In my work as palliative care chaplain, I often am honored to hear patient and family near death experiences, dreams, and visions. These experiences of love, wisdom, grace are often incredibly comforting to the patients/families. I hold these stories in my heart with great honoring of the mystery that we inhabit in these human bodies, in these short, poignant lifetimes.
“People like us, who believe in physics, know that distinctions between past, present and future are only stubbornly persistent illusions.” –Albert Einstein
While helping patients and families process the material in these experiences, my clinical mind often reflects on whether the Mystery/God/Spirit/Source comes to us in ways we can understand or hear in these moments. Universal symbols appear in these nuggets of human experience: the warmth of pure light, wisdom figures, a sense of peace that is beyond our ordinary comprehension. The wisdom figures tend to be those that we have connections to in our past, and sometimes will in our future.
While not every NDE is positive or blissful, the changes that are brought about by NDE’s are often profound. Those that report NDE’s speak over time of changes of reduced anxiety around dying, a heightened sense of peace in the time of life that they have left to live, often a growing sense of the connectedness of all life as well as the fragility of life. Often these people live the rest of their lives with a renewed purpose of being of service to life in general.
Such it was with my grandmother’s story below. For the rest of her life, she was less worried about how her family would fare without her, freer to explore thoughts that would have been anathema to her earlier in her life (specifically around other religions) and a greater sense of peace, harmony, and humor about it all.
Here then is a story of my beloved Grandmother’s near death experience (NDE) that echoes, reverberates in my own soul. While this telling of the experience does not tell all her story, it is what I can share with clarity that she would want me to. Grandma’s story is of her encounter with her most profound wisdom figure, Jesus. It is very personal and not meant to disrespect any other thought system or wisdom figures.
Verna Phylura Seidel 1898-2001
This photo was taken in 1998 when Grandma was 99 and I was 44.
My beloved maternal grandmother, Grandma Verna lived to be 103 and had the following experience at age 94. ‘Gram’ was born in 1898 to two circuit-riding Methodist ministers (the hellfire and brimstone variety; my great grandmother, who I had the privilege to know until I was in my late teens, was a force of nature, but not necessarily a loving presence in my life,
unlike her daughter, my Grandma Verna). Grandma had always been a woman of great faith. She lived a difficult life in which she outlived 2 husbands and 2 of her 4 children (one of them my mother). She had worried and fretted, trying to keep the multiplying generations of children, grands, great-grands on the ‘straight and narrow’. Her life, nevertheless, was marked by gratitude and grace. At the time of this experience, there were five generations and before her death another generation was added.
In her 94th year, she was living in assisted living and fell, and after being down for several hours, ‘died’ on a gurney in the local hospital. A few months later, she recounted an NDE (near death experience) to me as I was visiting her in Kissimmee, Florida, while I was on break from seminary in Denver in 1992. In the experience, Gram was sitting on a long bench that felt like a train or bus station to her. There was a translucent curtain in front of her—she could see light through the curtain but could not see what was on the other side. She became aware that there was a Presence sitting close to her left side. She had a very long, intimate conversation with this Presence, without any words, she was clear to say to me, ‘as if we were communicating just through our minds’. During this exchange, she asked for forgiveness for something that she had struggled with for many years and the Presence said, ‘Verna, I remember you asking me for forgiveness, but for the Life of me, I do not remember what for.’ (‘As far as the east is from the west’ Psalm 103:12) When I asked her to identify the Presence, asking her if it was Jesus, she demurred, but did not deny that it was; her hesitancy was from humility, I would assume, rather than lack of clarity. There were long silences and sighs as she told me about this experience, that told me so much about her inner experience.
In her experience, she found forgiveness for supposed sins she had worried over; she gained perspective on her life as a spiritual matriarch for her extended, widespread family. The Presence told her that she had the choice to come back to this reality or to go on ahead. (In many NDE the person is told that it is not their time, and they must go back and finish their ‘work’.) Gram was hesitant to ‘go ahead’ as she felt that her family needed her. She was assured by the Presence that she could be helping her family as much from beyond that curtain as she was in her physical body. This was immensely reassuring to her then, and I assume, now.
When I hesitantly asked her about her relationship with that Presence, Jesus, during and after this encounter, “Is he closer than a brother, Gram? (alluding to Proverbs 18:24). Gram said, without a pause, ‘No Beth, he is closer than your own skin.’ My life turned on a dime as I felt the impact of her words. At that stage in my life, at age 36, I didn’t think much about ancestral wisdom and how it is passed down. But I felt in that moment, the lineage, the transmission of deep wisdom. Now, in my late 60’s, this wondering, this incipient wisdom is ever more present.
I feel like my own ‘spiritual DNA’ was changed by my Grandma’s near death experience, her encounter with Jesus. I have lived with the sure knowledge, even if I do not fully understand it, that the wisdom, love and compassion that Jesus embodied for my Grandmother lives in my psyche (as a microscopic agent of humanity) in a very tangible way, in my cellular structure, flowing through life with me. More will likely be revealed at my own encounter with death whenever that happens! ‘Close than my own skin’ is the call to a more embodied faith, a practice of presence with those who I serve and a joy that holds me from deep within.
While my religious perspectives continue to widen and deepen, so to do my spiritual understandings the questions run deep, without need for answers. At this time in my life, my inner compass points to living with love becoming ever more manifest in how I engage with the world, in my professional and personal life. Indeed, those two worlds overlap and inform each other in amazing ways.
And, I look forward to the day, soon to come, when I will sit with my 14-year-old granddaughter and tell her this story of her great-great Grandmother, with my lived experience added to it in a spiritual DNA ‘soup’. My hope is that some time that lovely granddaughter, she/they, will recount to their children this story, with their added wisdom. And so it goes.
For more on NDE’s:
Near-death survivors describe what they saw and heard before reviving (nbcnews.com)
What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain | Scientific American,
Beth Patterson, MA in Religious Studies/Pastoral Care
Palliative Care Consult Service Chaplain
UCH, Anschutz Medical Center, Aurora, CO