CLEVELAND, Ohio – For years, I’d run into Jean (not her real name) at Walmart, where she works. For more than a decade, she had cared for her elderly father. More than once, I prayed with her when that situation became very stressful.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Jean said. “Maybe you’ll understand when I tell you what happened to my father before he died.”
Her father was in his middle 90s. In the final few weeks before his death, he kept saying he was seeing someone at the end of his bed. Jean didn’t see anyone. Her father said he didn’t know the man, but he seemed very nice and was watching over him.
About a week before he died, her father told Jean about family members visiting him. They all were deceased. A few times, they told him, “It’s time to come home.”
Jean said she never saw these people – or the visions of them.
“I know my father saw them,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of guy who had talked about spiritual things. But this was very real to him. What do you think?”
I put that question to Linda Isaiah, who is a pastor at Akron’s House of the Lord, where she specializes in end-of-life care and helping families handle grief. She is a certified Grief Recovery Specialist and Mental Health Coach.
“I often hear stories like that,” she said. “I recently had a 98-year-old woman who was in hospice. She said she had a vision of God. The lady told me, ‘God is coming for me, but he said not just yet.’ "
LIFE AFTER DEATH?
One of the great debates is, “What happens after we die?”
A friend once told me, “I don’t remember anything from before I was born, so I assume I won’t know anything after I die.”
The counter point is you wouldn’t know anything before you were born because you weren’t born. But the stronger theme is life on earth is all there is – here today, gone tomorrow.
And when we’re gone tomorrow, it’s all over, period.
“There’s so much about life after death that we don’t know,” said Walt Jenne, who is one of the priests at St. Helen Catholic Church in Newbury.
Jenne said he’s had several people tell him that near the time of their death, deceased friends and relatives appeared to them.
“Over and over, they’ve told me, ‘I never felt so loved,’ " said Jenne. “They talk about white lights and very comforting music. One woman who had a near-death experience told me that it was so beautiful, she didn’t want to come back.”
A CITY IN THE DISTANCE
I had a friend named Harry Watson, one of my mentors in jail ministry. For years, he was a salesman for Proctor & Gamble. He was not a guy who had a lot of visions of dead people or angels.
He had a major heart attack. At one point, he was in the hospital. They were pounding on his chest. His heart had stopped.
Years later, he told me: “I know some people won’t believe me, but when I had my heart attack, I had a glimpse of heaven. It was a bright city on a hill. There was this beautiful music. There were people waiting for me, people I knew from church when I first joined who had since died. Then I woke up on the table in the hospital.”
He died about 12 years later. I talked to him the day before he passed away.
“I’m ready,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”
MANY SAME STORIES
In Psychology Today, Thomas Verny wrote about near-death experiences:
“They share strikingly similar narratives. They speak of having experienced peaceful tranquility and happiness, seeing a golden light. It’s often at the end of a tunnel, being greeted by deceased relatives, or detaching from their body and floating above it. They often report feeling obliged to make a choice — remain in this other world, or return to their life.”
Is there another reason people have these visions?
“Skeptics have raised objections to the credibility of these accounts by pointing out that they may be due to religious indoctrination,” wrote Verny. “However, the phenomenon is remarkably consistent across cultures and religions and has been reported even by children and toddlers who were not exposed to religious doctrine.”
Grief specialist Isaiah said her mother “had full-blown Alzheimer’s. She thought I was her mama.”
They’d sing Amazing Grace and other old hymns.
“They’s ask her who was president,” said Isaiah. “She didn’t know. But she could quote long passages of the Bible.”
Then Isaiah told a story of an 89-year-old man she was with Monday. She has known him for more than 40 years. He is now in “something like a semi-coma, hardly responding,” Isaiah said.
She said he was there with eyes closed and suddenly began singing.
“I was around him most of my life, never heard him sing before,” she said. “He was singing, ‘Soon and very soon, I’m going to meet the King.’ "
Isaiah said he was quoting some scriptures. She said he never opened his eyes. He wasn’t responding to those around him. He was communicating with others he was seeing.
“I know he’s transitioning,” said Isaiah. “It’s a spiritual state. You’re going from life to death and then to a new life. It’s a peace so precious, it’s impossible to explain.”
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