What do you think about this?
Most people have heard of near death experiences, where someone on the edge of dying reports a tunnel, a light, a feeling of peace. But there is a stranger and lesser known cousin to that story, one that happens not to the dying, but to the perfectly healthy people sitting beside them.
They are called shared death experiences. A husband holding his wife’s hand as she passes suddenly feels himself lifted with her, seeing a brilliant light he cannot explain. A daughter at her mother’s bedside watches the room seem to change shape, or senses a presence come to gather her mother home. Some report seeing a glow leave the body. Some say they briefly glimpsed scenes from the dying person’s life, as if a door had opened for a moment and they had been standing too close.
The physician Raymond Moody, who first popularized near death research, spent years collecting these accounts and argued they cannot be waved away as the oxygen starved brain of a dying person, because the person having them is not dying at all.
Could it be that death is less of a solitary passage than we assume, and that the people we love can walk us to the threshold and feel, for an instant, what waits on the other side?
Grief and imagination, or a real glimpse shared between two people? What do you think these bystanders are experiencing?
