What happens at the moment of death?
Many have experiences to relate. Recently, we spoke to a home-care aide, Mary Ann Buchan, of Western New York, who told us how common it is for folks to wait for some sense of completion before turning serene and making the passage.
Most deaths are that way: peaceful.
“Sometimes, I can feel the soul pass right through me on the way to eternity,” she believes. “You can actually feel a vacancy, after a person departs.”
There are some who have fear, for sure; but this usually dissipates. Others may be waiting for a loved one to return from a trip and be there at bedside before making way to eternity. The “panic” deaths occur among those who “are not right, not at peace with themselves,” said another Catholic, Grace Bubulka, a nursing administrator in California, adding however that “they often would look peaceful or relieved or to be experiencing something wonderful just before they clinically died.”
Such is God’s Mercy.
“I’m a night-shift nurse and have been for thirty years, working many of those years in critical care,” a viewer from Maryland wrote us. “Many of my patients have died and come back, have visited Heaven, hell. Some see the most amazing things as the veil thins between this world and the next on their journeys toward Heaven.”
There are cases, claims a key researcher in the field, whereby those at bedside share the death experience, the transition, with the person dying. “The day my mother died, my two brothers, my sister, my sister-in-law, and I were all in the room,” a woman from Atlanta told the researcher. “My mother hadn’t spoken a word in several hours, and she was breathing in an irregular pattern. None of us were really upset because mother had been on a downhill course and we knew this was the end.
“Suddenly, a bright light appeared in the room. My first thought was that a reflection was shining through the window from a vehicle passing by outside. Even as I thought that, however, I knew it wasn’t true, because this was not any kind of light on this earth. I nudged my sister to see if she saw it too, and when I looked at her, her eyes were as big as saucers. At the same time I saw my brother literally gasp. Everyone saw it together. Then my mother just expired and we all kind of breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, we saw vivid bright lights that seemed to gather around and shape up into — I don’t know what to call it except an entranceway. Being next to it was a feeling of complete joy.”
Might it have been a flash of light such as this (but more powerful) that created the Shroud image?
Still others have co-experienced the “life review” of the person departing. Call these “empathic” death experiences, says this author (a doctor, in Glimpses of Eternity). Another relative saw the room begin to light differently and seem to change shape as his mother died, watching as a film or envelope of light lifted from her.
A Canadian doctor related actually seeing a patient who seemed strangely lit standing at the end of a hospital corridor staring at something. When the doctor approached, he realized that this person, who had severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was looking at a dead body on a gurney — his own. “There was a light of sorts that emanated from him — a clear light — and I felt like I was seeing his soul,” said this man of medicine. In a “flash,” the patient disappeared in a field of “bright golden light.” There was a sense of joyful energy rolling back and forth, as if unseen presences had been there to assist.
Yet another saw two pillars of light when a relative expired.
Said a woman named Gail (who witnessed her sister’s death), “I actually felt her leave her body. I leaned over to hug her and felt her pass through me like a pulse of energy. It was genuinely an outburst of happiness and release.”
Yet one more witness suddenly found himself reliving a scene from his dying grandfather’s life just before parting and at the moment of death he claimed to see a “golden ball” rise from his grandfather’s chest. Perhaps you have accounts you’d like to share.
Mists. Halos. Rays. Tiny light particles. That globe.
There are amazing stories — perhaps too many for the cynics to discount them all.
