S2E25: What We See Before We Die | Talk Tracks

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tuck Tracks. I'm Kai Dickens and today we have an incredible guest that you were briefly introduced to in season two. His name is Dr. Christopher Kerr and he's the chief medical officer at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Medicine in Buffalo, New York. He's known for pioneering rigorous research and doing some landmark studies on the vivid often meaningful dreams and visions reported by patients in their final days by conducting research through nine studies and over 1500 patients. He found that patients at the end of their life often go through the same emotional arc. And what I love about Dr. Kerr is that instead of dismissing or disregarding what the patients were experiencing, he leaned in and conducted groundbreaking research. So welcome Dr. Kerr, we're thrilled to have you. Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Tuck Tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long. Before we begin, I just wanna quickly note that this episode is also on YouTube where you can see visuals of the patients featured captured by the hospice staff and researchers. And though this episode is great just as an audio version, seeing these individuals in the midst of their experience just adds another layer that's incredibly powerful. So just wanted to note that. You know those things you don't think about until you change them and suddenly everything is better? I had no idea that cotton contributes to hair frizz and breakage and even those sleep lines on your face until I switched to blissy. And the difference was fast. 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It's convenient backed by Nobel winning science and it works. Ready for your own reset? For a limited time, Prolonged is offering telepathy tapes listeners 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five day program. Just visit prolongedlife.com slash tapes. That's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-E.com slash tapes to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolongedlife.com slash tapes. Why don't we start just by you introducing yourself? You know, what were you trained in? How did you start your career? What's your name? Where do you live? My name is Christopher Kerr. I have a medical degree as well as a PhD in neurobiology. I'm the chief executive officer and the chief medical officer at Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo. And how many patients are there right now? We care for about 1200 patients a day. And how many surveys or studies have you done and even published? We have numerous studies in the area Hospice and Palliative Medicine, kind of everything from drug studies to programmatic studies. We have nine studies that look at specifically the subjective experiences such as dreams and visions at the end of life. And how many patients did you collect data on eventually? Well, probably in total and families and patients were near 1500. But dying is a process. So what we did is we did it every day because it's a changing picture. And we wanted to know just like the nurses were able to predict where there are changes in these experiences as people got closer to death. For those people out there who maybe don't even know what hospice means, can you explain what hospice means? Hospice is first a philosophy which is really whole person centered care. It's also for many places it's a place but it's also a Medicare benefit. And that's how most people are coming to program. And it's meant for those folks who have a prognosis of six months or left to live. Okay, yeah. So someone goes into hospice or six months or less left to live. All probabilities, yeah. Were there people of all ages? I mean hospice isn't just for older people, right? It's not, no. We're unique in that we have a pediatric program but that's unusual. It's mostly older people but it's a full gamut. Oh gosh, that's just so heartbreaking to even think of a pediatric hospice. Your career and where you are now and what you've seen and experienced is so probably remarkable. I'm so different from where you started. So when you started all of this, what were your beliefs around death, around dying, around hospice? Yeah, none good. Probably for personal reasons, my father had died when I was 12 and I think that sort of trauma was hard. I had an aversion to even talking about dying. I had a very bad reaction at his death. And as I've said, medical school is a safe place to be if you have a death aversion, right? You're trying to defeat death and when you can't defeat it, you almost deny it. So yeah, I was uncomfortable with it. That's, I'm sorry about your father, by the way. That's really hard when you're young. And so did you have any beliefs even about like the afterlife or did you grow up within like a faith system or not? No, I actually, if anything, I'm from the polar end where I'm not only discomforted by it, but I'm freaked out by it, just to be honest with you. Like if I was walking down the road and they said there was a free reading, I'd probably cross the street and walk the other way. Yeah, I just don't have a disposition. So anything about death or the other side? Breaks you out. Or you have an aversion toward it, which... Yeah, completely, yeah. Okay, so... I mean, that was then. That was then. So what started to change for you? Oh, so what happened when I got to hospice, it was a Saturday and we have a 10 bed inpatient unit there. And I was completely out of my element. I had no training on how to care for the dying and or how just to be present, right? But that was therapeutic. And it was immediately apparent to me that my colleagues in nursing and social work and spiritual care were much more capable than I was. They were capable because I was used to, from my training, looking at the objective patient. So things that were measurable, observable, and they were much more attuned to what the person was actually experiencing. So my view of death was the visible suffering of it and the lessening of it physically. And with no sense that there was a subjective element to it. And that's what they were so attuned to. And when you say subjective element, what do you mean by that? That the patient was having an experience. So there was the view from my side, but there was the view from the bed. So the dying had another dimensionality to it that I had no recognition of. And would the support staff that was tuned more into this, would they talk about this with you? Yeah, it was a matter of fact, it's part of the lore. They just knew. And what actually happened was, there was this pivotal moment when it was during the AIDS epidemic. And I had a young man who was dying. And I did the doctor thing, which was thought that I could give him more time by giving him fluids and antibiotics. And one of the nurses just says, no, he's dying. And I said, how do you know this? He said, well, he's seen his mother. And so they were so attuned to the patient that it was just baked into their practice clinically that they had this awareness they could prognosticate based on what the patient was experiencing. And of course the patient died. And what were some of the things that they were experiencing that must have sounded very woo to you? Well, the backdrop of the story was, I seen my father do this when he was 12, when I was 12. Okay, so what did your father die from? He was a surgeon and he died of lung cancer at 42 and never smoked. And the last time I saw him, he was playing with the buttons on my shirt, telling me we had to get ready to go on a plane because we'd go fishing in Northern Canada every year. So I hadn't spoken of it. I knew intuitively that he, whether he was was a good place and I was with him. But it was something that I didn't live in that thought ever really. And then I go to hospice. Of course, all these patients are doing this and the staff there just knew it and they could understand it. And they knew it was soothing for the patient and their loved one. And they could prognosticate off of it. Wow. And so for listeners who maybe don't know what prognosticate means. Predict time and death. So they were so attuned to the rhythms and flows and the increasing frequency of this as people got closer to death, they were queuing off of it. Again, it's the idea that instead of looking at organs and functions, they were looking at the totality of what the patient was experiencing and presenting as. So they were much more plugged in. And okay. So, and I've, you know, obviously, I'm very familiar with your book and your work, but for someone who is like, wait, what were they prognosticating off of? What were some of the things happening for the patient that in these rooms that felt like common between many patients? So dying in and of itself is progressive sleep. And what they were noticing was that the patients were having these dreams or visions that were very, very vivid, that they kind of had this foot in two worlds. And that these kinds of events were increasing as people got closer to death. And the content would change. The closer they were going towards death, the more likely they were to see the deceased. And these are beyond real. They're overwhelmingly comforting. And it's always been to talk about across cultures and throughout history. There's nothing that we've done is new. It's just shining a light on something that's been known and kind of lost in our Western world. What I think is so remarkable about your story and what I love about it is that you kind of took a science mind. You noticed this was happening. And tell me what happened next because you really like almost codified and got metadata around this type of thing. Yeah. So what happened was, again, I didn't understand it. I could come up all the reasons for what it wasn't. But ultimately it was, I got to a point where I just learned to have reference for it. So where it came from, what it was, I didn't get. But I knew that it was so comforting for the patient. And there were so much reunion and being put back together that it mattered clinically. So shoot ahead, I have, now I'm working there full time. And I regularly have students and young doctors and I'm trying to teach them this. And we live in an evidence-based time and the science of medicine has outstripped its art. And so the young people would say, well, there's no evidence for it. And I would say it's always been discussed but it's not put in a medical frame. So out of frustration, I started to do the research. Basically, if there's no evidence, I'll get to evidence. So that's what we did. So just to recap this story, because I think it's so remarkable. I wanna make sure I have it right. So you were working with medical students and trying to teach them more about the death and dying process. You would explain that there are these interesting things that happen that can't be codified by EEG or brain scans or heart, whatever, all the things. And at that point, they were like, though there's no evidence for the fact that they're seeing people and you decided, okay, then I'm gonna get evidence. Okay, so then what happened next? So what happened next? I embarked on the study. I went to the university. They declined me the first time for approval because the idea is we sterilize dying. You can't bug the dying patients. Meanwhile, they're lonely and looking up at a white ceiling. But eventually I got it through and we designed a study and we did a number of things, I think, pretty well. One of the medical rebuttals is these are confused patients, right, and they were delirious. And we knew that wasn't true. They actually had heightened acuity. They were fully aware. They had greater insight. It was quite the opposite. But what we did is we took patients who came into this unit and we gave them a questionnaire every day until death. And they had to be screened every day so you couldn't be confused. There had to be a witness, all of these sorts of things. And we had a menu list. Are you having these experiences? Are you awake or are you sleeping? Realism on a one to 10 scale, how realistic is it? We had a menu item set of what you could choose from. You're seeing pets traveling, friends, family, at work, whatever. And when we would follow them right to the end. And then we started to film patients because I always knew the rebuttal would be they're feeble minded, de-oxygenated, medicated, demented and whatnot. And so we started to film patients. When someone watches the film, what do they see? They see a number of things. First of all, these people are cognitively intact. Again, they're remarkably insightful and articulate. What's noticeable is the absolute absence of fear. I was really taken aback by that. And they're very disclosing about what they're experiencing. Unbelievable. Okay, so you collected data for over 1500 patients. So what patterns did you find? 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Head to quints.com slash tapes for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash tapes for free shipping and 365 day returns, quints.com slash tapes. Almost 90% of people reported having a singular event. It's probably higher, but we had to take out people once they got confused. So let's say nine out of 10 people. First of all, one of the things that's very interesting is that we don't have the right nomenclature. We say dreams, but people are emphatic that these aren't dream experiences, these were happenings. Overwhelmingly comforting, well into the 80%. What's really interesting is the frequency of these increased as patients were getting closer to death. And there was a content shift. The closer they got to dying, the more likely they were to see people who they've known and they've lost. And interestingly, those seeing that on content was the most comforting. So you take it together, there's this built-in mechanism as you're getting closer to death, you're having increasing subjective, intense, and overwhelmingly comforting experiences, and you're more likely to be seeing people who you've loved and lost. And you said that 80% of the experiences were comforting. I'm curious what the 20% is. But the ones that weren't? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we got that completely wrong. We assumed that discomforting meant negative, the head of negative connotation. And actually those were the most profound because those were the transformational ones. We've all been harmed for having lived, there's regret, there's loss, and that often gets addressed. How so? In really interesting ways, whatever that lesion is, somehow you die as you live. And these experiences don't deny death, right? They almost transcend it, but they validate life, but you die as you live. It's not all butterflies and rainbows and it's honest, but you're given some form of grace. The war veteran who has survivor's guilt is reunited with his comrades and they tell him, we're coming for you. There's a great example on film of a man who's in his 40s, and he had a neck cancer, he had an open wound and he breaks down in the film because he thinks he's being stabbed by the people who harmed him. They were jigging the knife, you know, trying to cut, cut out, you know, my neck, where my cancer was at. Stop, stop trying to fight, you know. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you know, trying to fight this guy off. That's scary, it's scary to me. I'm not a bad individual, man, but I don't cross a lot of people in my life, you know, and I need help, I need help, you know. I don't want to live my life being out of society walking, have to look over my back, man. He's one of these guys who never had a reckoning in his life, come to terms with what he said he was sorry, and that forced him to ask for his daughter and he apologized really for the first time and said how much he loved her. She ended up staying with him, he was able to sleep and he passed. Just again, the idea that in these moments and in these experience subjectively, it allows you to come to terms with sometimes difficult things, but they're transformative and it's just fascinating, you can live your whole life with some sort of lesion, regret or a loss or a sorrow and then it comes back to you and you're kind of made whole again. And that's how he died, coming to terms with with his honest self and with those he loved. And it's remarkable because you can think about like the one more, but he had severe crippling PTSD for 60 plus years. There was no therapy that was gonna help him, no medication. There was something in him that could heal, but it took reaching this point. Wow. I met four devins up in Massachusetts where they were forming this company and we're gonna go to see a new company. And the guys are all young. They're like, I remember them and I'm old and I'm trying to tell them guys, I've been here, I've done this, I'm not gonna do it again. And they're arguing with me. I'm packing goods and I'm sending them for some reason up high. He's talking about travel, which is common. If you've had a pivotal event, especially if it brought you close to mortality, you often go there. Like what? Such as war. So he goes there, but of course he goes to his deceased wife. She always wears a beautiful light blue. It could be a suit, it could be a gown, it could be a dress, but it's always light blue. And a couple of times she's giving me the little beauty pageant wave. And it's always the case. It's vivid, there's nothing said, everything's understood. Here we would call that telepathy. And you call that telepathy. Yeah, no, it's very true. He just feels love and it's tangible to him and that's how he died reconnected with his war buddies and with his wife. Okay, so you start gathering data and then what happened next? Cause I know that you ended up on the TED stage. How did that happen? Oh, and this is really an interesting story. All of our work was meant for a medical audience and we published, but there was crickets. So I did this TED talk and it seeks out to major media and it goes around the world, it's still going around the world today. And it's just telling because there's a disconnect on these issues between the people who are providing care and their level of interest. And yet there's the people who are receiving care or curious outside of medicine who are very much interested in these sort of things. I think that is so interesting. So you had a lot of the data that you had, you know, gathered over the four years of all these different studies. You had some luck getting them published in journals, but it wasn't like the major media outlets were necessarily picking up on it. No, no interest, no phone calls. Yeah, yeah. But then when it was presented on TED, when viral people were very interested in what you had to say. And which shows that I think the public is so deeply interested in thoughtful conversations around all this stuff, you know? Well, they don't want the doctor's death. What do you mean by that? They don't want a medicalized death. They don't want their parents and grandparents' death in a hospital or nursing home. They want a death in which they have a say. They want a more humanized experience. Yeah. So what were the major points of your TED talk that you think were resonating with people? You know, imagine you're at the end of your life. Imagine your greatest love, your greatest loss and your greatest joy. You know, a birth of a child, a loss of a parent. What if those things came back to you at the end? And the other thing is so many people have experienced these things, but it's never been validated. These are really profound moments in people's life when they've been at the death of a parent and they've witnessed this, but nobody's translated it or validated it. So there's often an assumption that this was them confused or drugged. So it's putting that piece together, I think. This allows for context and a conversation that otherwise might not exist. Have you had any of these experiences in your personal life? Have you witnessed it? I was with my grandmother when she died. But no, it was just peaceful. I mean, you know, she just kind of, and it was the moment we were all looking away. You know, like we were all like sitting there and I was playing music and we were all around the bed and just constant, constant, constant. And there was like, I didn't, when it was getting really close, I didn't want to look at my phone. And like the 10 seconds that like my brother ran to get a coat, my mom was doing something. Oh, you're kidding. I was looking at my phone and I think it was purposeful. I think she was like, I'm out now. No one's looking at me. I don't want all that, you know. As far as people maybe at the bedside of a loved one as they're passing, did you ever experience in the vision with them or see something with them? There's people who are doing this, this sort of work, looking at that. I haven't experienced that. And it may be my being close-minded, but there certainly are people who talk about, now we have done dreams of bereavement, you know, people who are bereaved having dreams of their loved one. But yeah, I don't personally see that. And for you personally, after seeing this and kind of studying it, do you think, what do you think explains this? I mean, do you think they're hallucinations or dreams or do you think it's something different? Oh, they're absolutely not hallucinations. And if you see any of our videos, these people aren't hallucinating. I mean, they sound like you and I, right? So, and again, they're screened for that. So before they do a questionnaire or participate in a study, we do a thing to make sure they're not delirious. We follow their meds, we check their labs. I mean, that was par for the course. So not no hallucinations, dreams, absolutely not. They will say, I don't dream, I don't recall my dreams if I'm having them, but they and content and quality, they don't resemble dreams. So they're not metaphorical, they're not full of symbolism, they're not fantastical, they're none of those things. And the most important thing is they don't require interpretation. I've been doing this for nearly 30 years and I've never had a patient say to me, Dr. What do you think this means? And if you think about it, that's just, right? I mean, they're coming to the end of their life, they don't need to do work like that. And if you're nine years old and you're seeing the parent you lost when you were a child and they're in front of you, you don't need an interpretation. So, and then backing up a little bit, how often are these experiences happening with the eyes open? Well, that's really interesting. We've never quite understood that because they're absolutely the patients you walk in, they're looking right through you and they'll have a foot in two worlds. Some of them will say, oh, don't sit there, someone's sitting and just sat on so-and-so. That's less common, but it happens quite a bit. The reporting of it doesn't match what we see and we're not so sure if they're not lucid dreaming. So in other words, so again, dying is progressive sleep, you're in and out of sleep and the sleep architecture changes. I imagine dream architecture changes as well. It certainly happens though, they have their eyes open. It's about 50, 30 and then the rest is both. Yeah, and you said that as people get closer to death, they start to see loved ones or people that really are meaningful to them. Earlier in the process, what does it seem that they're seeing? Well, travel's big. Travel, like they're going somewhere? Or the metaphor to going to travel and packing. I've seen every mode of travel, canoes, planes. What's funny is they don't get the correlation that this is suggesting something. Seeing pets are very, very common. Jeanne and Michelle. This is a fascinating case. So this is a young, young lady, a teenager who's dying. I kind of saw that. Pessoe? What was the dog's name? Moose, I see a baby. That was my grandma's dog. The issue passed away. She creates a world where all these deceased animals are there. And what's fascinating is she puts herself in a castle. In a castle. Really? Is it beautiful? Yeah. Huh. It's huge. Describe it for me. Are there other people there? Yeah. Okay. Is it warm? Yeah. She describes light and warmth coming through. She put a pool in there so she can play. And all these animals are going around. That's how she left. She died days later. These are immersive experiences. It's not like looking at a photograph. You're in them. You're immersed in all senses with them. There's exchange. They focus more on the living upstream. And then as they get closer, it's deceased. But not just anybody. And that's a really fascinating thing. It tends to focus on a select few people who loved and secured them. So that might be one parent, but not another. We've seen people with three husbands. They really love the second. The second one appears. But it's often one parent, not the other. Interesting. I wonder why that is. Yeah. You know, again, it's this idea there's some sort of final justice. And there's not a focus on the negative at all. I think whatever helped form you best and most, and that requires to be loved unconditionally, that's what's there. And time and distance go away, right? This is a great failure. This is Florence five days from dying. It's very hard to pinpoint. They were so real. And all these years, my husband spent dead and my daughter, we were like sitting next to each other, table laughing, I could see their faces. I could tell it in four rows. We were laughing, we were talking, we were eating. It was like a rainy Sunday, then, or night. That's wonderful. It is. And then Monday night, the same thing happened. But the same identical thing, when I was laughing, we were talking, we're having a law. How to make you feel? I woke up Monday morning and I went, was that real? I said, hey, what was you? Somewhere in all of this is our notion of time seems to go away when they're at the end. Again, that they're just, they just have to be in front of them. It's in the present for them. What they feel was that it's happening again. And she even marvels at that. That it's just like it always was, she said, they're just there. What's lovely is I asked her in this interview, are you worried about dying? And she says, oh, no, she says, you know, if I quit swearing, I'll be okay. So that's Florence. And do you think they are originating in the brain or do you think it's responding? Like they're somewhere else. Like, you know what I mean? Like do you think, how do you explain it? I can't. And you know what? Where I'm at is I've given up trying to understand and I'm okay not knowing. Again, it just comes back to having reverence. And I actually am, the older I get, I'm kind of more okay with the idea of not knowing. And I think there's something special in the fact that something awaits us. And that's a vantage point. Dying is a vantage point we have no idea of. And your perceptions and perspectives are going to change and it's okay. Yeah. Yeah. What's really sad for me thinking about this is for people who die a sudden death, probably don't have this experience. Maybe they do. I mean, I guess who knows. What did George Floyd say when his air was being squished out of his lungs? He's calling for his mom. Yeah. Expression life flashed before my eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And his mom had passed, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're right. That is such a, because that was the thing that like, you know, and I remember I was reading an interview with a World War II nurse and she was explaining, she's like, you know, walking through the battlefield as people are like dying. Like she's like, it's so many grown, strong men reaching out for their mom. I don't know why I'm saying we're crying, but it's so sweet, you know? Because it's like, it's this universal experience that's always been there. Yeah. Well, and, you know, personally, those are the ones that move me because you're, and this doesn't, the telling of it doesn't get across the impact. But imagine you're standing at the bedside of a 95 year old. Yeah. And he lost his mother when he was five and he's actually one of our patients. And he can smell her perfume, hear her voice, say, I love you. And so everything evaporates in between and it's tangible. And it gives your, my sense of it is that they're never gone. They were always there for you and proximate to you. And in this way, it's probably the biggest takeaway from these experiences is that just as we're, our earthly bodies are fading, something in our mind, soul, spirit puts us back together by putting us back to those who most were instrumental in defining and shaping who we were. And so to see elders, you know, and it could be, and the detail, the remembrance of it's fascinating. They recall things that weren't otherwise accessible to them, the name of the dog when they were a child. The detail is incredible. I love that. And so often you forget memories before they just seven, you know, it's very common, even older you forget. So you're saying that they might remember something that had been long forgotten. Yeah. Oh, it's more common than not. For people that might be really looking for an evidence-based moment, has there ever been a situation where someone says something from talking to this other space, these other people in this other place or dimension or wherever they are that comes back, you know, when they are lucid and talking that turns to be quite evidential and interesting because someone in the room didn't know. For instance, maybe they saw someone who'd passed on that someone in the room didn't know. Oh, I see. A reveal that something. Yeah, a reveal in some way. Yeah. I have a really interesting patient right now, her name's Shirley and she's 83. Her parents didn't want her at birth and she was raised by a grandmother. So often families will say, I learned more about my dying parent in this last phase because all this stuff comes out, right? And when her eyes are closed at night, she's singing these nursery rhymes in Lithuanian. And her daughter Debbie didn't know her mother knew any Lithuanian. She didn't know the grandmother was Lithuanian and that's where it came from. So the recollections there, I mean, you can unlock memories in all sorts of ways, right? Music does it. You're driving down the road, you hear an old song, you remember that high school dance or whatever. I think that this period of dying, that journey kind of spiritually rekindles recall and it may be the basis for terminal lucidity. Have you heard of that? Where all of a sudden things come. They're learning things that they didn't otherwise know that are coming. Basically that person becomes recontextualized in an earlier time, right? And they're having detailed memories that weren't otherwise known or expressed. The filters are gone. They're so immersed in this realism that's virtual. It can't help but be shared. So imagine you didn't know that your mother's mother didn't want her and hadn't died and she actually knew Lithuanian. All of these details come out. Sometimes it's remarkable because it's one of these things, it's odd things that can separate people at the bedside or can bring them closer. So I had a patient not long ago who returned to their native language and they're speaking Polish and the daughter is sitting in the corner room with her hands on her lap completely freaked out when what's happened to my mother and normalize it for her, give her permission. The next day you come in, she's at the bedside and she's furiously taking notes and she's learning about all of her mother's childhood friends, the pets she had, the grandparents she didn't know. So there's lots of revelation that way. That's pretty remarkable because so you've like heard or documented the person dying recalling memories, languages, information about their ancestors that they didn't know or that the family didn't know and then the living daughter or son might go investigate it to find out it's true. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, it is true. Unbelievable. Next is a video of Jennifer. So this is the one and only picture that exists of Patrick and I that was snapped by my niece at a wedding. Jennifer's a fascinating story. She's talking about her significant other, Patrick. And what's unique about this story is it really highlights a couple of features that one, these are clearly aren't dreams. You don't wake up from your dreams and act, right? So he dreams that he ate spaghetti with his grandma Dolores. But it's not a recall. It was a happening in the sense that he feels full from heavy need. So again, it goes beyond realism to actually experiential. Patrick didn't cook with one single exception of making his grandmother sauce, which she did, I want to say about every four, six, eight weeks through the entire 16 years I knew him. Patrick was the only member of his family that knows how to make the sauce. And for all the years I knew him, he insisted something was missing fast forward to this would be the Sunday before he passed. He woke up in the morning. He believed he made sauce with his grandmother the night before said he could smell it. He could still taste it. He was full from it. And she showed him after all these years what he had done wrong, which is the very last step before you take it off the burner was to add a teaspoon of sugar. And that's how he left. He left full. He left surrounded by the love of his grandmother who he had known since birth, right? He left without fear. And again, it's, you know, God didn't come down from the heavens and tell him that here's the answer. It took his grandmother coming back and telling the ingredients to a spaghetti sauce recipe because that's what actually that was him. When they made the spaghetti sauce and added the sugar, was he like, yes, this is it? Yeah. Isn't that cool? It's so cool. Again, these are so unique in that they typically aren't great epiphanies. They're not great reveals. They're not these religious proclamations. It's about everyday life. It's highly symbolic of having lived and mattered. And it ultimately goes down to our relationships and it ultimately goes down to love and it doesn't matter where the person's dead or alive. This goes across and between lives. There's this weave. In that sense, there's this collective consciousness that doesn't seem to evaporate or lessen over time or in illness. It actually heightens as we're leaving. And he's a great example of that. Wow. In your studies, did you also do research and do these surveys for younger patients or the pediatric patients who were dying? And how is their experience different from those of the elder people who are dying? Yeah. We couldn't include them in our formal studies for university approval reasons, but we've absolutely documented. We published case series and they're in the book and we filmed them. And children do this differently. And like some of our cognitively different patients, they do it in some ways better and richer ways. There's less filter, right? Fascinating thing about these experiences for children is they self-informed them. So one of the concerns was a lot, several of these were my patients is how do you get them to a point of understanding? And they seem to know intuitively. And just like so many of the adults that have these, whatever again, whatever concerns you seems to be addressed. So we have one young lady who was raised by a single mom and who was she and how was she going to be without. And then in her dream, she sees her mother's friend who had passed in her mother's room. Wow. So. Hold on, I want to make sure I get that right. So a young girl was sitting with her single mom and how old is the girl? 13. And her mom is dying. No, she's dying. Oh, the girl's dying. Young girl's dying. And first her dog, Shadow, comes to her and she says, it means I am loved and I'm not alone and he had passed. And then she's worried about what is life without her mother. And then she sees her mother, her mother's friend who had passed away in her mother's room playing with her curtains. Oh my gosh. And that fascinating thing was she kept that, like so many of the kids, she kept that from telling her mother not wanting to upset her mother. Oh my gosh. Ah, oh my gosh. And then to any of them see anyone else, like either people they don't know that maybe someone else has to pull the pieces and put it together for them. People they don't know is relatively uncommon and earlier on. So we've gone upstream. We didn't know when did this begin. Yeah, right, right. So we started to go months and months. We spent two years going up and it kind of makes sense, right? Imagine you're first diagnosed and you worry about practical issues, bills, finances, lawyers, whatever. As you get to that journey of illness and acceptance and dying, you obviously focus on what matters most and let go of those sorts of things. And the people who are less significant, they drift off and the living drift off. So we've actually tracked the content in terms of when the living are there and when they fall off and it's kind of within that two week period before death. Wow. So the people that are alive and are on the bed or whatever kind of start to fall off in terms of this person's perception or even engagement. Oh, completely. Yeah. And people will wake up from it and their preference is to be where they were, right? They want to go back to that experience. When people say that, oh, I want to go back to be with my sister or someone who's passed on that they were just with, do they ever explain where they are? I mean, is it like a place that they knew together, like their child at home or does it feel like they're in a different place altogether? No, it always seems to be a bit familiar. So it's not like near death in that they're not out of their body, right? They don't have that experience. They don't see themselves dead, none of that stuff. They're just in the presence. Like a lot of them, some of our most beautiful videos, they're just sitting around their kitchen table. And it's always bothered me that they're sitting there with dead people and that's just okay. Again, the most striking thing in all of our videos is the absence of fear. But no, they're not anywhere special. They're just in, they're amongst the familiar. Whatever puts them back together best is where they go. That could be a childhood home, for example, but it's about the familiar. What do you think that means about consciousness though? Because it does, it just makes it feel like time is irrelevant. That's the thing that blows me away. And that took me a long time because again, I didn't want to, I wasn't trying to figure that piece of it out, but it just dawns on you. You're sitting there with somebody in their ninth decade and they can recall stuff. And it will freak out the family, that part, that they can remember all of this with such clarity. You know, I had somebody who was in her 80s and her father was loving and her mother wasn't. And she had this life outside of her home with the father. He was a mailman. He was very affectionate, expressive. And so he would meet him in the mail route and they would go hand in hand together through the neighborhood. And think of this, it occurred 70-something years earlier and she's recounting conversations in gossip with each neighbor. She's going along. So there's something about recall, something is rekindled in memory that is in opposition to what should be a failing mind. So there's something accessible at a spiritual level that's hard to explain. Do they ever experience in the vision, a religious figure or something like that? Like how common is that type of experience? In terms of religion, we struggled with this and others have found the same thing. Religions actually far less common. I remember we first had this result and I worked with a woman who's super Catholic and she said, I'm sorry, they're just, it's not a lot of symbolism. And she said, what's it about? I said, well, love and forgiveness. And she goes, duh. So it's the idea is that it's consistent with the tenets of faith. There's a hospice chaplain in Kerry Egan and she writes this beautiful piece that this is not incongruent to faith at all. She says, if we believe God is love and we think that's real, then we first learn about God, we learn about love in our first and last classroom of love as our family. So that's where we go. Yeah. To ask, like these experiences happen universally, right? Whether race, creed, religion. There's no distinction between you and us sinners or get to feel something at the end. There doesn't seem to be any predictive value to it at all. That's wonderful. I mean, it is, that's wonderful. So regardless of like whether you're the most faithful to about, you know, Catholic or Jew or Muslim or completely atheist, these experiences happen regardless. Yeah. That we, we really have looked at that. Yeah. And one of the things we were wondering was whether that we're looking at whether your spiritual beliefs are either enhanced by this, your religious convictions either enhanced or informed or changed. And it's still, we're not seeing anything though. So it's universal. I mean, it's ultimately, you know, kind of when medicine fails and you're dying, nature takes over and takes its rightful place and dying becomes what it's always been, which is a human experience that has dimensions beyond the physical, right? There's profound spirituality and they're seen and unseen and it's universal. Yeah. Are there any like particular cases that really stand out that are just like, get you in your heart or really stop you in your tracks? Yeah. I obviously the children reach you in a different way because they're, they're have a level of sophistication that you can't even imagine. What do you mean by that though for the children? They have a different level of sophistication. I think the skepticism and the scrutiny and coupled with their honesty and transparency out of the mouths of babes kind of thing is more of a direct window into what can be experienced. And they have such a unique vantage point and at the same time, they're not grieved. They're not, they don't have the same anticipatory grief because they don't understand mortality. They're just living in that moment with this kind of renewed faith for that day. And they're somehow full of love still is just, is just, you know, is at one hand it's beyond your imagination to think of a child's death, but it's also so restorative to think that they're still full of life and of love. I think those are probably the most meaningful for me. I know you've talked about people really engaging with seeing, talking to people who, you know, we, the pre-fail in the room, you can't see. Is it always really peaceful or can it be disruptive and scary? The disruptive ones are tend to be, they're more delirium. So delirium is never a good experience and it's very common at the end of life. It's actually the symptom we see as much of as physical pain. So kind of disorganized thinking and those are horrific and people can kind of vacillate back and forth. Pure distressing dreams without any inherent value are not something that we're seeing in this category. And how often, I've, you know, I mean, my brother's actually told me about this who works in hospice care that sometimes he'll see people reaching out, reaching up. What is that and how often is that? Hippocrates described it. Who did? Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. Wow. Yeah, it's again, this is this thing of nothing new but lost. So describe the whole experiences. Basically, you're dreaming virtually and you don't dream you're lying on a beach and waters going by. There's something in front of you, so you reach and you pick. That's very common. And do people ever describe what they're reaching and picking for? Yeah, that tends to be more delirium. And basically, when you normally dream, you actually have no body tone. And when you that becomes uncoupled, you're delirious. So you're actually in your dream. So it's when people fly out of bed, they want things off, they reach and they pick. And is there any difference in what you see occurring with people who have dementia, who might be like going out of their mind or body, possibly more, or people on the spectrum? Have you noticed any differences in how these experiences? No, I think it's probably the thing that pisses me off the most is that we, medicine has this way of putting a currency, particularly in dementia, where we talk about them and number them by deficit. That's how we communicate as doctor to doctor. But when do you mean by that? We label them understandably so that they're quantified, their loss of cognitive function, their scores of severity of loss. And what that does by focusing on who they aren't, it misses who they are. And people with dementia still have personal histories and emotional paths. And that gets blocked out if you're only talking about what they can't do. And I mean, I don't make them childlike, but there is similarities in the fact that I think they're disinhibited in a way to experience things very clearly. I think that they can do this in a more immersive sense. So a great video of a woman who is dying and you're expecting escalating psychogenic distress and more and more, and her daughter tells a story beautifully, she's having this great life. Because every time she closes her eyes, she's with her deceased husband, Gary. To the point, they're very close to her dying day. The daughter gets a call, she's trying to get out of the nursing home because she's trying to get to her wedding day. So you'll often see them do it in very rich ways that transforms them, not just, and again, these aren't memories, but as much they are become experiences for them. I had somebody with Down syndrome who had ovarian cancer and a big belly from a CITES. And she was always very maternal and carried around dolls, talked to dolls. And this became her baby. And she lived her dying as though she was in pregnancy. If you were to explain now to students having gathered all this research, new people coming in to work in hospice, what would you say? What would you say that someone must know about death and dying? I would first tell you what medicine isn't equipped to do, which is medicine, the art of medicine is obscured by its science. And that our organ system approached and our transactional approach to care actually is a poor fit for dying, which is life closure. And that we aren't in that space to deal with the totality of what a dying person is going through. So unless you're willing to step out of that traditional or contemporary role and first accept yourself that you're not curative, but you can be a comforter. And to be a comforter, you better be better attuned to what not what you see, but what the patient is experiencing. And once you enter that conversation, then you can be of help. Yeah, absolutely. I think we've asked the superficial questions and we asked them in a way that was a rebuttal to a skeptical medical community. I think we're getting better at asking better deeper questions. So we proved it happens, we proved they're not confused, we covered the thematics of them. I think understanding the spiritual dimensions of this at a deeper level becomes very, very important. And do you think our scientific model or even like instruments, if you will, are even equipped to explain or study consciousness at the end of life right now? No, no, no, I don't. But I think we can get to a better level of understanding by gathering inputs, particularly from the psychedelic world, which basically is showing what happens organically by using an exogenous kind of drug or plant earlier in upstream. The parallels are remarkable, right? I think they see themselves, again, as outside of themselves as something larger, they experience something at a sensory level that's beautiful and wondrous. But I think what's wonderful is the fear dissipates. And that happens naturally. And I love the idea of taking it upstream in illness, where you can change the experience of dying earlier. So that all that kind of psychogenic existential pain could be addressed is just magnificent. There's a whole world. And I think, again, it's similar to the end of life experience is that it's in us. It's just tinkering in a way that brings it to surface. It's one has there been any research on psychedelics given to people dying? Maybe a year out? And what's that experience like for those people? Oh, it's unbelievable. There's a, as part of a film, a documentary with Lynette Wallworth, who's worth talking to, what she did was she worked with the indigenous in Australia and the Amazon. And she came across my work. And she she said, you've discovered nothing new. I go, yeah. And she goes, these people have language for it. And then what she did was she brought shamans into the care model in a palliative care patients and had them give the psychedelics in hand and hand with a psychiatrist who starts out skeptical and ends up having his eyes opened. What were the people saying on psychedelics that were in palliative care? Oh, it's just that they recognize that they're not really gone, but they're part of something larger, that it's peaceful. And they almost become structurally changed. The fear goes, the sorrow goes, the sense of loss goes. They just come out. There's something transcendent about it. And they're enlightened while dying. It's so frustrating that this happens to people so often, like right at the end of death. And we don't realize that when we need it sometimes when we're living, right? Well, and that's what I would like to see, because we're catching people just towards the end. And it would be nice to see them upstream. Absolutely. I mean, it is, it's such a comforting thought, I think for a lot of people. And I think there's an epidemic of loneliness. It's plaguing this country, especially men. And you think of that feeling that people have of I'm alone, I'm alone. No one loves me. I'm unlovable. And then you get this moment, weeks or days or months before you die, where you're like, wait, I'm not alone. And I just wish that could happen for people earlier. Well, and you look at the futility of so much of the drug therapy, and the fact that you can establish some sort of neuroplasticity with the use of these medicines. And the, I think it's fascinating. There's nothing new here, right? It's always been. Yeah, we're missing a therapeutic opportunity. There's a rapid proliferation of work. We'll be starting work on ketamine. We've seen it with ketamine. We've used ketamine for years for pain. And those people come out completely different. So yeah, it's a great opportunity. But I just think it's fascinating that it aligns with our work, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So with all that in mind, I guess, like a few more questions, first being with the work on happening around psychedelics, and just, I feel like the whole world seeming a little bit more open to topics like this and conversations around this type of stuff. And they were even five, 10 years ago. Do you find like families walking in more open to this more willing to talk about it, or even patients or the scientific community? Like, where do you see shifts and where don't you see shifts? I don't see shifts in the medical community, right? And these aren't bad people, but the interaction with the patient is in a value-based system is reduced to its most efficient moment. 15-minute pauses, right? Spot welding and flybys. So they've extinguished any hope for a broader kind of interface. So I don't see it happening in medicine. There's no billable codes for talking about people like this, right? It only grew out of a hospice because they create the expectation as you take the time taken as time needed. So it's a completely different model. I could never have done this in mainstream medicine. So I don't see, and again, I think we are so self-enamored with technology and science that we've lost the other side of medicine. So I don't see it happening. And I've got data on this with our young doctors, our medical students, you ask them what's important, you ask an old person what's important, and they're oppositional. So I just think, I don't see it coming there, unfortunately. I think it comes from the larger public who, again, want a different, they want to have a say, and they're looking for something, and they're demanding now. I mean, it's not a longer a patriarchal doctor who they're going to listen to. They're going to claim that they're going to put a stake in the ground, and this is what I want, whether it's death cafes, whether it's made, whether it's hospice care, it's basically a pull away from a traditional medical-based model. And they're going to do the right thing. They're going to invent different things like psychedelics and experiment. They're taking control of the conversation around dying. Our problem is we get so much NDE stuff, and it's just so different. And it should be different, right? This isn't a trial run. They're not going back. And so they're not given work. They don't have questions that need answered. So it's just really cool. And that makes sense given where they are. Yes. And now for you, after being opposed to death, terrified of it, didn't want to talk about it, adverse to anything to do with it, how do you feel about death now? I'm also a cancer patient. So I've had to wrestle with this a lot. So I had to switch in a day from doctor looking at this to a very vulnerable, ill person having to think about this. And it's a really weird experience. I was fearful of the process of dying, having witnessed so much death. What I see of the dying and my colleagues who work in this space will tell you we see more affirmation of life than denial of life, right? So we see the best of humanity caring, seeing other people care for their loved ones. So that part of it doesn't frighten me. I'm just as scared as the next guy, but not for self. I'm scared because I have an unfinished life in the sense people are dependent on me to carry one child. So it's that pain I feel is not being able to be who I need to be and leaving somebody. It's not the actual process. And having gone through illness, you come out the other side, it's so hard to describe, but you come out, I think a better version of who you were than when you went in. In weird and wonderful ways. So I don't regret it. So the actual dying process, not fearful. It's just, and it's not about me. And we see that we're actually doing a very interesting study. The thing people get wrong about dying is they misunderstand hope and they misunderstand fear. Hope transitions kind of for cure to hope to others. So in our study and in all of our filming, what's fascinating is everyone wanting to contribute. They look like shit. They may be drilling, half dressed, tearing all missing, whatever. And they just want to contribute. So it's this idea of giving for something without secondary gain that is just so magnificent. They just want the words to matter. Right? And that never leaves right until the very end of their life. And then fear also seems to dissipate. Yeah. And you watch the videos. I don't have, we don't have anywhere you see fear. It's so great. Yeah. So it's a better story. Yeah. And have you looked at how other cultures look at this? Or when you presented this research to other cultures, do they say duh? I mean, or is it like, you know, is this a universal thing? Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of the best work has been done in other cultures. There's many cultures where this is the way that they maintain their connectivity to their ancestors, right? The idea that this continuity, we're the ones who demarcate death as a finality, whereas other cultures view it as a way to maintain their ancestral connection so that they don't feel gone from, there isn't that end point in the same way we view it. So yeah, the cultural piece is always there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, this has been such an enriching conversation, moving and uplifting. Yeah, it really is. It's one of the things people get wrong, they assume that we must be depressed or depressing. If you came into our work environment, you'd be surprised. That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will be released every Wednesday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. And if any of you want to explore this further, we've uploaded more videos to the Telepathy Dapes Backstage Pass, featuring additional patients describing their end of life visions and experiences in their own words. Thank you to my amazing collaborators, producers Catherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy, technical directing, audio mix and finishing by Jeremy Cole, opening and closing music by Elizabeth P.W., and original logo and cover art by Ben Kondora Design. I'm Kai Dickens, your executive producer, writer and host.