Deathbed Visitors

According to neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist Peter Fenwick, who carried out extensive research into the experience of dying, the perception of ‘deathbed visitors‘ — visits by the dead to a dying person — are a very common occurrence in the last days and hours of life. Often they are from a parent or grandparent, but sometimes a deceased spouse, sibling or friend. The dying person will tell staff that the person had come, or was sitting on their bed, as if they had had a living visitor.

As I get older (and, statistically, my own demise is nearer from here than the Millennium) I increasingly find myself wondering about it. When I thought I was going to die in 2017 I had serious regrets about my unlived life — I’d spent too much of this precious allotment of time on things of no consequence, working mostly, and too little on what really mattered, loving mostly (although the preceding decade had done much to rectify the balance). Remembering this keeps me focused on seizing life with both hands. And I‘ve remedied the shortfall as best I can: were I to die tomorrow I now have a little rosary of moments that have made life truly worthwhile, which I will happily bring to presence as the last minutes tick away, every bead luminous and perfect.

But who would I want to come back and sit at the end of my bed? I didn’t know my grandparents and, in truth, I hardly knew my parents. Unless I am predeceased by any of my children, which I very much hope will not happen, my oldest sister is the only member of my family who I would want to see (and she is still very much alive). Partners and lovers and dear friends would all be welcome, in accordance with the depth of our connection in life, but I fully expect to be the one coming to visit them. My master, my other teachers and friends in the Way who have passed on before? But they are so much part of me now that it would be superfluous for any of them to show up.

In truth most people who have really mattered to me in life are now so much part of me — ‘ham dam’, as the Persians say, ‘sharing the same breath’ — that I only need think of them to feel their presence alive in me. So who from the world of the dead would really cause my heart to skip with joy were they to come and sit on the end of my bed? Hardip, perhaps, who I remember enraptured by the vision of the afterlife he had seen at Damon‘s funeral, just a week before his own death. Or Oliver, whose presence in my dreams brings such delight that I wake wishing he were still alive.

—- James Souttar