Allan Kellehear

About 30 percent of hospice patients report a “visitation” by someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions—from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New Guinea—report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the...