Allan Kellehear - Visitors at the End of Life

From 2009 to 2012, I conducted deathbed studies with medical colleagues in India The bereavement researchers Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim describe the story of a woman named Sonia, who spoke to them about her nine-year-old daughter Valerie, who had died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. On an evening about six weeks after Valeries death, Sonia recounts:

I went to bed quite early because I had exhausted myself, but I know I was awake. I was lying on my right side, and I felt someone touch my shoulder. I turned over and Valerie was standing there! She seemed real to me. She looked exactly like herself and in good health. She was bright, sort of glowing, and was dressed in a sparkling, dazzling white gown. She said, Mommy, I love you. My headache is gone. Im all right, and I dont want you to worry about me. She was very calm and happy and quite beautiful. Then, suddenly, she was gone.

This book explores our personal experience of visitations by our dead. It is not designed or intended to establish where the dead come from, whether these appearances are some form of hallucination, whether they are pathological, whether they arise from mental illness or organic anomalies. We do not know whether they point reliably to personal survival over death. What we do know is that a large minority of people all over the world commonly experience contact with their deadsometimes regularly, sometimes as one-offsand that there is both an academic and a personal need to know why.

We can establish a broad outline of why the dead contact us by reflecting on a range of typical accounts drawn from the many thousands of personal accounts in books, articles, and social media sources. We can supplement these descriptions and reflections with the long-standing anthropological and folkloric writing about the patterns of assumptions and interaction behind the conduct of the visiting dead. Sometimes, these dead are accompanied by friends, such as beings of light. Where this is the case, we also employ the same methods to understand their behavior.

My first aim in this work is to sketch an outline of an approach to visits from our dead that frequently emerge from the main mystical experiences near deathfrom among near-death experiences, deathbed visions, or visions encountered by bereaved people. I offer insights into why our dead appear to us by drawing inferences and deductions from the usual reasons why the dead tend to visit in other peoples societies and drawing on some of the key rituals governing all human interaction, identifying the purpose and meaning underlying those, and then applying these to our visitation events. The anthropological view has long been that these experiences of visitation are best viewed as extensions of normal, everyday social life. For many traditional societies, that is the normal view. For most modern societies with industrial economies, that view is not.

But like it or not, the appearances of the dead in all societies are not in any way deterred by the fact that some are prepared for their appearance and others are not. The dead come anywayeverywhere. Neither cultural receptivity nor antipathy seems to slow down their appearances among us. The only difference is that more traditional societies have a ready set of explanations for what is going on, and the peoples from the industrial economies do not. An anthropological perspective such as the one I offer here can bridge that gap in our own sense and sensibility toward this enigmatic experience.

It does not matter whether these appearances originate from the mind or from a genuine afterlife reality. What matters most is the social impacts and personal consequences on those who encounter these experiences. In my line of workhospice and palliative careI meet many people who are affected by these common (and commonly difficult to speak about) experiences. Many of them are made uncomfortable, even distressed, when speaking about these experiencesnot because the apparitions upset them (they rarely do!) but because other peoples reactions are so fearful, suspicious, undermining, or dismissive.

On the one hand, so many people think these visits are isolated or freak incidents when they are not. On the other hand, other people commonly believe that the only real questions concern the origins of these visits, but these are not, for those who have them, the key concerns. These perspectives miss both the value and the point of these visitations. At best, they trivialize the people attempting to speak about them. At worst, they marginalize them. There has been a serious gap in ways to talk about these visits that normalizes these types of experiences and the conversations that attempt to discuss them. The second aim of this book, then, is to redress that omission.

I will describe, reflect on, and argue that the ultimate source of these visits from the dead is far less important than understanding the reasons they come into peoples lives in the first place, and what it is they often ask from each of us when they do. This is a humanistic exercise in establishing the social logic behind both the behavior and the motivations in these visits. Their ultimate source does not alter this particular dimension of the experience. Where the postman comes from is far less important than what is delivered.

In their book The Social Life of Spirits, the anthropologists Ruy Blanes and Diana Esprito Santo argue that it is not only spirits who are invisible but much of the world we call culture. We cannot see the so-called market or so-called race. These ideas are not personally tried and tested; they are subjects of social debate and theorizing. There is even debate about the origin of these ideas. All that most of us know is that these ideas are central to our life, and we must make personal sense of them to negotiate our way through, alongside, against, or above and beyond them. Blanes and Santos argue, as I do, that the key question most people ask when they have these experiences is not whether dead beings exist or where they come from but why they have come and how that contact has changed our lives. In the matter of understanding spirits, the purpose of an anthropological perspective is to go beyond psychology, neuroscience, or the metaphysical and understand the social meaning. This is the fundamental task before us.