30 DECEMBER 12, 2021
The old Marine will keep fighting, keep struggling, keep living
for three more days, before finally, mercifully, succumbing to
death. A few days later, I share the scene with Cindy Crane, a
seven-year volunteer with Capital Caring. We sit at a shady table
outside of a facility near Fort Belvoir where we’ve visited a
resident in assisted living. She shares this reason for why no one
should die alone: “Dying is hard work.”
A
t Inova Fairfax Hospital, Denise Mohess cared for a dying
Greek patient who was talking in her bed. Mohess asked
the woman’s son to interpret. “He said she was talking to
relatives who passed on and she was negotiating,” says Mohess, a
physician who founded the NODA program at Inova Fairfax in
- “She wanted to wait until she could see her granddaughter.”
Within hours of seeing her, the woman died. “It’s a common
phenomenon in geriatrics,” Mohess says of these conversations
with the dead. “And it’s usually very pleasant.”
As people die, they’re often visited by deceased loved ones in
dreams, visions, hallucinations; whatever you call them, the
encounters are well documented and quite real to those who
experience them. So is it possible that none of us really dies alone?
To answer that question, I’ve driven two hours to Charlottesville
to meet researcher and psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, professor
emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the
University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.
Greyson has studied near-death experiences for nearly 40
years, and I devoured his recent book, “After,” which shares his
research on those who almost died. Many near-death experiences
involve the well-known tunnel and bright light, and a being that
seems like God, though rarely the God of Sunday school,
Greyson’s interviewees report. “The vast majority say, ‘The entity
that I saw was not like any God I was ever taught about. It was
much bigger than what they talked about in my church,’ ” he says.
And instead of praying to God, or receiving messages from God,
they often feel like they merged with God.
The author with his mother, Sandy Budd, who
died in 2015, and his sister Karen Duffy.
PHOTO: KAREN J. BUDDThe nearly dead not only meld with a divine entity, Greyson’s
interviews found, but they are frequently greeted by a social
committee of the deceased. “What I hear repeatedly from
near-death experiences is that you don’t have a sense of dying
alone,” Greyson says. “You are met by either people you knew who
have gone before or entities that seem loving and welcoming.”
Half of people who’ve had a near-death experience met someone
who had died, his research has found, and “it’s almost always
comforting and reassuring.”
Reunions with the dead are also common in hospice settings.
Christopher Kerr, CEO and chief medical officer at Hospice &
Palliative Care Buffalo, has studied the phenomenon for years.
One patient told him that visits from dead relatives were
disrupting his sleep. He enjoyed seeing his Uncle Harry, who had
been dead for 46 years, but he wished Uncle Harry would quit
yakking so he could get some rest.
People who recount their near-death experiences frequently
say they felt no worries, no anxiety, no fear as they entered another
realm. Perhaps I’m consoling myself, but maybe, rather than
feeling scared, my often-nervous mother found serenity on her
living room floor. Maybe she felt a bliss in death that escaped her
in life. Maybe she was greeted by her father, who died on her 20th
birthday. Maybe she saw my dad. Dying might be hard work, as
Cindy Crane told me, but maybe death is not.
I’ll never know for sure, however — at least not in this life. And
not knowing is exactly why the idea of my mother — or anyone —
dying alone is so troubling.
Granieri, who began her career during the AIDS epidemic, was
pained by patients’ suffering in the spring of 2020 at New
York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center,
where she worked as a geriatrician. The hospital was almost
entirely filled with covid patients. Delirious, dying old men with
dementia would call out the names of their wives. Seventy percent
of patients died, she says. Most died alone, though staff sat with
patients when they could.
“Among our group, we would say, ‘So-and-so is gonna die
today or maybe tomorrow,’ and I was present with a few dozen
people either at the moment of death or just before,” Granieri
recalls. “There was a lack of PPE, and we still had less than
adequate knowledge about transmission, so you were limited in
how much time you could spend in someone’s room. The nurses
were especially crunched. So the vast majority of people died
without anybody at their bedside.”
The lonely deaths, Granieri says, were heart-wrenching. Her
voice cracks as she says it. She stops for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she
tells me. “I still cry. I cry about it because it just wasn’t right.”
Clarke, the NODA creator, says many volunteers are motivated
by similar regrets: A parent or partner died alone, and it feels
wrong. “They say, ‘I know I should have been there, so this is my
way of doing that,’ ” Clarke says. “But I don’t want volunteers to
feel guilty over something they didn’t control.”
I can’t control the past, but I can assist the dying now, even if
it’s as simple as holding someone’s hand. At a facility near Oakton,
I sit vigil with a 93-year-old man. The bed is tilted at a 45-degree
angle, and though the room feels warm, he’s covered by thick
blankets. His skin is pale, his mouth open. I introduce myself and
he glances at me, only for a moment, before returning to sleep. He
knows he is not alone.Ken Budd has written for National Geographic Traveler, the Atlantic, the
New York Times and many more publications. He is the author of the
memoir “The Voluntourist.”