After nearly three decades working in hospice care, Dr. Chris Kerr has witnessed the final stages of life closely and has spoken about several changes that may occur as death approaches. Among the experiences he has encountered are vivid visions or “visitations” involving people, loved ones, or animals who have already died. Speaking on Oprah’s podcast, Kerr explained that these experiences can appear alongside longer periods of sleep, as patients gradually spend more time asleep or in a state between sleep and wakefulness. He said some patients describe seeing deceased relatives or other familiar figures with striking clarity and strongly insist that what they experienced was not simply a dream. According to Kerr, these experiences may become more frequent as a person gets closer to death, and patients can sometimes become frustrated when their accounts are dismissed as ordinary dreams. Rather than describing them as symbolic messages that need to be interpreted, Kerr said patients generally experience them as deeply real and personal encounters involving recognizable people from their lives.
Kerr also noted that children with terminal illnesses may report similarly vivid experiences, although the figures they see can be different from those described by adults. Because children may not have experienced the deaths of relatives or friends, they might instead see a beloved pet, family friend, or another familiar figure who has passed away. He suggested that young patients can sometimes demonstrate an awareness that they are nearing the end of their lives, even if they do not have the vocabulary to explain mortality in the same way adults do. For families, such experiences can be emotional and difficult to understand, but Kerr’s observations suggest they may also provide comfort to some patients during their final days. Importantly, these experiences should not be treated as a precise medical prediction of when someone will die, since end-of-life symptoms and experiences vary widely from person to person.