Guy Spiro: Peter, how did you become so interested and involved with the near death experience?

Peter Fenwick: I am a consultant neuropsychiatrist, so I have an interest in the mind and what people think, particularly in the wider experiences that we have. I came across a patient who had a near death experience and that led me into an interest in them. We did a study in cardiac patients with near death experiences because there you can be certain what the physiological state is.

     We found that in those cases, when the brain is apparently down, with no breathing, no heart rate, and brain stem reflexatory gone, it is very similar to the ordinary near death experience. It is the best model we have of dying. So when you close your eyes and finally die, this gives you some idea what’s going to happen. That later led to an interest in the dying process. We did a number of studies with palliative care teams, hospices and nursing homes, and got a lot of data from the dying, about what happened when people are dying and during the dying process.

GS: It certainly is a fascinating subject. I think Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was the first person to bring it to wide popular attention.

PF: She certainly was and she made people aware. But you know there is still a huge amount of resistance against looking at dying. We split it off in our culture because birth and death are two of the major points in everybody’s life. We are all going to die. But few of us are prepared for it and very few of us know what the phenomenology of dying is.

GS: Well, I like that you mention birth and death in the same sentence. People normally don’t, when in fact birth is the single leading cause of death, isn’t it?

[Laughter]

PF: Yes, it absolutely is. They are inextricable linked. So when we set out to look at what the dying process was, we had to deal with a fairly stereotyped view. You see, if you are a doctor, people who are dying are your failures, and this is very much true in hospitals even today.

GS: As if death is not inevitable.

PF: Absolutely. It is really very strange that we haven’t come to accept that death is all part of the process. As we studied dying, it became more and more clear that it is a process which we go through in various steps and stages. Not only that, and many people who read this are going to be surprised with what I say next, if you study death, it is very comforting.

     As we came to study it, we found that about a fortnight–three weeks before you actually die, the first of the major group of phenomena are death bed visions. Now death bed visions have a very particular structure. The dying person will see them, first of all, as people coming to help them through the dying process. In our culture, the people we see tend to be our dead parents, and then a dead sibling, and then grandparents. In other cultures angels are often seen, but only in three percent of our sample. [Editor’s note: U.S. and U.K. cultures are very similar but not exactly the same.]

     I should say that we have over one thousand experiences. These came from a television appearance I did in the U.K. Seven hundred people wrote in with experiences of what their relatives perceived when they died. We also published an article in one of the major daily newspapers and we got about another three hundred from that. So we have a very rich and large database. It shows that parents are the most common figures who come and people will sit up in bed and greet the dead parent when they see them. Quite often they are standing at the edge of the room. They relate to them as if they were there. As the dying process continues, the vision comes closer and closer until the dead parent apparently sits on the bed, and they interact with the dying person in a very interesting way. First of all, the dying person is pleased to see them and they are pleased to see the dying person. But not only that, they will set a date for when the dying person is going to die. For example they will say, “We’ll come back and see you on Tuesday.” That’s maybe say, two days’ time and the person dies in two days’ time. Many patients die holding out their arms either in greeting or as if to be taken and one assumes it is the death bed vision. With people who have sufficient consciousness to be able to describe it, that is exactly what is happening. So we see these visions as enormously comforting for the individual. They say that they are there to look after them as they die. They are there to take them on a journey.

GS: In your opinion, and I think an opinion is all one could have on it, these people who are showing up who are dead parents and grandparents, do you think it is really them?

PF: One can only follow the data and the data is very clear that people who are dying say yes. They think it is. Now occasionally, but it is just occasionally, the caretakers of the dying, the relatives, see the same figure. And children also occasionally see the same figure as the dying person. So they can be seen by others occasionally.

GS: Especially young children, I would guess.

PF: Especially young children, ages four, five, six, seven. Now the first question is, are these visions due to the fact that dying is a toxic process as the organs which keep us alive start to fail? The answer to that is no, because in those states, they are delusional. We are talking about visions that occur in clear consciousness. So the next question is, then, is it the drugs? But those who look after the dying in the hospices and nursing homes say they can tell the differences between a death bed vision and a hallucination due to drugs. So we don’t think they are due to drugs either. It looks, then, to be something very special related to the dying process and, as I was saying, they change the language of the dying. The dying don’t talk about death, they talk about going on a journey. “Tomorrow, I will be picked by grandpa.” “Tomorrow, I won’t be with you any more. I will be going on a journey.” So their language changes, and we have come to see that the fact that death bed visions are occurring is a sure sign that the person will be dying in a few days’ time. That is the first set of phenomena.

     The next set of phenomena are ones where the dying person seems to be able to move in, or transit, or hold in consciousness two different realities. We talked about death bed visions. But quite often the person who has come to collect them is with other people the dying person may not know and they are usually surrounded by love, light, and compassion. This is a very important time for the dying person because with this light and compassion that they seem to have access to, they want to resolve a lot of the difficulties that they have had, and it is a time of reconciliation. It is a time of forgiveness. Those who care for the dying say that at this particular stage of the dying process, many people who are dying will ask for relatives, sons, daughters and others that they have had a very troubled relationship with, and then they are able to ask their forgiveness or grant it. This is a very healing time and a very important time. It is very important that the caretakers of the dying should be aware of the very special nature of this part of the death process.

GS: And to support it

PF: And they should be very supportive, I totally agree.

GS: A lot of people will be tempted to go, “Oh, no. You’re not really seeing anything,” or, “Oh, it’s just the drugs.” Or ...

PF: You are so right. We have actually done some research in hospices and nursing homes and have held seminars with the caretakers, and one of the things they said that they wanted is a pamphlet describing the death process, death bed visions and those sorts of things. They are not taught about them, and so we wrote up the information in a simple pamphlet for caretakers of the dying, talking to them about these end of life experiences. Three weeks ago a copy of this was sent around to every hospice in the U.K.

GS: That’s great.

PF: We have gotten enormously positive feedback and many of the hospices have written to us asking for more copies. So there has not been information on it, and not only that, there is a taboo about talking about these things.

GS: Yes.

PF: The taboo is that your colleagues will think you are mad, or at least slightly off the wall. If you say you have just been to see Mrs. Jones and she told you about a death bed vision, and isn’t that interesting, they will think “Oh, come on. For heaven’s sake. You don’t believe in any of that sort of stuff?” So education is enormously important on all of this and that is why we did the pamphlet. But we move now from before you die to the actual time of death, and that gets very interesting.

GS: One of the things I find fascinating is how the experience seems to be universal. People almost invariably report seeing the light, but then they might see Jesus or Buddha, depending on what country they are born in.

PF: There is definitely a cultural element to it. We haven’t got that in our series because we are in the U.K. There is one study which was done by Ossis Haroldson, and they looked at an Indian sample. There they found that the person who came to collect them was not always a relative, but was sometimes a messenger of the god of death. So there are cultural elements to it.

     Now, when you come to the actual moment of death, several things happen. The first one is it seems we are all very highly interconnected. The dying person often visits somebody with whom they have a strong emotional contact. That is always driven by the person who is dying and the form the contact takes depends on the mental state of the receiver. If you are awake it takes one form, if you are asleep it takes another. If you are awake, quite often it is the feeling that something awful is happening to somebody and you have to do something about it.

     Now sometimes we have those feelings, but they are never as strong and never with such a compulsion as the near death coincidences. We have a lovely example of a boy on his way to work. Instead of going to work, he immediately got on the train and went to the family home to find out, as he hadn’t, in fact, been home in many years, that his father was dying, and he arrived just as his father died. This was a very strong compulsion to visit the family home. There are accounts of people falling down stairs and breaking their neck and at the moment of death they contact a daughter or somebody who has this compulsion to find out what has happened. Sometimes it carries with it the message that the person who is dying is okay.

     If you are asleep, the dissertation is different. First of all, it much more narrative and secondly it has much more structure to it. Here is an example: A mother is asleep and is woken up by her mother, who has previously died. Her mother appears to her in a sort of dream like state and then disappears. So the woman sits up and then she sees her son—it is in a darkened room, and she is probably still half asleep-half awake—she sees her son coming to her, dripping wet. Then as her son comes towards her, he transforms himself, surrounded by light and love, and he says to his mom, “It’s okay. You don’t have to worry. Because I am alright now.” He reassures her and then slowly fades away. Well, she is obviously very upset by this and the next morning she tells her husband straight away about what she has seen. We have the account from them both. She tries to get in contact with her son and she can’t. It is not until midday that she learns that about the time she saw the vision, he, in fact, had a boating accident and drowned.

GS: The dripping wet was the clue. I think it is interesting that they say they are alright.

PF: It is fascinating.

GS: When from the survivor’s perspective, that might not seem to be the case.

PF: No. You would think, just having died, you are not alright. I think if you had just died you shouldn’t be doing anything if the medical model is correct. It looks as if it may not be. Then, at the time of death other things happen, like clocks stop. Do you know the song “My Grandfather’s Clock”?

     It stopped short
     Never to go again,
     When the old man died.

This is a song written by an American song writer who in the 1920s came to England to stay at a public house or hotel in Piercebridge, which is in Yorkshire. In the hotel there is a grandfather clock or what used to be called the longcase clock. The story with that clock is that it was the prized possession of two brothers who ran the hotel in about 1850. When one brother died, the clock, which had always been a perfect time keeper, started to go slow and couldn’t be made to speed up. When the second brother died, it stopped dead never to go again, and the song is where the term grandfather clock came from. Before that they were longcase clocks.

     Caretakers report that it is not unusual for the television in the room where the person is dying to stop at the time of death. Alarms go off, bells ring, that sort of thing. They also report that sometimes they can feel a change in the atmosphere in the room between the time when someone is living and someone has died. There are a lot of quite apparent and some subtle changes which go on at the time of death. Animals are very well able to perceive this. The dogs at home may suddenly stand up and howl and howl at the time the person dies. With cats, their fur stands on end and they rush around the room. We have a lot of bird stories. Birds that come and sit on the window of hospices and are there at the time of the transition as the person dies, and we have a number of stories of birds coming back to the grieving person for a week, maybe two weeks after the person has died. So there are whole sets of phenomena that occur which are just totally fascinating, and they are all there, all the caretakers know they are there. But nobody will report them because, as I say, it is sort of a conspiracy of silence. It doesn’t fit their little model. But it is all there.

GS: You just came out with a new book.

PF: It is called The Art of Dying. It’s called The Art of Dying because of a pamphlet which was written in the thirteenth century, after the Great Plague. After the Great Plague, about fourteen million people in Europe had died. So many priests had died in England that there were not enough to go around and so this book was brought out to provide guidance on what you had to do to have a good death. It was called The Osmorie Ente or The Art of Dying. So we used that title and our Osmorie Ente does exactly the same thing. In a society which has become almost totally secular and has lost its rituals concerned with death and its understanding with death, we thought it was time for a new Osmorie Ente.

GS: Interesting. The whole concept of a good death seems to be coming up again. I recently heard on the radio about a letter written by a solider in the Civil War, while he was dying, to his father, saying, “You will be pleased to know that I am dying a good death here.” There are other references to the concept. Two recent transitions I am aware of I’ve thought of having been good deaths.

PF: Yes, and it is very clear that at least part of what a good death is, is to die where you want to die. Only twenty percent of us will die at home, but many more would like to. What you don’t want to do is to die in the hospital with all these tubes and things attached to you. What you want is to die in peace and allow the process to take place. You don’t want to have so many drugs that you are rendered unconscious.

     In the U.K., fifty percent of all complaints against the hospital concern the treatment of the dying in the hospital. It just shows you how badly our hospitals view dying, and really I think hospitals are not a place where you should die. Hospices are the next best. Many hospices are very caring.

     In this country [the U.K.], if you die from cancer, you can achieve that because the Macmillan nurses, who are funded by a charity, will go around to the house where people are dying of cancer and support them, support the families, and support the dying until the person actually dies. They look after their medication and nursing care and things like that. You can actually die at home. But if you do not die of cancer, then of course you have to die in a hospice, which is much better than a hospital. But again, many people want to die at home and can’t because there just isn’t the support for it. The second thing is to have your family around you and to recognize it is going to be a time, as one person said, “Dying isn’t a great experience, but it is a healing experience.”

GS: That is just what I wanted to say, that people have to realize that sometimes healing doesn’t mean surviving.

PF: Absolutely right. In the case of the dying, and particularly in a good death, it is, in fact, forgiveness, compassion, having compassion showed to you and showing compassion to the living, strangely enough.

GS: It is often way harder on those who are being left behind.

PF: It is very hard. But one of the things that we are learning is that if the dying do have these experiences, then it is one of the strongest and most comforting things that those who are left behind can experience. It is very comforting for the grieving to know that their relative has been met and has been carried on the journey to elsewhere, and that it is a wonderful thing to have happened.

GS: Yes.

PF: So the next thing is to be allowed to say goodbye and to achieve forgiveness. Then finally the important thing is that you do have pain control, but you are not rendered unconscious. It is very easy to give people heroin when they are coming to the end so they spend their time sleeping. We all want pain control, but one also wants one’s consciousness. So you can say goodbye. You can be forgiving. You can experience the compassion and love of those around you. You can be in full consciousness. You can meet those people who are coming to carry you through the dying process.

GS: Have there been studies where people have, trying to be delicate, euthanized themselves? Or could one even do that?

PF: That actually is a really important question, and I don’t know the answer to it. One can see the quality of people’s lives, particularly in those long illnesses ... with a great deal of pain. Quite often muscular dystrophy is like that. Or muscular diseases where you get a creeping paralysis going up the body that finally attacks your breathing process and you die of suffocation. I think that those are awful diseases, and one would be very tempted to use euthanasia.

GS: I have always thought that under those circumstances a good doctor would say, “Now don’t take Five of these. Because if you take Five of these ... It will take you out. So don’t take Five of these.”

PF: Yes. I know exactly what you mean. I haven’t seen any data on this, so I really don’t know. All I can talk about is the natural process you go through.

GS: You are going to be in the Chicago area this month. What do you do in your workshops or lectures?

PF: I am speaking of the sorts of things we’ve just talked about. Really encouraging people to understand that death is in fact not what they think it is. It is not something to be frightened of. It is something to be learned from.

About ISEE:

     Mission: To serve as a support, resource and forum for all those who’ve had or are interested in extraordinary spiritual experiences.

     Vision: This organization will include near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, after-death communications, bliss or oneness experiences, and all related metaphysical experiences which have not generally been recognized as real.

     ISEE will have its own building, a large center, where it will provide a place for people to congregate for workshops, lectures, discussions, and one-on-one counseling, to provide support in many different ways.

     ISEE will provide education to the world about such experiences through conferences, workshops, materials (printed, audio, visual), teachers and lecturers, designed to connect people to each other for the purpose of expanding awareness and getting people the help they need to resume their lives after their experiences. This has larger ramifications for the world, as experiencers have an enhanced understanding of the connectedness of things and each other, and they have no fear of death.

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