Chris Kerr, a physician at Hospice Buffalo, shares his life-changing observations of deathbed visions, first witnessed as a young boy with his dying father. He discusses how these experiences often involve patients encountering deceased loved ones, providing profound comfort and connection. Kerr emphasizes the need for the medical community to recognize the emotional and spiritual significance of these visions, which help foster peace and acceptance during life’s final moments.
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Chris Kerr's Father's Vision
Chris Kerr's father, a surgeon, was too busy for him except for annual fishing trips.
Dying of cancer, his father spoke of their cabin, giving Kerr a sense of peace.
insights INSIGHT
Deathbed Visions: Comfort, Not Delusion
Kerr believes his father's vision was a source of comfort, not delusion.
He later realized such visions are common among dying patients and offer solace.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Mary's Vision of Lost Baby
Mary, a 70-year-old woman, saw a vision of a baby she lost long ago.
This unspoken loss brought her comfort in her final moments.
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In 'Death Is but a Dream', the protagonist, Callie, finds herself caught between life and death. As a homicide detective, she yearns to live again, navigating a complex world where the boundaries between life and death are blurred. The book is part of The Elysium Legacies series.
Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.
Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada.
Kerr followed his father into medicine, and in the last 10 years he has hired a permanent research team that expanded studies on deathbed visions to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions.
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