.
Right.
And then, for some strange reason, just before she dies and her loved ones have come to gather around the she irrupts into her old personality. Her brain is all but totally destroyed, but suddenly she is able to communicate with her loved ones. She speaks, she wonders about her grandchildren and how they're doing. She knows everyone's names. She's completely herself. This is an example of terminal lucidity, and
it happens. According to doctor Alexander Baianni, who's looked into this more than anyone else alive, it happens in about five to ten percent of Alzheimer's cases.
Well, I can say it happened to my mother who tell me about that. My mother had Alzheimer's. She died six years ago at the age of ninety, and she was somewhat coherent before her death. I mean, her memory
was very, very bad, but she always recognized me. And my wife Janelle was with her at this time, and she reports that my mother just sort of sat up in the bed and they had a lengthy conversation for over two hours in which my mother was her old self, like at least more than ten years earlier, before this illness had destroyed so much of her memory. And they talked about, you know, her marriage and her children, how
she was progressing with her disease. And she had had a boyfriend who had died a year earlier, and she was her Alzheimer's had progressed so badly that she kept asking for him all the time the whole year. She just could not digest the fact that he had died. I see, But all of that was clear. She was completely lucid.
Right, that's terminal lucidity. How long did it take before she died after that experience? Do you remember less than a week?
Oh?
Okay, there it is right. It usually runs between a couple of weeks and just a matter of minutes. Yeah, there it is now. Terminal lucidity is not something that is confined to Alzheimer's. Anyone who has had a seriously damaged brain or a brain that's been eaten away by maybe cancer, is capable. Unpredictably, we never know who they're going to.
My wife had another similar experience with a client of hers who a psychotherapy client who she had worked with for many, many years, who was a very serious alcoholic and had all sorts of emotional and physical problems and attachments due to the alcoholism. And she died in childbirth. It was very tragic circumstances. But shortly before her death, I think it was the same day in fact, or maybe the day before, she like my mother, sat up in the hospital bed and they had a lengthy conversation.
And the interesting thing is that she seemed emotionally for the first time, totally clear, totally objective about herself, able to look at her own life and understand things that had eluded her in psychotherapy for years and years. And her greatest wish at that time is, oh, I wish everybody could see me like this. Yeah, yeah, she knew that this was different. Yeah, that's another example. Let me go back into the past and dretch up a couple of famous cases. A biologist, professor.
The University of Freiburg in Germany, Michael Naum, is responsible for bringing all of this stuff that we now call terminal lucidity out of the dark and wrote a long article for the Journal of Near Death Studies on famous cases that he now recognized as being what we now call termal lucidity. And the most famous case is that of a girl whose name was Kita k a t h e. Kita, a German girl, and she had the
absolutely she had. She had been born profoundly disabled, never capable of as she grew older, of making any more movement than just sort of spasmodic jerk. She had no control over her body. She never learned a single word, never spoken a word. Just a tragic case of someone whom you would say it was better had she not been born profound, profoundly retarded, and she had been hospitalized
her entire life. Okay, just left there basically the rod away and I would say, fortunately, she contracted the disease of tuberculosis as a teenager, and she was close to death, and the most astonishing thing happened just before she died. She became a lucid person, speaking German, singing Christian hymns. And can you imagine the amazement of all of the staff, somebody who had never spoken, never spoken a word.
And I know this occurs that a nephew who had the same condition born without a corpus colosive brain severely damaged.
Unbelievable. Anyway, there she was, and she was a transformed person. They spoke about how her face glowed with this kind of spirituality, and up to this point it to have been nothing but just, you know, kind of animalistic. The only kind of sounds she ever made were animalistic sounds. Absolute transformation. There's no way to explain via conventional brain science how that could have happened. And that's true of
Alzheimer's patients. You know, their brains have been eaten up to such an extent that there is no way to explain.
These lucides generally considered irreversible.
It's irreversible, it is, And this leads a number of us to a very different kind of conclusion. The reason these loose lucid moments happen is not because there's been a sudden creation of billions of new brain cells in this brain. It's that the being, the consciousness, the person who really is, has managed to loosen herself or himself
from the brain. The soul in other words, if you want to call it, that has managed to loosen itself from the brain, and that has made it possible for this remarkable transcendence.
And loosen from the brain, but still in control of the vocal cords.
Somehow. It's very mysterious how this all works. Doctor Bognanni uses a wonderful analogy. He talks of the consciousness or the soul, if you will, spiritual self as being like the sun in eclipse, and the moon is causing the eclipse. If you move, and the moon, of course is like the sick brain, you remove the moon or the sick brain, then the sun shines. There was never anything wrong with
the sun in the first place. It's just that it couldn't communicate because it was obstructed by the sick brain.
So you, in a sense regard the cases of terminal lucidity as evidence for the notion that the spirit or mind or psyche or consciousness can operate independently of the soma or the body, or the nervous system and brain.
That's exactly right. It's sort of a duellist, exactly so. And it is one of the nine types of evidence for survival of death that I go through in my book. It's I think it's the weakest of them, but I think still it's very suggestive. And it becomes more suggestive when you look at the research done by a doctor in Britain named John Lorber. He was the head of a hospital, or I guess it was a hospital. Six
hundred hydrocephalics were kept. Okay, and these are people with big heads, water on the brain, yes, And in many of these cases the brain has almost completely disappeared. The fluid has basically taken the place of the brain.
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Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and we are eavesdropping on a very interesting conversation between doctors Stafford Betty and Jeffrey mish Love on something called terminal lucidity. Just before someone passes away, even if they have had no brain function, can come back to life. Let's continue his story.
A doctor in Britain named John Lorber. He was the head of a hospital. Six hundred hydrocephalics were kept okay, and these are people with big heads water on the brain. Many of these cases, the brain has almost completely disappeared. The fluid has basically taken the place of the brain. In thirty out of six hundred cases. The IQ's of these people with very little brain left is one hundred
or more. That's what he was able to determine. In one case, his star pupil had only five percent of a normal brain an IQ of one hundred and twenty six was functioning as a normal, intelligent person, and that leads him to believe, and it leads me to believe that the question is the brain really necessary should be asked, because in a few cases it obviously isn't necessary, and that seems to be supportive of the thesis that who we really are is not brain dependent.
Well, there are a number of other cases in the literature of people who suffered from major brain damage. I remember there's a famous case from the nineteenth century of a rail road worker who had a railroad spike through his head exactly so I was able to function normally exactly so.
Right. There's another case that doctor professor nam on Earth of a woman who had been in an asylum for eight years and she had some kind of brain damage. It was never said what was the cause of it, but she had turned into an appalling human being. The only thing that ever came out of her mouth while in this asylum for eight years were horrible curses. And she also managed to develop a particular skill of spitting very accurately on the shoes of the priest or the
doctor who came to visit her. She was uncannily accurate with her spinning, all right, and so shortly before she died, she hadn't come plea transformation of character and personality. She remembered all of those episodes of spitting. She remembered all of those cursings, and she was profoundly sorry for them. Yes, she felt that she was not in control. She was aware of what was happening, but she didn't feel that
she was in control. It just suggests the number of ways that terminal lucidity can manifest itself, and it did in this instance in a very different way.
Well, when we think about brain function, right, one of the intriguing things to me, for example, is parrots. Parrots are animals that are highly intelligent. They can speak and sometimes acquire a large vocabulary, and their speech is often in context it makes sense. And yet they have tiny, tiny little brains.
It's true, that's true. Maybe even the dinosaurs are smarter than we give them credit for. They also had tiny friends.
In an era of computer technology where the processors are getting smaller and smaller all the time, and yet more and more powerful.
I know.
It's so so the size of the brain may not be as determinative as was once thought. Where we do all of these ratios between the brain mass and the body.
Weight exactly, So that does appear to be the case when we look at Labbres research, that really does appear to be the case. Only in five percent of the cases. Let that be said. You know, the other ninety five percent were pretty much lost in their hydrocephalic fluid and they were not able to function. But this five percent were able to function curiously for reasons we can't understand, with very damaged brains or very tiny brains. Who knows why.
Now. Earlier, you and I were having a conversation about the relationship between terminal lucidity and deathbed visions. Oh okay, can you pointed out to me you thought these are very different.
Yeah, And we had a little disagreement on this. I would say this that you know, with in deathbed visions, the patient, the dying person is talking lucidly to spirits. Then he or she sees visiting her or him in the room right in the hospital. Okay, whereas interminal lucidity. There isn't ever any mention of visiting paranormal entities.
That seems a little odd. I mean, if normal people who are dying experience these visions, why wouldn't a person who was becoming lucid prior to death also experience them.
That's a good question, I guess the answer would be that they already have so much on their plate just for them to become normal and speak to people around.
Them, so they have other priorities. They have other priorities at the time, and one priority that obviously a dying person will have is to kind of complete the communication at an emotional level with people.
With people around them, with their loved ones, you know, very much in this world, not in the next world. Though. There's nothing, of course that would rule that possibility out, Jeff, I have to grant you that I just haven't come across a case like that yet. Well.
And of course, the typical case where you'd even want to remark that somebody is especially lucid prior to their death is because they've had some disease or damage to their brain or nervous system that would make that unusual.
In the first place exactly, so that would be assumed before you would use that phrase.
Because people who are having deathbed visions are all lucid.
That's right, they're normal people. They've not had damaged brains, and their experiences are extraordinary enough. And we talked about that on another program. But it's not quite the same thing as terminal lucidity. So I remember another case one that was written up ten years ago as a matter of fact in Time magazine, of all things, but apparently it didn't really have much of an impact on people. It certainly had an impact on me because it was
a classic case of terminal lucidity. He was a man who had contracted cancer what is the term when he goes all over the place metastasized metastasized, and it had completely eaten away his brain. He had almost nothing left, There was nothing to communicate with, and he again was just a human vegetable, and his dear ones came to say goodbye to him, just on the point of death,
and he had this incredible lucidity. The doctor who was in charge of the case was astounded and was convinced, though he's not a religious person, that the mind somehow was able to through that sick brain, force itself out and say goodbye to his loved ones. That was what we used. The words he used. It forced itself through that sick brain. It didn't just jettison it, but forced its way through. I like that way of speaking it. And it just suggests how relatively rare terminal lucidity is.
Keep in mind that somewhere between ninety to ninety five percent of advanced Alzheimer's cases do not experience terminal lucidity. Maybe because it's just too hard to do, who knows.
Yeah, I can imagine that, but it surely gives one pause to think about the consciousness and the brain is being very distinct from me.
It does, it does, and that of course is what I am trying to show in my book. And it's the last of the chapters coming out of psychical research or paranormal research. And I think it has a statement to make. It's very suggestive. It doesn't prove, but it's very suggestive. And I hope that doctor Bunjohnny will be able to come up with more and more evidence that supports this conclusion. And he is, I've written him, he is very open to this possibility that this is a kind of evidence for the soul.
Well, it's not so different than evidence, let's say, from extrasensory perception or remote viewing, where a normal person in their normal state of consciousness is able to kind of reach out with their mind and acquire information from distant points in space and time that would never be accessible through normal sensory means.
Yeah, well, you know, the paranormal is the paranormal, and so what you're doing is linking these various extraordinary, unexplainable situations together. They all suggest that our life is more vertical than we think. You know, we're not Flanders, and our good friends who are materialists or physicalists I refer to them, at least privately, as flat Landers. They need to verticalize their life.
Well, I think you can still. To be honest, you could be a physicalist like my friend Ed May, who's can on this program and still and disagrees. He thinks that if I come up with solid evidence for survival, they cannot be explained by what we call living agents, I that that would disprove his physicalism. But I think no, I think that physicalism can accommodate it. If we take a look at all of this work going on in higher mathematics and in string theory involving higher dimensions of
space hyperspace. If we allow space to be much more complex than we normally think of it, then we could accommodate a.
Kind of physicalism anyway.
An afterlife, And as you've talked about yourself, the communications from the other side say it's very similar to our physical existence, suggests that it's kind of physical.
It is kind of physical. I would prefer to say that it's kind of material. They often speak of vibrations. It's a kind of a physics of physics of the afterworld. Vibrates at a level then how our sensors cannot accommodate, cannot relate to. And it is not a purely spiritual environment. It is a world of beauty that the sensors can appreciate that we can walk in. All of that is
asserted by by spirits speaking through legitimate mediums. Absolutely. So, Yeah, at some point maybe there will be a physics of the astral.
I think you can agree that was a pretty interesting conversation. You want to check out doctor Jeffrey mish Love and doctor staff Betty To, a long time explorers into the world of the Afterlife. So let's go to our next break and we'll come back with some more stories. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal podcast network.
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Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain. We have been talking about terminal lucidity. Hospice workers call this rallying r A l l y people rally or ken rally just before they pass. What I'd like to do now is play an old recording for you of hospice nurses. Now, these are not examples of terminal lucidity, but they are examples of these deathbed visions, and they're precious and I just think they'll make you feel good.
And I know for me, it just reminds me that we go on and that loved ones are there to greet us, So let's listen.
By working with the dying, hospice nurses gain an insight into death and the opportunity to witness the signs of a life beyond our own.
I had one gentlemen three months after I started working in hospice. I thought, I can't do this anymore. This is just too much. I'm going to get burned. Out or it's just too stressful. And so just as I was really trying to debate whether I was going to leave this field or not, I had an experience that just kind of blew me away.
And one of the LPNs came up to me and said, mistress, and so I just died. And so I took that.
Information and we said, all right, we'll call a physician and call a corner and get all the information that we need. And I was walking down the hall and making bad checks and sure everybody was okay, and this one old fellow was climbing.
Out of bed.
He was really out of pain control, and I was thinking, you know, we need to just.
Get me settled down.
And I walked into the room and I said, let me help you get taken care of it. And he said I got to get out of here. And I said, I understand, you know, and he said I I have to die. And I said, you know, I would probably want to die too if I had that much pain, and let me help you. Let me see what we can do. He said, no, you don't understand. He said I have to die. And I said, well, I don't know where it came from. I said, well, you have
to wait till you get your own invitation. Sometimes it just because we want to die doesn't mean we get to die. We have to wait till it's time. Well, that guy down there just got his invitation. He said, I knew him from Lyman. And I said, what do you mean And he said, well, he just shuffled by here and I here on the back of my neck stood up and he said, I thought that was a curious term, shuffle by. And he said, I want you to go get my son.
He said, I knew him. I knew him from Lyman when we were kids.
And he said, and he just shuffled by, and he points from his door to the window and how it acrossed in front of his bed.
And I thought, boy, there's a lot I don't know yet.
I had a kid that I lost last week who saw horses. That he saw a horse and his dream was about two weeks before he died. He was on this big brown horse and they were going through the field and it was very smooth.
It wasn't like a gallop, but they weren't flying.
And he said that all of a sudden they kind of jumped over a barrier and when they landed. They landed in a river bank that had over load its beds, and it stopped. The horse stopped and turned sideways, waiting for this kid to tell him which way to go, whether to go into the woods or out of the woods. And I asked him which way he chose, and he said, well, we went out, And I said, what do you think would have happened if you had gone into the woods.
He said, I think I'd have been gone.
And I told him I thought he would too, And I told him that that horse would probably come back for him when it was time for him to go, That horse would be the one to come back. Well, that afternoon, his mom was washing dishes and the horse came and she went to talk to him, and she asked David if his horse was there, and he said yes, and she said, I think he's probably here to get you. And she said I think so too, And within two hours he had gone.
He had died on his horse.
You feel a presence, you feel something is in the room. You know that there's something there. And one time there was this man and he was really really close to death, and he was very very weak, and and he looked up and he he was looking at something, and he looked very, very scared, and the nurse said to him, it's okay. They're there to help you. There, they won't hurt you. And and he put his hand up and and he had his hand up like somebody was holding it.
And he did this for a few minutes. And there is no way this man had the strength to hold his hand up by himself.
Uh. And he died just a few minutes later too. So there's something. I had one really neat fellow that we were taking to the hospice unit and he was really close to dying, and his his son was nearby. And this poor guy went through an incredible bath from the nurse, I mean, and he didn't move it all.
Didn't even blink and eye, so.
We would say he was an unresponsive And as we were walking down the hall, pushing his bed down the hall, he opened his eyes and he looked straight up and his little toothless mouth and he went and waved and then just smiled in close size, and five minutes later he was gone. I don't know who's waving at, but that's not uncommon.
As death approaches, patients may have visions of angels or see tunnels of white light. Other people receive angelic comfort from someone they already know.
Patients who are closer to their dying time will see those who have already died. Oftentimes they'll talk about dead grandparents sitting at their bedside, brothers who've died before. I'm not so certain that we just see spirits running around. I don't really believe that, and I've never heard anything that scary. But I have heard of a lot of patients who are very afraid of dying talk about seeing a father in law kitchen, and.
That would scare me out of my mind.
But they're not afraid, and it really made me realize about how they.
They are just sort of drifting to the other side. They had one foot here and one foot.
Somewhere else, and a patient who's very frightened. We'll tell you that, and yet for some reason it doesn't bother them.
That bothered me.
But Mary was a fifty two year old woman. She had little Gary's disease and it was getting pretty bad. She was pretty close to death and the muscles in her throat were closing up. They weren't working very well, and she had this fear that she was going to drown, which is essentially was a real possibility for her, and one of her last wish was that her mother not
be told. Her mother was ninety years old, and her mother, she liked to be called Grahama Rose, and she just said, this is too hard for a mother to go through, to watch a child die, and especially the way I'm I don't want my mother to know.
Now.
The family was in conflict with this, but it was her last wish, so what could they do? And then the story, as Gramma Rose tells me, is she lived in Texas and one night she went to bed. She was getting into bed and she saw her husband standing there, and her husband had been dead for twenty years, but she said that he was as real to her as I am to you. And he said, Rose, I've come
to take Mary home. And at that point, Grandma Rose she just started to scream and said, no, no, please, let me go back and hold my baby one more time. Don't take her until I've gone and I've held her and I've said goodbye and I've kissed her.
Please don't do that.
And so he just kind of smiled and faded away, and she knew at that point that he would allow that. So she got a the next plane. She came to Denver and for three days she stayed with her daughter, and she told her stories, and she combed her hair, and she gave her bath, and she was holding her daughter when she died, and I was there, and she just looked at me and she said, you know, I brought her into the world, and it's only right that I'm with her when she goes out.
And it would have never happened.
If Mary's husband would have come come to her and told her that he was taking her home.
Like one person said to me, it's easy for you to say, it's going to be peaceful. You're not going to die, you know, and you know you're right. All I know is what I see, And all I know is that somewhere along the line, you're not going to be afraid anymore. Somewhere in that last those last hours, it's going to go away and somebody will throw you a lifeline.
I'm sitting here right now thinking just how special this is. We really do go on and loved ones come to greet us or animals. I want to read to you now, just a couple of quick things. This lady says, My mom looked out the window of her hospice room and said she saw all of the dogs she ever had in her entire life, from the time she was a child playing outside in the courtyard. She looked so happy and she smiled, and then she passed away. And another
my father passed away two weeks ago. He was ninety seven and in hospice. He had basically been non responsive for weeks. Two days before he died, he had about six lucid hours. He woke up continually, He asked for food, asked for a bowl of ice cream, and wanted to drink his nightly martini, which he did. He was laughing and joking and very much himself, and then two days
later he died. I know you may be a new listener, or you may be a long time listener, But for the past one hundred and forty plus episodes, I've been trying to give you my all. Not each one of us is going to witness a loved one have one of these experiences, but through all these hours of episodes to give you reasons to believe and have faith that you are an immortal soul having a human experience. You are so much bigger and wiser than you could ever imagine.
We are trapped by this little voice in our head that tries to convince us that we are just human. But that's not true. We are so much bigger. There's more to life than meets the eye, and more to you than you know. Right now, you are surrounded by invisible cheerleaders who know how hard it is to live a human life. They will be there when it's your time, but not too soon, to help you across the veil to probably the biggest standing ovation that you've crossed over
and completed this life. Make the most of it while you're here. There's things that we can't do over there. There are things that we can learn over here that really add depth to our soul. So take up every experience you can with that reminder. Our home base is we Don't Die dot com. Please come visit me on one of our Sunday gatherings, or take a course, or just check out other past episodes, or join our Facebook group.
I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast am Paranormal podcast Network.
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