Visitors at the End of Life: Finding Meaning and Purpose in Near-Death Phenomena

"About 30 percent of hospice patients report to their palliative caretakers a "visitation" by someone who is not there: a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a death-bed vision.

These visions can be of dead friends or family members, and typically occur on average three days before death.

Most interestingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions all report similar visions.

Allan Kellehear, a medical anthropologist and expert on death and dying, has gathered data and conducted studies on these experiences across cultures, and found analogs between places as diverse as New York and Melanesia. (The visitations Kellehear will discuss are not the same as what are commonly called near-death experiences.

NDEs usually contain life review, out-of-body sensations, and tunnel vision and occur when the percipient directly risks death.) Kellehear proposes an examination of these experiences across categorical types (ty